Weekly Digest: Rethinking Regions
Welcome to my weekly digest for March 18, 2022.
For new subscribers, this contains a roundup of my recent writings and podcasts, as well as links to the best articles from around the web this week. You can control what emails you get from me by visiting your account page.
Welcome to the Mid-South
My column in Governing magazine this month is about rethinking how we conceptualize regions in order to highlight an often overlooked area I call the “Mid-South.” This concept originated with my friend Carl Wohlt, who is credited in the piece. Here’s an excerpt:
This Mid-South contains sections of the northern part of the South and the southern part of the Midwest. Nashville is the capital of this region, and the Bentonville/Northwest Arkansas area its western hub. This region is heavily southern-influenced, but distinct from the Deep South. It has a romantic landscape with varying topography, including mountains in some parts. It features the convergence of several major rivers, and many lakes. It has perhaps the best four distinct seasons weatherwise in America, avoiding the worst extremes of cold winters and hot summers. It has its own cultural icons — bourbon in Kentucky; music in Nashville and Memphis.
Click through to read the whole thing.
More Content and Media Mentions
First Things printed two letters this month in response to my three worlds piece, one from Samuel James and another from Andrew Walker.
New postings this week:
Building the Virtue of Self-Mastery. If you missed it, read my monthly newsletter, published earlier this week.
Live Through This (Subscriber only). I take a look at the Oscar nominated Norwegian art film “The Worst Person in the World” and what it says about modern generational and gender dynamics.
At American Reformer, Michael Young writes about Jesus and John Wayne and Timon Cline asks if nationalism is natural.
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The American Man
If you haven’t yet done so, you should sign up for New Founding’s weekly men’s lifestyle newsletter, the American Man. Each week we give you ideas quality products you can use, ideas for self-improvement, enriching culture, and examples to inspire you.
Best of the Web
Related to this month’s newsletter, Thomas Bevin has a Substack post on why no news is good news.
Erik Hoel has an interesting theory on why we don’t seem to produce geniuses anymore.
Salvo: Girls Just Wanna Have Anything but Babies
I found that for husbands, personal income was positively associated with their number of biological children, and for wives, personal income was negatively associated with their number of biological children, as previous research has shown. That is, husbands with higher income tended to have more children, while wives with higher income tended to have fewer children.
Rachel Aldhizer writes about soaring levels of developmental delay in children born during the pandemic - and how the CDC has extended developmental milestone dates as a cope.
Mere Orthodoxy: Teach them friendship - on male friendship
Finally, a really great piece on Joe Rogan and transcendence by Phil Cotnoir at the Gospel Coalition Canada.
This third form of re-enchantment brings us back to Joe Rogan. Raised vaguely Catholic in an abusive home, he has no interest in the Bible or Christianity. And despite the almost dizzying array of guests he has had on his podcast, I am not aware of a single solid Christian among them, a fact which makes one suspect a certain avoidance.
Rogan represents this third subset of those who are groping for the transcendent. They seem to intuit that ideology-driven utopias are wrong-headed – an instinct which inoculates them to the appeal of the first stream above – but see any kind of return to organized religion as a step backwards. And so they turn to things which promise at least a taste of re-enchantment in our late-modern world. Among them, we now consider two which come up perennially in Rogan’s endless hours of conversation: technology and psychedelics.