News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We have re-opened registration for the fall conference in Madison after securing a larger venue. Plans are shaping up for a Friday evening conversation with Paul Kingsnorth followed by a great slate of talks on Saturday. We'll post the full schedule soon, but if you aim to join us, register soon as even our larger venue looks likely to fill up.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about time, secrets and water.
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Hamilton Craig positions Sohrab Ahmari’s new book, Tyranny, Inc, in a long American tradition of Jeffersonian political economics, one which recognizes that "unchecked capitalism, by commodifying every part of life, erodes traditions, bonds, and morals."
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Philip Bunn reviews Ahmari's book as well, focusing on the possible remedies Ahmari considers for corporate malfeasance: "where these corporations exercise tyranny over the individual, over local communities, and what Ahmari calls the “real economy,” they are permitted to do so by policy. This is, in short, a political issue."
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Alex Sosler commends The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education, concluding that it's precisely the kind of book he needed to encounter as a college student: "Perhaps people defended the liberal arts to me, and I was too dense to hear, but I truly cannot remember anyone ever setting out a vision for the liberal arts."
Sarah Hart’s Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature is a fascinating journey through the ways numbers interweave through imaginative literature. The book doesn’t always live up to its promise—some of her observations aren’t fully developed and so seem trivial—but it was nonetheless an eye-opening read. Near the end, Hart cites Alice Munro’s fictionalized version of real-life mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya. Munro’s dialogue captures the premise of Hart’s book quite well:
Readers of this book will, I hope, be convinced already that there is nothing unnatural about combining mathematics and literature. But Kovalevskaya had this to say to a friend who questioned it: “Many people who have never had occasion to learn what mathematics is confuse it with arithmetic and consider it a dry and arid science. In actual fact it is the science which demands the utmost imagination.” She continues: “It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul. . . . One must repudiate the old prejudice by which poets are supposed to fabricate what does not exist, and that imagination is the same as ‘making things up.’ It seems to me that the poet must see what others do not see, must see more deeply than other people. And the mathematician must do the same.”
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro