Posts in: Short posts

One of the southern Indiana electric companies asked people to conserve energy over the next couple of days to prevent outages. The comments are full of people telling them to turn off the data centers and I love it.


Grown in the Hoosier hill country

There’s a turn of phrase in Colter Wall’s “1800 Miles”: “we don’t got these kinds of cliques where I was grown.” We don’t normally talk about humans being “grown.” Maybe we should? Tell me about your terroir. Because I have never separated myself from my home neighborhood, I cannot identify myself to myself apart from it. I am fairly literally flesh of its flesh. It is present in me, and to me, wherever I go.

Continue reading →


I deleted a quick, frivolous post this morning when I realized why it bugged me after posting it: it was another example of the tedious irony that is the lingua franca of social media. Like “gotcha” political argumentation, it’s laziness that mistakes itself for cleverness.




Donny quotes William E. Pannell discussing his crisis of conscience after the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. It strikes me that now such young deaths are common—barely newsworthy, and certainly don’t cause any crises of conscience. Doing nothing after Sandy Hook was a turning point for us.


Opening line of a 2015 book: “It is becoming undeniably clear that Western civilization has entered a post-Christian age.” That didn’t age well. There seems to be a revival in America of both (on a large scale) nationalistic pseudo-Christianity and (on a smaller scale) more serious, engaged Christianity.




Going to be an usually wet and warm Christmas week. Should be pretty quiet here at work–a good time to catch up on some documentation and clarify plans for upcoming work.