Friday Links
June 12, 2026
The View from Childhood: An Upcoming Conversation with Angela Alaimo O'Donnell & Steve Knepper
Healing Modern Medicine
What is suffering for?
First Things: Third Annual Poetry Prize
Should the Lion Lie Down With the Electric Lamb?
Easy Writer
The View from Childhood: An Upcoming Conversation with Angela Alaimo O'Donnell & Steve Knepper
We are all invited to a free online book launch conversation between Steve and Angela on Thursday, June 18 at 7:30 ET. You can register here.
Healing Modern Medicine
Dr. Kheriaty is one of the sanest, most gracious voices in modern medicine today. Here he shares a review by David Lorimer of his new book, Making the Cut: How to Heal Modern Medicine.
What is suffering for?
Helen Andrews on life with her severely disabled sister and the purpose of suffering:
Suffering is part of life. But suffering has to be connected to some purpose, or else it is just a way of showing pride in how much you can endure. Families with a disabled child are often encouraged to embrace the challenges they face but given no idea of what the suffering is for.
First Things: Third Annual Poetry Prize
Polish up those poems and submit by June 30!
Should the Lion Lie Down With the Electric Lamb?
Antón Barba-Kay on Pope Leo XIV’s MH encyclical and why it falls short on the greatest threat.
Magnifica humanitas has met with an extraordinary reception. With the possible exception of Pope Francis’s Laudato si’, I cannot remember an occasion in which a wider public took any notice of a papal encyclical. The panting anticipation around Leo XIV’s circular is due not just to the fact that this public feels itself in want of guidance but to the symbolic natural antagonism between the Roman Catholic Church and Big Tech itself. They could each be said to offer a distinct pattern of how to speak, how to live, and how to transcend our natural lot. The one is centered on a sacrament of true presence; the other on one of virtual absence. They offer contrasting definitions of “communication.” Each offers its faithful technologies of confession. Each gives meaning to the material world within the terms of a spiritual one. They both imply a vision of what human beings are for. These are perhaps the two most significant nonstate actors in human history; their practices unify the attention and consciousness of billions across nations. The promise of a conflict between the Church and the church of AGI is as close to a theological gigantomachy as our fragmented age could ever summon up.
Easy Writer
Max Callimanopulos on Ted Geltner’s new biography of Denis Johnson, Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gesture:
“Immediately,” “promptly,” and “quickly” are the adverbs that pepper Geltner’s breezy summary of Denis’ college years: Denis’ poems were “immediately” put on track for publication, and once that happened, Denis — restless and in search of further worlds to conquer — turned his attentions to Iowa’s fiction workshops. The first short story he ever wrote, “The Taking of Our Own Lives,” was “promptly” accepted by the North American Review. The next landed at The Atlantic and provoked Houghton Mifflin to “quickly” make Denis a deal for his not-yet-written debut novel. It’s enough to make the reader, who’s probably a writer, squirm with jealousy as they consider the drafts, rejections, “in-progress” submissions, fragments, jottings, and half-baked ideas clotting up their desk and their desktop.
