Friday Links
Virgin of Seven Sorrows, Hamburg Altar (courtesy wikicommons)
Manifesto! A Podcast: The Information State
Jeff Reimer on a Good Birth, Good Death
March issue of Talk to Me in Long Lines
J. E. McBride: Unto Death: A review of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life
Sigrid Undset and Willa Cather: A Literary Friendship
Louis Markos: Peter Kreeft on C.S. Lewis’s “Till We Have Faces”
March 27, 2026
Manifesto! A Podcast: The Information State
I was fortunate enough to receive an early copy of this book and devoured it in just a few days. It’s one of those exhilarating “stay-up-late, skip-a-few-meals” stories that gathers together many things you already know, or are at least vaguely aware of, and many things you do not know, and shows how they are related and what they mean together, in toto. This is not an easy thing for an author to do because often the sheer volume of stories and facts and relationships just becomes overwhelming, to the point where you feel as dulled and deadened as if you’d just eaten a tryptophan heavy meal, followed by too much sugar.
In The Information State: Politics in an Age of Total Control, a new book that builds on the essay “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Disinformation” (easily one of 2023’s most important essays), Jacob Siegel does not dull or deaden us, instead he wakes us up, calling upon us to pay attention, to consider “how the technological infrastructure built to make society safer and more rational has steadily replaced democratic freedoms with systems of digital control.” Wanting to ignore the way that “the information state,” which is made up of every industry along with governmental and non-governmental institutions, “uses censorship, mass surveillance, and algorithmic manipulation to shape public perceptions as it tries to engineer reality” is natural. But the truth is always better than a lie. And this book gives us the truth. You may not agree with every one of Siegel’s conclusions (Siegel’s interlocutor and podcast partner, Phil Klay, certainly doesn’t agree with every claim, as you can hear in the podcast), but it’s pretty hard to deny the evidence that something is happening, that there’s a real investment on making sure we all believe the “right” things and say the “right” things and do the “right” things. In his endorsement of the book, Christopher Caldwell writes: Jacob Siegel’s investigative history is eloquent and incriminating. Over the decades, technical protocols, regulatory bullying and privatized surveillance came to steer our speech and trammel our politics. This is the process The Information State unearths. To anyone who has felt silenced but unable to explain who or what is doing the silencing, Siegel provides a commanding explanation.”
When I was a nurse the pressure to agree with certain “facts” and medical dogma, to go along with certain protocols despite the risk to patients or staff, to never question anything, to “just shut up and do what we want you to do and smile while you’re doing it” was so intense and so all-pervasive that work often felt like a battlefield. This same type of pressure is being applied to all of us, though often less obvious ways. This pressure to conform is bad in a health care setting and bad in the world. Listen to the podcast and get The Information State. It’s exhilarating, frightening, important, and urgent.
Jeff Reimer on a Good Birth, Good Death
Going back further—way further—to the very creation of the world, it is said that the Lord God spoke the world into existence on none other than March 25. In fact, throughout much of medieval Christendom, the New Year was observed on March 25 for this very reason, and to correlate it with the Annunciation. Alas, in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII spruced up the old Julian calendar, making a few much-needed adjustments and in the process moving the New Year back to January 1. Protestants, particularly in the British Isles, loath to take any cues calendrical or otherwise from the pope, held on to the March 25 New Year till 1752, when they adopted the Gregorian calendar by authority of an act of Parliament. Even in the American colonies until this time, the New Year was celebrated on my birthday.
March Issue of Talk to Me in Long Lines
An excellent issue with poems from Sally Thomas, Christian Lingner, T.O. Brandon, and Brennan O’Donnell.
J. E. McBride: Unto Death: A review of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life
If you have never had occasion to hear the sound of a scythe swinging through ripe wheat, you may, like I was, be struck by its fullness. Less a hiss than a roar, it evokes the heaviness of the work, the tension of the muscles, the impressiveness of the labor that defined a peasant’s days.
A Hidden Life, Terrence Malick’s dramatization of the life of Austrian conscientious objector Franz Jägerstätter, is full of these lost soundscapes. The routines of St. Radegund, Franz’s achingly beautiful Alpine village, are a symphony of them. As melting snow descends the mountainside, the mill resounds with the creaking of its wheel and the pounding of grain. Cattle low soothingly, the tinkling of their collar bells mingling with the deeper tones of church bells marking the noon Angelus. When the wind picks up, heralding a storm, it rustles the fields with an affectionate hand and carries the laughter of children.
Sigrid Undset and Willa Cather: A Literary Friendship
I haven’t watched the video yet, but it looks fascinating.
Louis Markos: Peter Kreeft on C.S. Lewis’s “Till We Have Faces”
Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College, has published over one hundred books, including a series that render accessible the key themes and lessons of central texts in the Western canon (the Psalms, Augustine’s Confessions, Aquinas’s Summa, Pascal’s Pensées, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings), a second series that sets Socrates in dialogue with influential philosophers ancient and modern, and dozens of other books on prayer, heaven, the problem of pain, the Bible, ethics, apologetics, and Catholic doctrine. As prolific and diverse as Lewis in his oeuvre, Kreeft also shares a vital quirk with the author of Narnia: he puts everything he knows into everything he writes.
