The Diminishing Commons of Reading

Upsplash

We live in an age of unprecedented access to information, and yet books themselves are becoming harder to obtain. Prices rise, libraries strain, and even digital access comes with invisible expiration dates. The result is a quiet paradox: the more abundant knowledge becomes, the less equitably it is distributed.

I have long been a fervent devotee of Virginia Woolf, unquestionably among the greatest writers of the twentieth century. For nearly thirty years, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse were central texts in my modern novel course. Most recently, I read her diary (1918–1941), an extraordinary record of a writer’s inner life and artistic evolution.

I had assumed that we possessed a full collection of Woolf’s extant letters—some 3,100 of them, published in six volumes spanning 1888–1941. Yet recent scholarship has uncovered more than 1,400 additional letters, now published by Edinburgh University Press. The problem, however, is cost: the retail price approaches $255 (£188), and the collection is unavailable in e-book form. What should be a scholarly enrichment becomes, for many readers, an inaccessible luxury.

Even in the digital age, book prices—especially for hardbacks, the staples of libraries, bookstores, and schools—continue to rise. I am fortunate to have a well-stocked independent bookstore nearby, yet like many such stores, it survives as much on gift merchandise and an in-house café as on book sales. Across the country, independent bookstores have declined, leaving some communities without any physical access to books.

School budgets are under comparable strain. In the United States, library funding has remained essentially flat in recent years, even as costs rise. More than half (58%) of school librarians reported restrictions on spending in 2023–24, up from 48% in 2020–21; some report being unable to purchase books (Cockcroft, 2024).

In the United Kingdom, 15% of secondary schools report having no library budget whatsoever, while 69% of those with budgets indicate that funding has remained static or declined, eroding real purchasing power (Reading Cloud, 2023). In England more broadly, school funding fell by 8.5% in real terms between 2009 and 2020, with predictable consequences for library acquisitions (Sibieta, 2021).

An underreported consequence is the strain on public libraries. Approximately 94–96% of public library funding derives from government sources—primarily local governments through property taxes, with supplementary state and federal support, including grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Only 4–6% comes from fines, fees, or philanthropy (Sweeney, 2025). This reliance on local funding creates a structural inequity: communities with weaker tax bases, often those most in need of library services, are least able to support them.

Yet public libraries remain indispensable. Roughly 17,000 public libraries in the United States receive more than 1.3 billion visits annually, exceeding the combined attendance of major professional sports leagues (Sweeney, 2025). They are not luxuries, but essential civic institutions: centers of learning, access, and communal life.

Recent federal policy has compounded these pressures. In March 2025, the administration of Donald Trump mandated reductions to the budget of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the nation’s only federal agency dedicated to library funding, as part of a broader effort to reduce government spending. A coalition of 21 state attorneys general successfully challenged these cuts in federal court, restoring funds that had amounted to just $266.7 million in 2024—approximately 0.003% of the federal budget, or roughly 75 cents per capita (NPR, 2025).

Meanwhile, the publishing industry has consolidated into five dominant firms—Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan Publishers—three of them foreign-owned. Together, they exert enormous influence over what is published. Such consolidation reduces competition and contributes to rising prices.

Libraries face an additional burden in the form of digital licensing. Unlike consumers, who may purchase an e-book outright, libraries must often pay steep licensing fees; for example, $55 for a popular title that a consumer can buy for $15, and must repurchase access after a limited term, typically two years (Goode, 2024). If a library declines to renew, the title simply disappears from its collection. When high-demand titles—such as The Women by Kristin Hannah—are involved, libraries have little choice but to pay.

Efforts by states to legislate fairer licensing terms have thus far failed in the courts.

At the same time, Amazon dominates the market, controlling roughly 68% of e-book sales—rising to 83% when Kindle Unlimited is included—and an increasingly large share of print sales as well (eReaders Forum, 2024; WordsRated, 2024). Its Kindle Direct Publishing platform has democratized access to publishing, allowing authors to earn up to 70% royalties on certain e-books, but it does so within a system that further concentrates market power.

The result is a feedback loop: as platform dominance reshapes the market, major publishers compensate by raising prices, especially for institutional buyers such as libraries and schools, and by concentrating resources on high-profile authors and guaranteed bestsellers.

In 2017, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama secured a reported $65 million joint publishing deal with Penguin Random House for their memoirs, Becoming and A Promised Land (Weaver, 2017). Such advances reflect market realities but may also crowd out emerging voices.

We have, in other words, not resolved the paradox but deepened it. As prices rise, access narrows, and even our digital abundance proves conditional, knowledge becomes less a shared inheritance than a gated resource. What is at stake is not simply the cost of books, but the principle that they, and the intellectual life they sustain, belong to everyone.

–RJ

REFERENCES

Cockcroft, M. (2024, April 4). School library budgets remain strained. School Library Journal.

Goode, L. (2024). E-book licensing and libraries. GoTech.

Reading Cloud. (2023). UK school library funding report.

Sibieta, L. (2021). School funding trends in England. Institute for Fiscal Studies / Wiley.

Sweeney, P. (2025, September 4). Public library funding in the U.S. Candid.org.

Weaver, H. (2017, March 1). _The Obamas’ publishing deal. Vanity Fair.

NPR. (2025). Court restores IMLS funding.

eReaders Forum. (2024). E-book market share statistics.

WordsRated. (2024). Amazon book market share projections.

Culture as Reenactment: Wallace Stevens, UNESCO, and the Fate of Living Traditions

Recently I posted my personal reading of Wallace Steven’s “Sunday Morning,” exploring what might replace religious transcendence once belief dissolves. Stevens’ answer is not despair but immanence, the sufficiency of the natural world, apprehended through the shaping power of imagination.

Yet it is not only religion that now shows signs of erosion. Embedded cultures, those dense inheritances that confer identity through their singularity, are likewise under strain.

In an increasingly global village, accelerated by digital transmission, the world assumes a more monocultural cast, often shaped by the diffuse reach of corporate and algorithmic influence. Against this drift, UNESCO convenes its Intergovernmental Committee each year to review additions to its Intangible Cultural Heritage lists.

Among these is the Urgent Safeguarding List, devoted to imperiled dialects, ritual songs, oral epics, and traditional crafts, forms of life whose disappearance would constitute not mere loss, but erasure.

We are inclined to think of culture as something we visit: a museum, a concert hall, a staged performance. But culture, more fundamentally, is not exhibition but enactment, a way of life sustained through repetition. When cultural memory vanishes, what is lost is not simply artifact but identity itself, as irreplaceable in its domain as the disappearance of elephants, lions, or polar bears from the natural world.

Meaning, then, is not merely conceived; it is made. It inheres in what a people does repeatedly, across time. Imagination, Stevens’ great theme, does not operate in abstraction alone; it is embedded in language, craft, music, and ritual. Culture is the accumulated expression of that imaginative labor.

I am no anthropologist, nor a specialist in indigenous societies; yet it is difficult to ignore the accelerating pressures placed upon such cultures, systems of knowledge refined over centuries of intimacy with specific environments, often encompassing ecological and medicinal understanding that modern systems only belatedly recognize.

Missionary activity, whatever its intentions, has frequently contributed to cultural leveling, supplanting local cosmologies with imported belief systems. Likewise, the expansion of agribusiness, mining, and deforestation, whether in the Amazon Basin or regions such as Papua New Guinea, has disrupted not only ecosystems, but the cultural worlds entwined with them.

The history of the Waorani in Ecuador offers a particularly stark instance. In 1956, a group of missionaries, including Jim Elliot, made contact with a people then labeled “Auca,” a Quechua term meaning “savage.” The encounter ended in violence, an event long framed as martyrdom but more plausibly understood as the defense of a bounded world.

Subsequent missionary and governmental incursions encouraged the Waorani to settle in centralized villages, disrupting their semi-nomadic, kin-based lifeways. The introduction of Christianity and Western norms altered not only belief, but social organization itself.

These transformations deepened with the discovery of oil. Companies such as Texaco, along with the state firm Petroecuador, initiated exploration and drilling across Waorani territory. Roads penetrated previously isolated tribal habitat, bringing loggers, settlers, and a cash economy. Environmental degradation followed: oil spills, polluted waterways, and the decline of flora and fauna, some unique to the region.

Cultural consequences were no less profound. Native language use diminished; oral traditions weakened; customary practices eroded. Some Waorani communities entered agreements with oil interests, while others resisted. Still others, the Tagaeri and Taromenane, remain in voluntary isolation, defending their autonomy with increasing difficulty.

In effect, a territory once lived as its own world has been recast as resource. Missionaries sought to save souls; governments and corporations sought to extract value. The result has been not only cultural change, but a destabilization of the very conditions under which meaning is made.

To read the Waorani encounter alongside Wallace Stevens and UNESCO is to see more clearly the stakes of each. Stevens imagines that, in the absence of transcendence, meaning may be remade through attentive presence to the world.

UNESCO seeks, more cautiously, to preserve the practices that make such meaning possible. The Waorani experience, however, reveals that these practices are neither secure nor easily restored. They can be fractured by missionization, by development, by the redefinition of land itself.

What follows is not silence, but improvisation. Meaning persists, though not intact: a continual effort to live coherently amid altered circumstances.

If Stevens offers a philosophy of immanence and UNESCO a strategy of cultural continuity, the Waorani expose their shared vulnerability, as meaning clings precipitously to practices that can be weakened, displaced, or undone.

For indigenous cultures like that of the Waorani, what is at stake is existential: the vanishing of a way of life, uniquely intelligible to those who inhabit it.”

—RJ

“Sunday Morning”: Wallace Stevens’ Secular Hymn


It was at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1979, while doing a course in modern poetry, that I first heard of Philip Larkin, featured among the poets we studied..

Many critics consider him Britain’s best poet since WWII. Later, I would make him a staple of my own university courses in modern poetry. One Larkin poem that impressed me tremendously was “Church Going,” with its somber reflection on Christianity’s demise and, by extension, religion in contemporary life. Larkin, a librarian at the University of Hull, was slated to visit our tutorial, only to cancel for whatever reason at the last minute. He died a few years later.

While “Church Going” remains my favorite Larkin poem, it had its thematic precedent, however, in modernist American poet Wallace Steven’s “Sunday Morning,” published in 1915 and revised in 1923. Like Larkin, Stevens takes up the embers of a once vibrant faith.

It’s not an easy read, Stevens perhaps with Eliot the most erudite of modernists poets. I’ve been thinking a lot of Stevens and this particular poem as Easter approaches. The resurrection, whether mythic or historical, is the poem’s underlying centripetal force that energizes this magnificent poem.

I.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

Commentary:

The poem commences on a Sunday morning, moving intermittently from the palpable, sensory present—an anonymous woman in nightgown, lounging on a couch, enjoying her coffee and oranges, a green parrot resting on her rug.

An interlocutor voice intrudes with philosophic reflection, setting up dialectic tension: nature’s plenitude versus a “silent Palestine/Dominion of the blood and sepulchre,” vague and distant.

II.

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

Commentary:

The idea of paradise distant and abstract, vividly contrasts with the pungency of the physical world, sufficient in both “grievings” and “elations.”

III.

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

Commentary:

The ancient myth of Jove, the Roman sky-father, and his non-human birth yields a deity absent of human experience, a monarch remote from sensory, earthly life, suggestive of Jesus born of a virgin (“virginal,” “star”). Blood, “commingling…With heaven” implies the Incarnation. “Muttering”suggests incomprehensibility, a divine speech not relevant to human need, an indicting of the traditional transcendent god, absent from daily life. The several symbols — Jove, blood, the Virgin, the star, the hinds (female deer)—suggest their man-made origins. Humans project on the universe their need for the palpable (i.e., “blood) to meet what fulfills their longing for a deity who co-mingles among them (“requital to desire”). Requital means reciprocation, a satisfying of longing. Several pivotal questions are raised toward the stanza’s end:

“Shall our blood fail?” — Will human desire for the divine simply die out?

“Or shall it come to be the blood of paradise?” — Or will we succeed in sacralizing earthly life itself?

“Shall it give back all that it has absorbed?” — Will heaven (the sky, the idea of transcendence) return what it has taken from us — our energy, our desire, our consolation?

“Or shall men gather and make hymns to what / Is left of paradise?” Or shall they celebrate / The sky, the sun, the earth?”

In sum, the human-wrought Incarnation is needless, for Earth functions sufficiently as our sole paradise (i.e., heaven): “A part of labor and a part of pain.” Nature, woven into our experiential world, yields a friendlier, knowable cosmos, the stuff of human experience.

IV.

She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

Commentary:

Here, Stevens address the poem’s pervasive anxiety, the longing for immortality. The woman worries that the beauty of the earth—the “green of April” or the “plum on the golden plate”—is too ephemeral to satisfy the human soul’s longing for something eternal. In rebuttal, the voice argues the insufficiency of vague, mythic afterlife narratives, the “chimera of the grave,/Neither the golden underground, nor isle/Melodious, where spirits gat them home,” to cyclic nature’s sustaining cornucopia of delight.

V.

She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

Commentary:

The woman longs for assurance of a heaven with its bliss in the conflict between rejecting religion and persistent emotional need. Mortality, the voice argues, heightens our awareness of present beauty resplendent in human event.

VI.

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

Commentary:

The interlocutor’s musing as to the nature of heaven. Is it a place of unchanging sameness, absent of ending ,where “fruit never falls” and the “boughs hang always in that perfect sky”? Is it a place, like earth, of continuing longing,
“With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find…?” Mortality intensifies an awareness of life’s intrinsic value.

VII.

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

Commentary:

The poem’s climax opens with an extended auditory image of a naturalistic celebration of life—“a chant of paradise”!—cognitive of mortality, enhancing acceptance of its ending:
“They shall know well “the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.”

VIII.

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Commentary:

The concluding stanza commences with the speaker’s rejection of the Resurrection:

“The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”

Independent of a transcendent deity, we are granted autonomy (“freedom”), our lives governed by ancient, impersonal physical laws (the “dependency of day and night”) rather than a moral or spiritual prerequisite.

The stanza concludes with the image of an evening flock of pigeons making “Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.”

“Ambiguous undulations” suggests impermanence, the inevitable intrusion of change as life transitions from beauty to death. We, like these birds, glide gracefully (“extended wings”), “sinking” inevitably toward the “darkness” of extinction.

REFLECTIONS:

Previous to my retirement, I had taught this poem for some twenty years as part of my course in Modern Poetry, unceasingly admiring its resonant Keats and Wordsworth innuendos.

Paradoxically modern in its delivery, cerebral and image focused, the poem is rooted in English Romanticism, celebrating the imagination’s witness to our fated passage into a parenthesis of light suspended between spheres of darkness.

Like much of Romantic poetry, again that of Wordsworth in its blank verse of unrhymed pentameter, melancholic disposition, rich symbolism, and lofty diction, its voluptuous fantasy, reminiscent of Keats, it supremely celebrates nature.

While there is an insistent tension through much of the poem between nature’s plenitude and the woman’s expressed need for something more, it’s crucial to Stevens’ purpose of philosophical debate.

The final stanza proffers epiphany, the woman’s possible acceptance of a cosmos devoid of divine certitude—“the old chaos of the sun,” a realm of “ambiguous undulations,” where no promise of resurrection intrudes upon the flux of being. We cannot be sure the woman is even present here. Critic Frank Kermode points out Stevens preference for open endings. He sees the poem’s final stanza as process, not conclusion.

Distinguished critic Helen Vender reads the poem as a movement toward a “natural supernaturalism”—a vision in which transcendence is reabsorbed into nature. The final stanza’s birds and “ambiguous undulations” affirm process, not permanence.

Stevens’ masterpiece, a secular hymn, grants solace not in transcendence but in the acceptance—and even the aesthetic affirmation—of metaphysical ambiguity: the freedom to choose, to become arbiters of all that we define as beautiful, grounded wholly within a mortal world.

–RJ

The Perfecț Evening: Tips on Social Etiquette

Pretense pervades most social relationships, less a flaw than a civic duty. There are ground rules that could be taken right out of Dale Carnegie’s landmark playbook, How to win Friends and Influence People. Obsequiousness is in. Sincerity a no-no.

When out with friends, be sure to temper news of your successes. It may sound like you’re boasting and, after all, your friends may have had a bad day. Best serve up your triumphs like a weak tea: faint, apologetic, and quickly forgotten.

Equally your woes. Everybody has them, and they’ll certainly not want subscribing to yours. And besides, nobody likes being cornered into false condolence. Nothing clears a room faster than earnest despair.

Try to agree with everyone. The food may be awful, but keep it to yourself. Silence signals discontent. Try a “thank you for a memorable meal!” It might get you invited again, and since you thought it “memorable,” having it again. If someone tells you of their transcendent ski venture at Aspen, a simple “awesome” suffices.

Whatever you do, don’t huddle up with someone, conversing in a corner. Avoid lingering In a conversation long enough to be known. Circulation’s democratic; depth, exclusionary. A minute per person hits the right balance between recognition and escape.

Encourage others to talk about themselves. Make them feel they’re the night’s chief exhibit, the most important person in the room, even though you can hardly stand them. It’s important to have people like you and, doing this, you can’t miss. It’s not an emotion but a technique. And who knows—this evening’s bore may prove tomorrow’s benefactor.

Be sure to dispense hugs liberally, even to those in daily life you eagerly avoid. Distribute them as though they were small-denomination currency passed out. Make them feel they’ve made the team.

At evening’s end, offer to help—clear plates, stack glasses, perhaps gesture nobly toward the tip if at a restaurant. Accept, with serene gratitude, the inevitable refusal. The offer, not the act, is what counts.

Should you encounter someone who violates these protocols—who speaks too candidly, listens too intently or, worst of all, means what they say, withdraw promptly. Avoid authenticity like a draft in an old house,

For instance, I have this “friend” on Facebook who “doth protest too much”(Hamlet). Practicing social etiquette, I don’t travel to his page anymore.

With these modest disciplines in place, your evenings are granted success: pleasantly forgettable, flawlessly managed, absent of those awkward intrusions—honesty, feeling, intuitive vapors that have been known to unsettle a perfectly good night.

—rj

ON TRUTH, POWER, AND THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES

In moments of political outrage, we often hear that some “moral compact” has been broken between the government and the people, as though public life rests on an understood promise of honesty and good faith. It is a comforting idea. It’s also, I think, a naïve one.

The record we inherit suggests otherwise. Bill Clinton misled the public under oath. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson deepened American involvement in the Vietnam War under a widening credibility gap. Franklin D. Roosevelt withheld the full truth of his condition from the electorate. These are not anomalies. They are reminders.

None of this excuses Donald Trump, whose conduct stands as an extreme case in its brazenness. But it does suggest that the deeper problem is not the breaking of a compact, but our belief that such a compact has ever governed political life in more than name.

Niccolò Machiavelli understood that those who govern must often act against truth while preserving its appearance. Thomas Hobbes argued that we submit to authority not because it is virtuous, but because it is necessary. Between them, the so-called compact begins to look less like a foundation than a useful fiction, one that steadies public faith even as it obscures political reality.

If that is so, then the question is not how to restore a moral politics, but how much of our moral life we should ever have entrusted to politics in the first place.

Here Henry David Thoreau offers a necessary restraint: that government is best which governs least, not because it is especially good, but because it is always liable to be otherwise.

And Wendell Berry reminds us, more quietly, that the work of responsibility does not belong first to governments at all, but to persons, living within limits, bound to places, accountable to one another in ways no distant authority can finally secure.

We have asked too much of politics, and in doing so, we have misunderstood it.

Power does not keep faith; it manages necessity. It persuades, it conceals, it endures. It cannot bear the weight of the moral order we would like to rest upon it.

That burden remains where it has always been—closer to home.

Not in the abstractions of the state, nor in the promises of those who govern, but in the small, stubborn practices of truthfulness and care: in what we say, what we refuse to say, what we permit, and what we will not.

If there is any compact worth defending, it is not the one we imagine between ourselves and power. It is the one we keep, or fail to keep, with one another.

—RJ

A War America Can’t Win: The Iran Crisis

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched coordinated aerial strikes on Iran, ostensibly to induce regime change and secure stability in the Middle East.

Central to this strategy was the expectation of a mass popular uprising—something glimpsed in January 2026, when tens of thousands of unarmed civilians took to the streets and were met with lethal force. Estimates suggest as many as 30,000 were killed, 7000 independently confirmed. The regime they opposed—a repressive Islamic theocracy entrenched since 1979—remains intact.

This is a war America is unlikely to win.

Despite the destruction of command centers, arsenals, and the targeted killing of senior leadership, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran has demonstrated a capacity for resilience that was either underestimated or ignored.

Its response has been asymmetric and expansive: ballistic missiles and drone strikes aimed not only at Israel but at a widening circle of nations hosting American bases—Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Recent launches have extended even farther, toward Crete, Turkey, and the joint UK–U.S. base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, 2400 miles distant.

At such range, the perimeter of vulnerability shifts. Southeastern Europe comes into view; with further technological refinement, even cities such as Rome or Berlin may not remain beyond reach; in a decade, the United States.

As this conflict widens, its economic consequences are already apparent. Iran’s disruption of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes, has driven prices upward, with projections rising sharply. The leverage is stark: Iran need not defeat the United States militarily to impose severe costs. It need only prolong the conflict.

The political implications are equally stark. Domestic opposition is mounting here at home, shaped less by geopolitics than by inflation, felt daily in grocery bills and at the gas pump. A war that amplifies those pressures becomes difficult to sustain, regardless of its stated aims.

Even proposed escalations such as a seizure of Kharg Island, which handles a significant portion of Iran’s oil exports, risk becoming symbolic victories at disproportionate cost.

The comparison to Iwo Jima is not misplaced: a tactical gain unlikely to alter the strategic reality. Much of Iran’s missile infrastructure remains embedded and protected, beyond the reach of conventional assault.

Recent Trump statements suggesting that U.S. objectives have largely been met already signal a search for an exit. Yet an off-ramp may not be readily available. Iran’s advantage lies in time. By sustaining pressure, economic as much as military, it can compel concessions without decisive confrontation.

There was another path.

Rather than precipitating war, a strategy of containment through sanctions and patience might have allowed the regime to atrophy under the weight of its own contradictions. Iran faces converging crises: acute water scarcity, environmental degradation, declining agricultural productivity, economic duress, and deep internal dissent. A large portion of its population—diverse, young, and increasingly disillusioned—has already demonstrated a willingness to demand change at great personal risk.

That internal pressure, not external force, may have proven the more decisive agent of transformation.

–RJ

My Porch of Books

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges

This year I decided to overhaul my reading habits by adopting what I call focused reading—pursuing a subject deeply rather than wandering endlessly from book to book. Instead of grazing randomly across titles, I try to follow a particular vein: reading several works that illuminate a topic, an author, an era, or a historical moment until the subject begins to feel textured and alive.

For years, though my reading had been eclectic, and not without pleasure, I began to sense that the most memorable intellectual experiences of my life had come, not from isolated books, but from immersion, one work leading naturally to another, ideas conversing across pages and centuries.

Reading then becomes less a pastime than a form of exploration, the mind moving gradually through a landscape rather than darting past it from the window of a passing train.

This year I began, as usual, with my annual eclectic list of fiction and non-fiction culled from authoritative sources. But going forward, I hope to limit that list to perhaps twenty titles—books that seem especially deserving of attention.

Alongside these, I’ve begun concentrating on several areas. This year they include the farming iconoclast Wendell Berry; the conservative economist Thomas Sowell; the late historian Walter Johnson; and the classical world—an area where I lack deeper exposure.

Next year, should I still walk the planet, I can imagine expanding the method further: perhaps ten topic areas, each composed of primary and secondary works. Five books per topic would yield roughly fifty works of focused reading, in addition to the twenty eclectic titles.

To give an example, one of this year’s areas of focus is the classical milieu. Staying within my five-book limit, I chose the following:

• The Republic — Plato
• Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle
• The Bacchae — Euripides
• Metamorphoses — Ovid
• Letters from a Stoic — Seneca the Younger

So far, my experiment is yielding dividends. I’ve committed to reading a minimum of fifty pages a day—assuming an average book length of about three hundred pages—and by mid-March I’ve completed twelve books. Last year, by contrast, I finished only twenty.

I should confess that Atomic Habits by James Clear helped inspire the discipline. Clear’s practical application of behavioral psychology, ideas traceable to B. F. Skinner, encouraged me to approach reading not merely as an aspiration but as a daily practice. Nowadays I cringe when my routine threatens the minimum and will sometimes delay sleep simply to complete my pages.

Such discipline may seem quaint in an age that offers a thousand distractions. Once it was linear television that eroded the nation’s reading habits; today, the Internet amplifies the trend. Last year, nearly half of Americans, 48.5 percent, did not read a single book. In Britain, the figure stood at 40 percent, according to a YouGov poll reported in the Times Literary Supplement.

Bottom line, Americans spend roughly four to five hours each day watching television or streaming media; in Britain, the average approaches four and a half hours. Platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Facebook dominate much of that viewing.

Add the hours spent on smartphones, computers, and tablets and the total easily approaches seven hours a day, nearly the equivalent of a full workday, devoted to screens. Much of that time is spent watching movies, sports, or the endless scroll of digital entertainment.

Younger generations, though still fond of sports and films, increasingly inhabit the fast-moving currents of TikTok, YouTube, and video games.

Reading, by contrast, has steadily fallen out of fashion.

Nor has reading alone suffered. The social fabric has frayed as well. I remember when houses faced the street with broad porches where neighbors gathered in the evening, waiting the advent of night’s coolness, conversation drifting unhindered from one subject to another, board games on small tables, laughter an abundant sprinkling of neighborly fellowship.

This simple act of sitting together seemed reason enough to linger.

Today, many houses turn their porches to the rear, facing private yards rather than the street, as if community itself had quietly retreated.

Perhaps this is why books continue to matter.

Reading restores a community the modern world has forsaken.. Open a book and time folds in upon itself: Plato resumes his patient inquiry into justice; Seneca counsels composure in adversity; Ovid reminds us that the human story is one long sequence of transformations. The centuries speak again in voices at once distant and intimate.

Books, in this sense, comprise the old porch of civilization.

There we sit again with the living and the dead alike, the conversation unbroken. The room grows quiet, the hour late, yet the mind moves freely—wandering Athens with Aristotle, pausing in the tragic shadows of Euripides, or returning, perhaps a little wiser, to our own small corner of the world.

So I keep my modest covenant of fifty pages a day. Not simply to finish more books, though that is pleasant enough. I read because within those pages waits a larger company and a wider horizon.

In a distracted age, the turning of a page may be one of the last quiet forms of freedom left to us.

—rj

Ignored by Media: African Rangers on the Front Line

In a story largely ignored by the American press, armed militants attacked a ranger station in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Upemba National Park on March 3, 2026, killing five rangers and looting and destroying infrastructure.

The attackers remain unidentified but may be linked to Mai-Mai or Bakata Katanga militias, which have historically used Upemba and other parks as hideouts.

Britain’s Prince William, an ardent conservationist active in organizations such as United for Wikdlife, issued a statement lamenting their deaths: “Environmental protection has become one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet.”

According to the Game Rangers Association of Africa and the International Ranger Federation, at least 630 rangers have been killed protecting wildlife and protected areas since 2011, including 200 in the Congo’s sprawling Virunga National Park alone, home to one-third of Africa’s endangered mountain gorillas.

Beyond poaching and militia attacks, Africa’s wildlife faces ongoing threats from illegal mining, oil exploration, and agriculture incursion.

Adjacent human populations also place enormous pressure on parks: many rely on charcoal and bushmeat, and some establish homesteads within protected areas.

Ranger deaths in Africa average 47–60 annually. Just between June 2024 and May 2025, 67 rangers were killed. Despite their sacrifices in protecting forests, wildlife, watersheds, and ecosystems on which millions depend, these defenders rarely receive the recognition afforded to soldiers, police, or firefighters.

The fate of Africa’s wildlife is dire. Upemba, established in 1939 and covering over 11,000 km² of wetlands, savannas, and mountains, is home to an estimated 1,800 species. Once teeming with 100,000 elephants in the 1950s, fewer than 200 remain today. Of the once-thriving zebra population, only 200 survive in Africa’s only park offering refuge for zebras. Its lion population, once flourishing, is now extinct.

Climate change further exacerbates these threats, disrupting weather patterns and causing long-term droughts.

Rapid population growth—Africa’s net population increase averages 2.5% annually, with Nigeria projected to reach 750 million by century’s end—intensifies competition for natural resources.

Meanwhile, poverty, especially in rural areas, continues to rise. Some countries, including Zimbabwe and Angola, have recently implemented reductions of wildlife herds to feed growing populations.

Addressing this complex dilemma requires holistic solutions. Key measures include:

   •   Financing protective strategies, including international support, especially given climate change’s role in ecosystem stress.

   •   Expanding access to birth control and reproductive health services, countering population pressures.

   •   Establishing community-based conservation councils and alternative livelihoods like eco-tourism.

   •   Protecting species through migration corridors, no-entry zones, and crop-compensation programs.

   •   Employing satellite and monitoring technology to track poaching and militia activity.

   •   Restoring degraded habitats and prevent illegal settlement and mining through government-NGO partnerships.

   •   Strengthening ranger capacity with training, equipment, and fair compensation.

The five rangers killed in Upemba on March 3 died in a park most of the world has never heard of

While Africa’s wildlife, forests, and watersheds are under siege, the greater tragedy may be how little attention this struggle receives beyond the continent itself. In remote parks like Upemba, rangers patrol landscapes larger than some countries, confronting militias and poachers with little recognition and fewer resources.

They stand, quite literally, as the last line between survival and disappearance. If the world continues to look away, the elephants, zebras, and forests of Upemba may vanish—and the quiet heroism of the men and women who died defending them will have been in vain.

–RJ

Love and War: A Moral Perspective

“This new war, like the previous one, would be a test of the power of machines against people and places; whatever its causes and justifications, it would make the world worse. This was true of that new war, and it has been true of every new war since. The dark human monstrous thing comes and tramples the little towns and never even knows their names. It would make Port William afraid and shed its blood and grieve its families and damage its hope.

“I knew too that this new war was not even new but was only the old one come again. And what caused it? It was caused, I thought, by people failing to love one another, failing to love their enemies. I was glad enough that I had not become a preacher, and so would not have to go through a war pretending that Jesus had not told us to love our enemies.”

—Wendell Berry, Jaber Crow

Exploring Japan: Collective Kindness

I’m currently reading travel connoisseur Pico Iyer’s A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, a delightful read. Unlike many travel writers who guide us to a country’s tourist amenities—sights, hotels, restaurants—Iyer illuminates its culture. He knows Japan intimately, married to a Japanese wife and calling the country home for the past thirty-two years.

As a serviceman, terribly young at the time, I visited Japan twice on R & R. I was impressed by its remarkable post-war recovery and, even more, by its people—the most courteous, polite, clean, and honest of any nation I’ve been privileged to visit. Leave a camera in your room at checkout, and they’ll have it waiting at the desk when you return to inquire

The Japanese aim to please, integral to a culture of collectivized kindness.

Iyer shares a German visitor’s observation from 1910:

“If a fisherman sees you emerge from the ocean after swimming, he will quickly remove the sandals from his feet, bow, and place them before you in the sand so that you do not have to walk down the street barefoot.”

It’s still that way.

Purchase a gift and it will often be wrapped—even in newspaper, say from The New York Times—simply to heighten your pleasure.

Don’t be surprised to find a basket of toothbrushes, toothpaste, and floss in your hotel bathroom.

For sheer convenience, Japan has 5.6 million vending machines—more than anywhere else in the world.

In America, convenience stores are a way of life, especially along interstate highways. They are also, sadly, frequently robbed.

In Japan, which has more than 50,000 convenience stores in a nation roughly the size of California, they are places of safety when one fears assault.

Outwardly and inwardly, they are uniform—for your convenience.

And yet they differ.

Some deliver.

Some are expansive, two-story outlets.

Some are specialized for the elderly.

If you need someone to console you in your grief, Amazon Japan can send a Buddhist priest to your door.

Feeling lonely? There are companies that will provide a pseudo-relative or friend—a mother or father, even a girlfriend.

Train stations, spotlessly clean, often feature signs:

“In order not to bother other customers, please show good manners and create a comfortable atmosphere.”

One of my special memories of Japan—beyond the scalding baths where nudity among the sexes was not a problem (though that may be changing as immigration increases) was the custom of not opening a gift in the giver’s presence, lest one reveal disappointment or offer false praise.

I like Iyer’s observation of Japan’s intuitive grasp that some things cannot be perfected:

“Japan has a sharp-edged sense of what can be perfected—gizmos, surfaces, manners—and of what cannot (morals, emotions, families). Thus it’s more nearly perfect on the surface than any country I’ve met, in part because it’s less afflicted by the sense that feelings, relationships, or people can ever be made perfect.”

I adore the Japanese penchant for harmony with nature, of which we are a part—reflected in meticulous gardens replete with lanterns, bridges, fountains, lakes, and ponds; sculpted cherry trees and moss marking the seasonal passage; myriad stone and pebbled pathways; sanctuaries of stillness instilling reflection—the way of Zen.

I love their cherishing of the ceremonial, their intuitive sense of inherent beauty in redeeming a pattern—whether arranging flowers or serving tea.

Above all, I love Japan’s simplicity. Dressed in kimono, I slept on floors in narrow rooms divided by fragile sliding doors: beneath me, my shikibuton; my head resting on a single makura; a kakebuton drawn close against the night chill. Nothing excessive. Nothing clamoring. Only wood, paper, cloth, and quiet. A nation refined not by accumulation, but by restraint.

Japan—a place apart. May it always remain so.

—rj