"From this angle, the embrace of vibes might signal a yearning to confirm subcultural affinities, a collective desire for “vibing” with someone, or something. Over the course of 2022, we witnessed a shift. Perhaps it wasn’t toward anything so tangible as the hedonistic spree that was predicted, but the transition from influence to impression was palpable nonetheless. Whether the messiness we’ve embraced as an outlet for a difficult couple of years continues into 2023, we’ll just have to feel it out."

"Re’eh. The word means “see”. But what are the people looking at? Two mountains? No. Are we looking at those mountains now? No. You are reading this on a page or on a screen, perhaps looking up at a window or a table. The people are instructed to look at blessings and curses—abstractions, futures. The blessing if the people remember, if we remember. A curse, if we forget. The cursed life lacks a sense of past and future. The blessed life acknowledges past sacrifices so as to avoid redundancy. But it also looks to the future asking what sacrifices it can make so that subsequent generations won’t have to. The blessed life takes the long-view."

"If Hanson is right that sacred writing is a key to relative peace and prosperity, we should ask how we can cultivate an appreciation for sacred writing even in a secular age. We should ask how we can maintain a literary and poetic sensibility in a time dominated by Tiktok, 24 hour news cycles, and a culture that produces cultural goods as if they were consumer goods—cheap to make, cheap to break, cheap to replace. The Torah is given to last. It is a bulwark not just against exile from land, but also exile from attention. Torah anchors us in what would otherwise be a sea of constant content. Ironically, Torah is needed not just to shift us morally from a primitive age to an Axial one, but to protect us from various existential risks that we now face."