Hog farming has a massive poop problem–North Carolina is not the only place where the lagoon and sprayfield system exists. A lot of large-scale pig farms in the US store and dispose of waste in this way. However, in states like Iowa that experience more frequent freezing temperatures, farms store the waste in deep pits under the hog buildings. Other states require lagoons to be covered. And small-scale farmers graze their pigs. But I couldn’t find anywhere a version of a wastewater treatment plant that most advocates are calling for, aside from various pilot projects. It’s clear that changing this system would require an industry-wide sea change, led by corporations fronting the cost and by more government regulation. www.vox.com

A Utopia of Useful Things–The futuristic fiction of the early nineteenth century overflowed with mechanical inventions. Airships carrying thousands of passengers dominate the skies; steamships, sometimes with additional pull from giant kites, turn the oceans into lakes; trains traveling hundreds of miles an hour defeat time. Machines dry hay faster, bore deeper tunnels, and shield cities from inclement weather. The more machines, the more futuristic the story felt. Jane Webb’s book was so packed with imaginative innovations in science and technology that the famous English landscape architect J.C. Loudon went out of his way to meet the author, assuming it was a man. They were married later that year. www.laphamsquarterly.org

The Pedagogical Legacy of bell hooks–In the 14 essays that compose Teaching to Transgress, hooks raised critical questions about whose voices are heard in classrooms, curricula, and society at large. She argued that teachers should help students apprehend the unequal power structures — racism, patriarchy, and imperialism — that shape our everyday lives. Education, she wrote, was a “practice of freedom,” empowering students to resist and transform injustice. And yet, hooks also sensed that teachers could not challenge these practices of domination through hierarchical classrooms predicated on the tyranny of instructors over students. www.chronicle.com

Civilian Casualties are a Policy Choice–US foreign policy has emphasized military power as the sole means to accomplish objectives. That civilians die in large numbers is a lamentable but predictable result of that. Only by reorienting US foreign policy as a whole will that change. It starts by pulling troops out in the places where their presence is both dangerous and unnecessary. This realignment doesn’t just mean negating the militarism of the last decades. It means fostering a diplomacy-first foreign policy, something which President Joe Biden advocated but hasn’t implemented in Iraq and Syria. inkstickmedia.com

Sisyphus Gets a Prescription–The question of how to treat Sisyphus lies at the heart of Robin Downie’s new book, Quality of Life: A Post-Pandemic Philosophy of Medicine. According to Downie, Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, the COVID-19 pandemic ought to make physicians rethink the fundamental ethos of medicine, which has produced an individualistic, consumerist, science-worshiping form of medical practice. Physicians consider themselves enlightened when they emphasize the importance of improving their patients’ “quality of life” rather than simply curing their diseases, yet most of them have a narrow, unexamined view of what that entails. Downie would not deny that Sisyphus has a poor quality of life, of course. Nor would he dispute that he faces a serious problem. Yet not all suffering is a medical problem, and not all remedies for suffering include medical intervention. What else does a physician have to offer? hedgehogreview.com

Why The President’s Party Almost Always Has A Bad Midterm–One of the most ironclad rules in American politics is that the president’s party loses ground in midterm elections. Almost no president is immune. President George W. Bush’s Republicans took a “thumping” in 2006. President Barack Obama’s Democrats received a “shellacking” in 2010. President Donald Trump’s Republicans were buried under a blue wave in 2018. And the results out of Virginia and New Jersey last November suggest that a red wave might hit President Biden’s Democrats in 2022. fivethirtyeight.com

How Disruptions Happen–On 3 April 1917, a crowd gathered to meet a train arriving from Helsinki at Petrograd’s Finland Station. The train carried Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He greeted his audience with a speech calling for the overthrow of Russia’s government – and, six months later, he made this happen. The world changed. Aeon