Holiday gift guides often include suggestions for what to buy for people who are “hard to shop for.” It’s really a problem of not knowing what the person wants — possibly because you don’t know them well. Invariably, the product being proposed is something no one would want. Maybe the point is to take revenge on those who don’t voice their preferences.

Dear reader, in all likelihood, I don’t know you. You are interested in my writing, which makes you clearly a person of good taste. But I am not entirely sure what I write that you like, and I worry that whatever that is, I don’t give you enough of it to keep you interested. I confess, I’m still scarred by the single biggest unsubscribe event in the history of this newsletter: right after I wrote that I was getting more interested in art, opera, and French.

This post is both a year-end roundup and a sort of gift guide, meant to match your interests with something I published in the past year. Maybe, if you like one thing I’ve written, you’ll try reading something on another topic. Maybe it will turn out that it’s not the topic that interests you but my general outlook on the things that interest me (including perhaps art, opera, and French, or even the ultimate destiny of this newsletter: thrice-weekly posts — and a podcast! — on art direction in French opera).

I only published five essays in 2025; ordinarily, I’m good for about 12. (I’m not counting what I write for this newsletter.) I spent the first part of the year working on the proposal for a book called Dear Student: Letters on Life and Learning in College (more info here) and the second half of the year writing it. I’ll spend a lot of next year working on it, too.

All of these pieces should be freely available, no subscription required.

If you want to give me a gift, I’d love nothing more than for you to share one or more of these essays with people you think would enjoy them.

For the person who just graded a million exams and is now totally burned out

I wrote an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education called “How to Build a Sustainable Faculty Career.” It’s a bit ironic that I’m dispensing this advice, since I was not able to build a sustainable full-time academic career myself. But my failure was instructive.

I gave a few talks on this topic during the year, too, and I would love to again in 2026. Get in touch if you’d like me to speak to your colleagues. My schedule might not allow for an in-person visit until May, but it won’t hurt to ask.

For someone who complains that colleges are too woke — or not woke enough

The culture war over college is being conducted by people who are not looking at the colleges students actually go to: community colleges and regional public universities. At places like Rose State College in Oklahoma, things look very different than how they look at the colleges that grab the headlines. I know this because I got out of my armchair and visited Rose State. I talked to students and faculty. I sat in on classes, including an organized debate in an intro to American government class. I came away rather more optimistic about American democracy.

The outcome of this reporting was an article for Commonweal, “Where Politics Is Still Possible.”

For the relentless AI booster — or the person who wants to defend humanistic teaching in the age of AI

Like many people who teach, I’m dismayed by AI and don’t know what to do. Sometimes, I wonder what the point is of trying to teach, when students can cheat so easily and without much chance of definitive detection. University administrators aren’t helping; in fact, they’re making things worse

I wrote an essay for The Hedgehog Review called “ChatGPT is a Gimmick” to figure out why old-fashioned learning and teaching are still worth it. The reason: We’re going to die.

The essay was pretty widely read, getting a major boost by Matt Dinan’s viral tweet that the “last paragraph is something like a Hippocratic oath for humanities professors.” In fact, the last paragraph eventually detached from the rest of the essay and started getting posted, without attribution, on teaching forums. I discovered this when a friend and former colleague posted it approvingly on social media; she didn’t know I wrote it!

This essay, too, is based in part on reporting I did at a two-year school — Austin Community College — where great learning is happening.

For anyone who feels like their attention span is so far gone, only divine intervention can save it

Everybody knows we can’t focus. We can’t just sit still and do one thing for even twenty minutes — or twenty seconds — without checking our phones! We need to lock in on the task at hand. And art can fix us, not just because it gives us practice in attention, but because it offers models of attention, like Mary, lovingly focused on her son.

Or maybe an inability to focus isn’t the problem. Maybe attention isn’t what we think it is. Maybe our “distractability” is actually a form of attention in its own right, a great ability that gives us access to goods that we would miss if we were always intently focused on what’s before us. And maybe Mary offers an example of that form of attention, too. Find out in “To See as Mary Sees: Marian Art in an Age of Distraction,” my cover story in the December issue of America magazine. To my surprise, this essay struck a chord with readers.

For the art connsoisseur — or total novice — who wants to see what an idiot thinks about a prominent contemporary painter

I often tell students that their most ebarrassing weaknesses as writers are also their greatest strengths. (See above re: distractability. Or better yet, read the essay on Marian art and attention.) One of my weaknesses is that I like to write about art, even though I don’t know anything about it. As a doofus, though, I don’t come to an exhibition with a lot of assumptions. I have to look at an object for a long time to figure out what I think of it. And I try to focus on how people do or might interact with the artwork. All of this, I believe, helps readers in their efforts to see artworks.

A good example of my art-idiocy is “Skin Deep,” my review essay for Commonweal on a stunning and significant exhibition of work by Jenny Saville, who paints human bodies and faces in ways that provoke yet ultimately defy our impulse to see them as revealing an individual’s character. I think this is a good essay. One reader said it made her reconsider her long-held negative view of contemporary art. This is the highest praise I could hope for.

A final observation

These essays were all published in magazines I have read for decades and written for since at least 2017. My first piece for the Chroncile of Higher Education was published in 2004. I’ve had the same editor this whole time. We’re told that the media landscape is in constant upheaval, that legacy publications don’t matter anymore, that everyone is their own publishing enterprise. And it’s true that even the Chronicle, the Hedgehog, America, and Commonweal have changed quite a bit since I started reading them. (America was a weekly within my memory; Commonweal was until a few years ago biweekly.) But many good magazines have endured. In some ways, they are better than ever.

If you’re looking to give yourself or someone else a last-minute gift, consider a subscription to one of them. The links in the previous paragraph are all to subscription pages. Some of these magazines charge less than many paid Substacks and all offer much more value than a newsletter is capable of. Your subecription is also a great way to support my work and the work of many other writers, not to mention the editors, designers, and other staff we depend on. We thank you.

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It has been nice to hear from people who enjoyed my essay in America magazine on Marian art and attention. If you haven’t read it yet, please do! I think it’s a good one to consider at this time of year, when images of Mary and Jesus are everywhere, even in our increasingly secular societies. What are these images saying, not just about God, but about attention? Could they offer models for how to use our attentional capacities? Read and find out!

Now I have another essay on art, this time in Commonweal. It’s a review of the exhibition, “Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting,” which is at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth through January 18. If you’re wondering who Saville is, I say a bit in the piece, and for more, you might read this profile of her in the New Yorker from last summer.

I hope you’ll read my essay. I worked very hard on it. Here’s a paragraph:

Saville’s paintings feature bodies, but that doesn’t mean they make a claim about embodiment, any more than Georgia O’Keeffe’s work says what it’s like to be an orchid or Claude Monet has a thesis about the Rouen Cathedral. Bodies and faces, rather, offer Saville both a surface and visual language within which to explore representation, abstraction, and what one can do with paint. Hands, knees, fat, ears, breasts, wrinkles: these are elements of a human body. Represented in pigmented oil on canvas, they can become elements of a disturbing, elevating, or piercing work of art. But they do not say who we are.

I don’t explicitly say in the review that I was thinking about the idea of “anatomy” as I viewed the exhibition, but I was: parts and whole. What parts constitute the whole of who we are? What parts are essential, inessential? Is a person more than the sum of their parts? Is a painting more than the sum of its? I think the tension between part and whole is one of several that make Saville’s work so captivating.

One thing that didn’t make it into the review is the show’s relationship to the setting. The Tadao Ando-designed Modern is an ideal venue. It has the capacity to give the biggest paintings room to spread out. The 12-foot-wide portrait of a cadaver Still hangs opposite the 16-foot-wide Leverage (1998-99) — a pileup of three horizontal bodies arranged foot to face — as the only works in an airy gallery. A visitor who needs a break from Saville’s colossal figuration can just look over the railing onto a trio of Ellsworth Kelly monochrome panels in the space below.

Some of Saville’s more recent portraits are hung in side galleries and nooks overlooking a reflecting pool. The more intimate setting gives visitors a chance to feel like they’re discovering something, but it also makes the pieces easy to miss. And after confronting larger, earlier works, these vivid pastels, similar to each other in mood and merely six feet high, might seem like a letdown.

I think these newer works don’t stand out in the exhibition simply because there are so many of them in one place. The show was organized by, and was first presented in the National Portrait Gallery, in London. There, the show included six or seven works that extended the exhibition’s range, including some of Saville’s self-portraits with her newborn children. My guess is that these pieces could not make it to the U.S., and the Modern substituted what it could get, which turned out to be a lot of similar paintings.

Do these two essays on art conflict with each other? Do I contradict myself? The one on Marian art is all about the content: What are the paintings telling us about Mary and attention? The Saville review pays more attention to form, and indeed, I argue that the content of Saville’s work is a bit of a dodge. She’s inviting us to make claims about a person being represented, but she also resists those claims via the volume of paint, her brushstrokes, etc.

Maybe you don’t live in Texas and so don’t care about a museum exhibition in Fort Worth. I invite you to click the link and read the review anyway; I tried to make it an enjoyable read even for people who will never make it to the show. And I tried to say something about painting itself, not just this specific exhibition. (Plus, Commonweal reproduced three key paintings, though the screen will not do justice to a work like Hyphen.)

Besides, it could be worth a trip. DFW airport1 receives direct flights from nearly everywhere in North America, so it’s easy to get here. The Modern is situated among several other museums, notably the Kimbell Art Museum (designed by Louis Kahn and Renzo Piano) and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (designed by Philip Johnson), both of which are excellent and free. You can visit the Stockyards and drink in a saloon with honest-to-God cowboys. You can marvel at our highway interchanges, which are whimsical works of art in their own right.

Afterward, get barbecue at Goldee’s, ranked #3 on Texas Monthly’s list of the best barbecue places in Texas; or Panther City (top 50); or the brilliant, Michelin-recognized Tex-Ethiopian barbecue joint Smoke & Ash in Arlington.

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Greetings to all of you who did not unsubscribe after my last post, in which I confessed that I like opera and am learning French. Some sins are just unforgivable, I guess.

The first of two essays I wrote on art has just appeared in the new issue of America magazine. It’s the cover story:

Here’s something I say in it:

Art has long been used to show how a person should be. Certainly in the Christian tradition, visual depictions of Christ and the saints model virtues like piety, chastity and forbearance. The figure in Christian art—indeed, in all of Western art—whose attention matters most is Mary, the Mother of God. Marian art reveals attention to be much more than the intense focus of Vermeer’s lacemaker or a knowledge worker absorbed in a spreadsheet, Pomodoro timer ticking away nearby. Marian art shows that our attention encompasses a range of capacities. It even suggests that distractability is itself a form of attention, one that is essential to living a Christian life.

How could distractability possibly be a positive capability? And what does Mary have to do with it? Read the essay to find out.

The essay is adapted from the Theotokos lecture I gave at Marquette University last month. (“Theotokos” means “God-bearer” in Greek. It’s a title that has been attributed to Mary for 1,600 years.) It builds on ideas about art and attention I explored in a piece I wrote for Commonweal last year. I’m glad I could get a version of the talk in a Jesuit publication (since Marquette is a Jesuit university).

The talk was in a hall the students call the Harry Potter Room on account of its high, vaulted ceiling, paneled walls, and stained glass. I’ve never read Harry Potter, so I will have to assume that these are features of his world. There is an essay to be written about the influence of Harry Potter on university architecture in the U.S. in the past 20 years. (And its legacy now that teenagers don’t read these novels anymore.) There’s something to be said, too, about students’ attraction to the trappings of the traditional, humanistic university, even as their academic interests skew toward the technocratic. Where do students want their graduation photos taken? Typically in front of the most plausibly gothic or neoclassical building on campus. That says something about what they believe college ought to be about.

And the students I spoke with at Marquette were great. They were into theology! Amazing. They’re lucky to have a team of serious and innovative scholar-teachers in the theology department. And an equally innovative museum, the Haggerty Museum of Art, that designed exhibitions in conjunction with the department. The intro theology students were assigned to visit one object in the museum for 15 minutes every week of the semester and write about how their perceptions of it and of themselves changed over time. This was all connected to Ignatian spirituality. I thought it was cool.

In the lecture, I had more to say than I do in the essay about the attentional crisis and about how women have usually been presented in Western art as objects of attention rather than agents, and I had a whole thing about secularism and transcendence via a look at three images that employ Annunciation iconography in various ways. I don’t want to say more about that here, because I might want to publish these ideas elsewhere one day (for money).

You really had to be there.

This was my first trip to Wisconsin. I loved Milwaukee, which seemed like a bigger, more economically-developed version of Buffalo, the city of my birth. There was a Friday fish fry on every menu, as there ought to be. The two cities are like fraternal twins, living far apart but each sharing a common destiny to dwell lakeside and in the shadow of a much-bigger, sprawling city.

No one told me Marquette (the university, not the explorer-priest) brought over a 15th-century chapel from rural France, plunked it in the middle of campus, and dedicated it to St. Joan of Arc.1 Had I learned this more than an hour before I had to leave, I would have spent more time there. There may have been a grotto behind the chapel, too, but I was hurrying along with my rolly bag and missed it.

The second art essay, in the December issue of Commonweal, is a review of “Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting,” an exhibition currently at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. That piece will probably be published soon. If you’re still a subscriber by then, I’ll let you know when it’s up.

Here one more time is my America cover story on Marian art and attention. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

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The big thing I’m up to is working on my next book, Dear Student: Letters on Life and Learning in College. (Or Learning and Life, who knows, these things change.) There are no interesting updates to share about this work. It’s going well. It’s on schedule. It’s currently a wreck, but that’s completely fine at this stage. It won’t be a wreck in six months. I may nevertheless write a post on my “process,” because Substack loves nothing more than such.

This post is about what I’m into. If you knew me ten or five or even two years ago, you might be surprised to learn that what I’m into has changed quite a bit. I don’t know if everyone is like this — some people are into the same things, year in and year out, and we salute them for going deep. But I’ve noticed that other people I respect get into new stuff. It can feel like a betrayal at first. I liked them because they were into this one thing. But then they got into a new thing.

For example, I have thought often over the past few years about this essay by the art historian Jennifer Roberts about art and attention. I am so interested in what she had to say in 2013 that in 2024 or so I started following her on Instagram. And it turns out she isn’t into attention anymore. She’s into the moon.

Similarly, I have been into the work of Buffalo-based graphic artist Julian Montague for 20 years. But I was surprised to learn that people don’t follow him for the reasons I did: his stray shopping cart project, which permanently changed how I look at the world around me (i.e., I look for and then think about stray shopping carts). Montague had gotten into other stuff, and people loved it. When his shopping cart book was republished two years ago, it was partly because so many of his fans knew nothing about this important work.

Perhaps some of you started following me because of burnout, the subject of my 2022 book, The End of Burnout. (The hardcover for which is in at least its third printing.) Or, going further back — and God bless you if it’s the case — you followed me because I wrote about the need to conceal Christian identity in public life, the subject of my 2009 book, Secret Faith in the Public Square.

I still give talks about burnout (indeed, I spoke about it at three universities in the past couple months; hit me up if you’d like me to speak at yours), though I haven’t written much new stuff on it lately. I haven’t written or spoken about Christian identity in public life in quite a while (even though more recent events prove I was right). I doubt I will anytime soon, but who knows.

Anyway, here are some newish things I’m into.

Art

I have never taken an art history class. I do draw, which must count for something. The first artist I wrote about was the contemporary portraitist George W. Bush. Several years after that, in desperation for new ways to teach writing, I started taking my undergraduate students to the university’s (really excellent) art museum. The museum educators taught my students and me much about how to look at artworks. So I started looking at artworks differently, too. That led me to read more about art.

Then someone who writes well about art told me they like how I write about art. With that encouragement, I decided I would write about art more. I wrote what I think was a pretty good essay about art and attention last year. Then the good people at the quite excellent art museum at Marquette University invited me to give a talk about Marian art and attention. It was so much fun. That talk is going to be an essay, coming out very soon. And I have another essay coming soon about a major exhibition of contemporary painting.

I remain baffled by art, but it’s fun to be baffled. The bet I’m placing is that I can help others by writing through my bafflement.

French

In January, I enrolled in a French class with other adults whose brain plasticity is, like mine, at approximately the level of sheetrock. It’s been a blast. I’ve kept going to the class and now also listen to several French podcasts, read Le Monde, watch Instagram reels about the anti-Shein protests outside BHV Le Marais, that sort of thing (or genre de chose).

I did this because my wife and I found ourselves, for work reasons, in France in 2022 and Switzerland in 2023. On both of these trips, I leaned on the tiny bit of French I learned in college, but mostly I leaned on the excellent English skills of people in Paris and Geneva. I felt stupid and helpless. I realize that this is the experience of most Anglophones in French-speaking places. But, you see, I am committed to believing that I’m not like other guys.

Then we had work-related occasion to go back to Paris, and I decided, that’s it, I’m going to spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars to delay for up to ten seconds how quickly the cashier at Franprix switched to English on me. And it worked! Instead of switching to English immediately upon my opening my mouth, they switched after my second or third French sentence. This is progress.

Opera

I think the first opera I went to had Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg onstage in non-singing roles. (In a production that I just learned became the basis for an opera in its own right.)1

I went to a few more after we moved to Dallas, because we got free tickets. It seemed fine. Then I listened to Jessa Crispin’s podcast series on classical music, which convinced me to go to Elektra. It utterly blew me away. The next year, I got season tickets for the Dallas Opera.

I don’t listen to recordings of opera very often. I really just love the in-person experience, for which my wife and I have developed our rituals: what night to go, where to eat beforehand, where to park, etc.

I didn’t subscribe to the full Dallas Opera season this year, even though their focus is on French opera. Carmen is really long. The Little Prince is actually sung in English. And Don Carlos is even longer than Carmen and is also not in French. I do have tickets for Dialogues of the Carmelites. I feel a special connection to the composer, Francis Poulenc, becuase on both of our recent trips to Paris, we ate our first meal at an adorable restaurant below the place where he was born or possibly died. Or both.

Brags about former students

A few people who took my summer spiritual nonfiction writing class (via the Jesuit Media Lab) recently published essays that they worked on in the class:

• Anthony Russo, “Recommitting to the Sign of Peace in a World at War,” America, Sept. 19.

• Allison Bobzien, “The Golden Legend: Understanding St. Martha’s Bravery and Boldness,” Busted Halo, Oct. 15.

• Lisa Creamer, “Who Is My Neighbor?” Everyday Ignatian, Oct. 31. (The real question of this one is, can a snake in my garden be my neighbor, whom I must love?)

Anthony, Alli, and Lisa all came to the class with strong narrative and rhetorical skills. I hope the class helped focus these skills a little bit more, not just through my instruction but through the writing community we formed.

If you’re interested in taking a class like this, keep an eye on the Jesuit Media Lab site. They’re always doing something really good!

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I regularly read the Wall Street Journal opinion page but rarely agree with what I find there. Over the past few days, I have visited more frequently, looking, I think, for one of their writers to endorse a crackdown on “radical leftist” thought, so I can have the perverse satisfaction of knowing my political opponents are as vile as I imagine them to be.

But that article has not appeared.1 I don’t think I’ve seen an outright condemnation of the White House’s rhetoric on punishing protected speech, but I have seen this piece by the paper’s former editor-in-chief, Gerard Baker, which I thought gave eloquent voice to thoughts I have had often lately, about how the vast majority of citizens everywhere are the political hostages of a small number of online weirdos. Here’s Baker:

What hurts especially hard in the wake of such a terrible event [as the murder of Charlie Kirk] is the grifting quality to all this: the rapacious, unending hunt for clicks and likes and donations and descriptions kicks into a frenzy as a young man lies dying.

This reflects a paradox of our newly democratized digital media. The overwhelming majority of Americans are decent people, appalled by violence, eager to respond with a constructive determination to do what we can to root it out. But the discourse is led by a small minority of opportunistic ghouls (not to mention, I suspect, a significant number of foreign enemies, successfully promoting bitter division among Americans).

Even before Charlie Kirk was killed, seemingly by someone whose brain was profoundly corrupted by a nihilistic strain of online culture, I had been thinking a lot that nothing good has come from connecting the internet to politics. (It’s hardly an original thought.)

The attention economy has made it impossible for government to serve the common good. I mean, the doctor had barely signed Kirk’s death certificate before a Republican congressman proposed in the frothiest terms (on social media, of course) that anyone reveling in Kirk’s death … should have their social-media privileges permanently revoked.

The only person who could come up with such an inane proposal is someone who doesn’t want to legislate within material reality but who just wants to be a representative online. And I want to say, Great! You can have it! You can be governor of Twitter/X! And you, over there: You’re now the Grandee of BlueSky! Huzzah! Do whatever you want, just leave the rest of us out of it!

We are a country of (mostly) normal people who have been often forced over the past decade into choosing, as our representative in government, between two online weirdos. Not only does it not have to be this way, we — you and me, normal people (never mind the fact that I’m communicating to you via the internet) — we can make it otherwise through a very simple action.

We can just stop paying attention. We can just look away. We can boycott the worst actors in our attention economy — most of whom are not elected officials but rather figures who produce content on, about, and for social media. You are not obligated to know what anyone on “the Nazi app” or “the dork app” or whatever thinks about anything. You can let them shout into a void.

What I’m suggesting is not quite the same as cultivating your own garden, though I think it’s compatible. And it certainly isn’t pretending everything is fine and normal. Rather, it’s an attempt to dispel the power online weirdos have over us. Their power depends on our continuing to look. What if we just stopped?

This approach is complicated by the fact that the President and his closest allies and proxies are prolific posters. Don’t the citizens of a democracy have to pay attention to their Tweets, Xeets, and Truths?

I don’t know. Maybe not. The biggest online weirdos have only the online world to communicate. Public officials — even the ones who are extremely online — have many channels to reach us. What if, to get their messages out, they had to use media that don’t make them and their constituents insane? Might their messages even change?

We have the power of looking away. Maybe we can try to use it.

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