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Dec 1, 2024 | 
plough.com | Peter Mommsen
In 1851, Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the kindergarten, weighed up fleeing his homeland for America. That August, the Prussian government had banned as seditious the network of kindergartens he had started eleven years earlier.
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Sep 15, 2024 | 
plough.com | Peter Mommsen
“Freedom!” was what Hans Scholl and two fellow students painted on walls around Munich during the night of February 3, 1943. The three friends, all in their twenties, were members of the anti-Nazi movement known as the Weiße Rose or White Rose. They painted the word freehand, three feet high, using tar-based black paint that would be tough to scrub away. For their other slogans – “Down with Hitler” and “Hitler the Mass Murderer” – they used stencils.
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Jun 3, 2024 | 
plough.com | Peter Mommsen
After four years as Plough’s poetry editor, A. M. Juster has let us know that with this issue he is concluding his service in that role. As his fellow editors, we’re immensely grateful for the lasting mark Juster has left on Plough’s poetry program, and wish him the best for his many other endeavors. His successor will be announced in the coming months. A poet, translator, and essayist, Juster established Plough’s Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award in 2021.
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Jun 2, 2024 | 
plough.com | Peter Mommsen
When I took my son and a bunch of his cousins swimming at the lake one afternoon last summer, I didn’t plan to lose a piece of someone’s pancreas. The boys were practicing flips off the dock. After an hour, their daring grew to the point that I called time. As they straggled onto the beach, I noticed that my nephew, whom I’ll call Tristan, was missing his smartphone, which he’d stuffed into a waterproof case.
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May 21, 2024 | 
plough.com | James Rebanks |Helen Rebanks |Peter Mommsen |Susannah Black Roberts
James and Helen Rebanks talk about raising sheep and cattle in the Lake District. James describes the landscape where their families have lived for six hundred years, and how they have begun practicing regenerative agriculture as a way of restoring the land that recent conventional agriculture had damaged. He gives details about the sheep and cattle herds and the grazing systems they’ve established.
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Mar 5, 2024 | 
plough.com | Ross Douthat |Peter Mommsen |Susannah Black Roberts
Ross Douthat discusses why what is natural is not a guide to what is good. The idea that the natural world is to be worshiped can take many forms. Douthat and Peter Mommsen and Susannah Black Roberts discuss these forms, ranging from Wordsworthian spiritual experiences in a national park, to worshiping ancestral or local gods, to civic religions of left and right, to tarot card reading, to affirming the Darwinian struggle for existence as a source of moral guidance.
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Feb 25, 2024 | 
plough.com | Peter Mommsen
The day I butchered my first lamb was one of those hot but brilliant September Sundays. My friend Achim had come from the next village over – our family was then living in rural Thuringia – to supervise and coach. A former East German police officer, Achim had his own flock and decades of experience, as well as the required bolt gun. We were living on the meager income from a start-up landscaping business at the time, and there was never enough protein in the house.
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Dec 28, 2023 | 
plough.com | Peter Mommsen
One of Plough’s 2023 highlights was a weekend conference we hosted for writers in July. The time spent together reminded us that the small magazine crowd is a community of communities, of diverse interests, concerns, and styles but often with common goals. In that spirit, we’ve picked some noteworthy writing that appeared in other small magazines in 2023.
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Dec 4, 2023 | 
plough.com | Peter Mommsen
Do farmers have a right to repair their own tractors? The American Farm Bureau Federation thinks so. That’s why this year it reached an agreement with John Deere in which the manufacturer promised to enable farmers, as well as third-party mechanics, to fix their own green-and-yellow machinery, for example by providing service manuals and diagnostic tools that earlier only licensed shops could access.
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Nov 7, 2023 | 
plough.com | Sohrab Ahmari |Peter Mommsen |Susannah Black Roberts
The hosts speak with Sohrab Ahmari about how private power crushed American liberty. Sohrab’s new book, Tyranny, Inc., is a thoroughly reported look at the way that private economic power, especially the conditions of employment, has taken away workers’ abilities to have agency over their own lives. How did we get here, and what can we do about it?
