Based on Kate Ward’s Making a Life: Catholic Social Teaching and the Meaning of Work (Bloomsbury, 2026). Using the See-Judge-Act Method Most of us inherited a definition of work we never actually chose. It arrived through job postings, performance reviews, LinkedIn feeds, and the quiet dread of the Sunday-night inbox. It tells us that work... Continue Reading →

Victor Gruen never meant to invent the shopping mall as we know it. That’s the part of his story people tend to skip, and it’s the key to his story. The Austrian-born architect who designed Southdale Center — the first fully enclosed mall in America, opened in Edina, Minnesota, in 1956 — and over 40... Continue Reading →

Green Junction The vast majority (92%) of professional football players prefer natural grass to artificial turf. This summer in the United States, 11 National Football League (NFL) stadiums have hosted the World Cup soccer games. In eight of the stadiums, artificial turf was replaced with natural grass, since this is a requirement of the Federation... Continue Reading →

A few months ago, I watched a friend ask an AI chatbot whether she should leave her job. It gave her a tidy pros-and-cons list. It was helpful, in a way. But it couldn’t tell her anything about who she wanted to become — and that’s not a glitch to be fixed in the next model update.... Continue Reading →

There is a temptation, when we study history, to place ourselves safely on the correct side of it. We read about slavery and think: I would never have done that. I would have known better. But history does not offer us that comfort so easily. The dynamics that shaped American slavery — the way technology concentrated wealth... Continue Reading →