Editor's Letter

Autumn has much to recommend it, beginning with the departure of summer. The air improves, dinner parties seem like a good idea again, and we remember that other people can be rather pleasant company. You might even find yourself speaking to a neighbor without first consulting his yard signs.

We could use more of this. Americans have become accomplished at watching their portfolios and less attentive to the places where they once enjoyed one another’s company. Churches empty, neighborhood diners close, and the local dive bar gives way to another establishment serving $18 cocktails. The new place invariably has a mission statement. The old one had regulars.

Something goes missing in these transactions that never appears on a balance sheet. A town needs places where people know your name, tolerate your opinions, and notice when you haven’t shown up. We have spent decades treating such arrangements as expendable, then wondering why everyone seems so lonely.

As we assembled this issue, I was struck by how many of our contributors had found people doing something about it. Few would describe themselves as engaged in the restoration of civic life. They have cars to fix, steaks to cook, things to build. But they are giving people reasons to leave the house, which is a useful place to begin.

James Poulos explores the world of science fiction, whose devotees now find themselves living through developments that once required a considerable feat of imagination. With artificial intelligence advancing at its present clip, the future must be getting difficult to keep in the fiction section. Chris Bedford makes the case for steakhouse culture, takes us through some of its finest establishments, and explains how to cook the perfect steak. There are worse foundations for a friendship than an excellent dinner.

Our cover, photographed by the gifted Tara Faul, comes from a classic car meetup in Portland. People turn up to admire beautiful machinery, compare notes, and spend a few hours with others who understand the attraction. A shared love for an old automobile can get a conversation further than a shared opinion about the news.

In El Segundo, John Roberson reports on young men building the hard technologies of the future and the Christian faith underpinning their ambitions. Josh Centers, meanwhile, visits the perennially maligned redneck, who has been acquiring useful skills and looking after his neighbors while much of the country learned to outsource both activities. When something breaks, it helps to know someone whose first instinct is to reach for a tool.

For our state section, we travel to South Carolina, where food, architecture, and ghost stories bind the living to a remarkable past. There are also watches, lobster fishermen, American-made goods, Chesterton, Upper Michigan, and the spectacular photography of Barry Goldwater. Taken together, they offer ample evidence of a country still worth exploring, and of people doing the work that makes it so.

This fall, have the dinner party. Take the children to the pumpkin patch. Walk somewhere the phone reception is poor. Give the neighborhood place some business while it is still the neighborhood place. Football will survive your absence for an afternoon.

Community isn’t going to build itself. Someone has to put out a few chairs.