culture
The Society We Practice Every Day
Culture isn't just arts and entertainment. It's also the way a society discovers who it is becoming.
FloydFest 2013, Image by RuralUrbanNatural. Read more*
I’ve been thinking a lot about culture lately—not the arts, exactly, but the invisible patterns that shape how we live together.
The word gets used so many different ways that we can lose sight of culture’s deepest power: its ability to shape what feels normal, possible, and true. Culture isn’t just museums, music, theater, or literature. It isn’t something a society possesses. It’s something a society practices.
Every day we teach one another what is normal. We do it through the stories we tell, the language we choose, the meetings we organize, the neighborhoods we build, the traditions we keep, and the countless small decisions that communicate, “This is how we do things around here.” Over time those choices accumulate until they become common sense.
That’s why I’m starting to think of culture as one of the most practical forces in public life. Long before a new idea becomes law or policy, it usually begins somewhere much smaller. Someone writes a novel. A musician gives voice to a feeling people didn’t know they shared. A teacher experiments with a different way of learning. An entrepreneur builds a company around a new set of assumptions. A neighborhood discovers a better way to solve an old problem.In other words, societies rehearse the future before they build it.
That feels especially true in America. We’ve never been held together by a single ethnicity, language, monarchy, or ancient tradition. From the beginning, we’ve been asking what it means to become we. The answer has never been fixed. Every generation inherits that conversation and adds something of its own.
I suspect that’s why I’m drawn to people who are making culture rather than merely commenting on it. Artists, certainly. But also teachers, librarians, business leaders, community organizers, architects, parents, and neighbors. Anyone who is helping people imagine—and practice—a more generous way of living together.
That’s also what I’m hoping Love & Work can become. Not simply a collection of interesting ideas, but a place where we learn to notice the people, practices, and experiments already pointing toward a more hopeful future. Every week, we borrow a little of their vision so we can see our own lives—and our shared future—with fresh eyes.
culture, shared imagination
Where a society discovers itself
Art, literature, music, theater, and museums are not luxuries, says Isaac Butler. They are how a democracy discovers who it is and what it values. In The Perfect Moment, Butler traces America’s modern culture wars to show that creating a shared culture is itself an act of citizenship.
BOOK: Musicking
culture, creativity
Exchange creates prosperity. Gifts create culture.
Most economies run on exchange. We buy, sell, negotiate, and trade. The transaction is complete when both parties walk away with something of equal value. Lewis Hyde reminds us that culture works differently.
BOOK: The Gift
culture, human flourishing
Culture begins in attention
John Dewey refused to separate art from ordinary life.In Art as Experience, the philosopher and educator argues that art isn’t something confined to museums, concert halls, or galleries. It begins much earlier—with the human capacity to notice, to feel, to make meaning, and to find patterns in experience.
BOOK: Art as Experience
culture, music
Music isn't a thing. It's something people do together.
Christopher Small asks us to see music not as an object but as something people do together. He calls it musicking: the shared activity of performers, listeners, and everyone involved, through which human beings practice belonging.
Book: Musicking
culture, place
Culture doesn't float above a place. It grows from one.
In “The Work of Local Culture,” Wendell Berry reminds us that culture grows from place. Over generations, communities learn what the land supports, what endures, and how neighbors depend on one another. That accumulated knowledge becomes culture.
BOOK: What Are People For?
culture, collective hope
Hope is a discipline.
Every society lives by stories about the future. When those stories fail, hope becomes a cultural resource. In Commanding Hope, Thomas Homer-Dixon distinguishes hope from optimism: optimism expects things to work out; hope chooses to act even when we cannot know how the story ends.
BOOK: Commanding Hope
One liners
ARTICLE: In Philadelphia, residents of Germantown are turning their own poems about grief, gun violence, and loss into public art displayed throughout the neighborhood.
ARTICLE: On a street in South London, neighbors opened their homes, gardens, and even a car to artists, turning the entire block into a gallery—and discovering they knew one another better when it was over.
ARTICLE: In Portland, Oregon, the Latinx Choral Project is using community singing to preserve the musical traditions and stories of Latin America while building connections across generations.
ARTICLE: In California, public arts funding is explicitly being used to give more people the opportunity not merely to encounter culture, but to create, participate, and flourish through it.
ARTICLE: In the Catawba Indian Nation, a young cultural knowledge keeper is restoring rivercane basketry by restoring the rivercane itself—reviving culture, craft, and ecology as one practice.
*About the image
Festival-goer at FloydFest, Check, Virginia (2013).
On July 22-26, 2026, FloydFest celebrated more than two decades of music in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, where Appalachian traditions meet influences from around the world. On any given day, a traditional bluegrass band might be followed by a Malian guitarist, a New Orleans brass ensemble, an indie folk songwriter, or a psychedelic string band. It’s all part of the same conversation.
The festival is equally known for its culture. One longtime tradition is that an empty chair isn’t really empty. If someone leaves to get food or catch another performance, anyone is welcome to sit there until they return. Then you simply thank them and give the chair back. It’s a small gesture, repeated thousands of times over the years. Less about the chair than about the kind of community people are practicing together.
"Progress is people flourishing."
-Ted Gioia
Peace
'Americans have voted for a politics of fear, anger, and hatred, and those of us who oppose this politics are now trying to figure out how we can oppose it usefully.'
In November, 2016, Ursula Le Guin wrote a blog post in response to the election of Donald Trump as president.
ARTICLE: The Election, Lao Tzu, a Cup of Water
Community
If we think of lonely people as a public health crisis then their disease is now twice as prevalent as cancer and growing rapidly.
We have survived for so long because the environmental devastation we are experiencing today is an exception, not a human norm.
BOOK EXCERPT: Connection Is Our Lost Superpower
Cultural Awareness
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.”
This month Macmillan published a new collection of the writings of David Graeber, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World .
ESSAY: ‘It Does Not Have to Be This Way’: The Radical Optimism of David Graeber
Interdependence
'Gratitude, because it’s so easy.'
"...Gratitude. Such a lovely word. Humble and warm. Humble, because it’s not a word you use if you think you did everything yourself. Humble, because no matter how hard you did work at whatever it is you’re grateful for, you know—and more importantly, acknowledge—there was some luck involved."
ESSAY: The Gratitude Essay
Interdependence
“What can I give in return for the gifts of the Earth?”
We are showered every day with the gifts of the Earth, gifts we have neither earned nor paid for: air to breathe, nurturing rain, black soil, berries and honeybees, the tree that became this page, a bag of rice, and the exuberance of a field of goldenrod and asters at full bloom.
ESSAY: Returning the Gift
Creativity
'We all live the same problems and now the world is in the highest peak of interconnectedness.'
This is an inspiring film that represents many voices: "How can we create a society in which creativity is inevitable and becomes really the force through which we build our collective future? The question that we need to ask ourself is really, can creativity change the world?"
VIDEO: Creativity is Essential. Here’s How It Can Catalyze Social Justice
Feminism
'Women have always been writing and advocating against patriarchy and misogyny.'
As to why Americans would vote for a convicted felon and rapist who said during his campaign that he would be a “dictator” on his first day in office, I agree with Heather Cox Richardson.
NEWSLETTER POST: Obscure Book Lovers Rejoice
