pomo update 11.0

Boycotting Amazon, Crabgrass Catholicism, & the VIP dinner

Events, announcements, and other business:

• Get your tix for ‘Should Women Be Working?’ next Saturday @ KGB feat. Katherine Dee Audrey Pollnow Bridget Ruffing and Emilia Tanu Chornay. Annual/Monthly subscribers get half off and Founding members get in free! (DM for the discount codes)

  

• SAVE THE DATES:

  • An Interintellect salon feat. João Ruy Faustino on Life in the Global Village: Marshall McLuhan, Silicon Valley, and the Future of Globalization. Get tix here. Monthly/Founding subscribers can DM for discount code. (2/11)

  • A panel discussion on the meaning of home in the Jewish and Islamic traditions at the New York Encounter (2/14)

  • A discussion with Eve Tushnet on Pasolini, Catholicism, & masculine identity (2/19)

  • Mondragon, Leo XIII, & the promise of workers’ co-ops at the Catholic Worker (2/20)

• Check out our latest reel feat. Cory Doctorow on whether we should boycott Amazon (also available on TikTok)

Crowdsourcing: We need your help!

What’s your favorite spot in NYC that only locals would know? DM us the name and location of your fav spot, and 2-3 sentences explaining why it’s so great. You might be featured in the zine vol. 4!

Latest pod eps

Fr. Stephen Koeth joins the pod to discuss his book Crabgrass Catholicism, the suburbanization of American Catholicism, urban ethnic politics, and assimilation. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

Pomo people elsewhere

• Stephen reviewed Shadi Hamid’s new book in The Metropolitan Review

  As much as I tried to deny it, the book pricked my conscience: could it be that my convictions are a mere cope for my bourgeois ennui, or worse a projection of my moral immaturity? Perhaps I’m right that America’s problems are feature and not bug, and that it is indeed all going to shit. Either way, Hamid’s book is a provocation to both champions of the American project and declinists to enter into an intelligent, nuanced, and heartfelt debate about our nation’s future. What follows is my personal attempt to grapple with the nagging questions Hamid’s book gave rise to in my own conscience, which I hope might further spark such debates.

• Evelyn Quartz on Zohran’s inauguration

  The logic of the internet has colonized physical space. Even when bodies gather in the same room, the form of politics remains shaped by online conditions. As with online, you can enter and leave these spaces without any major commitment or forgoing the comforts of anonymity.

• Nikos Mohammadi in UnHerd on how Looksmaxxing is the new trans

From the archive

Back in 2022, we had the great Pater Edmund OCist on the pod to discuss integralism, among other things. Two years later, we republished an excerpt from a fascinating essay written by his grandfather, Philip Burnham.

Pater Edmund says that his grandfather “was a truly radical Catholic. He wanted to draw from the deepest roots of the Catholic tradition, and he wanted to oppose the injustices of the world at their very roots.” Because of this, it was difficult for him to be “classified as ‘right’ or ‘left.’ He was opposed both to false understandings of freedom and equality that he saw on the left and to Hobbesian power politics that he saw on the right—as well exploitative and dehumanizing features of industrial/managerial society on both sides.”

In days like these when the Catholic Church in the US is dominated by the winds of the hysteria cycle, we need figures like Burnham who are reminders that the essence of the Church’s spiritual and social vision transcends the polemical categories that have been manufactured for us by ungodly elites. Read the excerpt (plus Pater Edmund’s lovely intro) here.

Scene from the 2026 VIP Dinner