Alabama’s CHOOSE Act is already drawing heavy interest from families seeking help with private-school tuition, homeschooling, and other education costs, and lawmakers are now moving toward a much larger expansion of the voucher program.
March 17, 2026
Alabama spending at least $250 million toward universal school choice. What do parents need to know?
What do books do to a man? In this conversation, Shilo Brooks and Brian Williams discuss reading, ambition, teaching, and the making of a life. Brooks reflects on growing up in West Texas, discovering the great books almost by accident, and learning to read not merely for school or profession, but for wisdom, courage, and the ordering of desire. Together they consider why men stop reading, what is lost when they do, and why the best books are not simply objects of study or instruments of advancement, but companions in the long work of formation. They do more than convey information. They enlarge the soul, sharpen judgment, deepen wonder, and usher us into a richer and more serious way of being in the world. Along the way, Brooks discusses the teachers who first put serious books in his hands and the books that shaped him, from Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise to Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus. The conversation ranges from landscape and longing to teaching and apprenticeship, and from the allure of ambition to the discipline of moderating it through wisdom. This is a conversation about books as guides for life, about the formation of men, and about the kind of education that moves from the classroom to the soul.
In this episode of Forged, Chris Hall reflects on the formative power of the “common arts”—the ordinary skills and embodied practices that introduce us to the givenness of the world and manifest our humanity. Drawing on stories from the classroom and the farm, Hall argues that formation and education flourish when intellectual study is joined to hands-on craft, inviting students into apprenticeship, real responsibility, and attentiveness to the natural world. He also addresses the cultural divide between academic learning and vocational skill, urging a recovery of an older vision in which the liberal arts, practical arts, and fine arts enrich one another for the sake of a fully embodied, fully aware human life of discipline, delight, craft, and calling.
In this episode of Composed, Emily Maeda describes the living patterns in her life passed down from her own mother that have helped her in raising her children, starting a school, and designing gardens for now and for posterity.
