Each year, for the Saturday closest to New Year’s Day, I share some of the ideas I’m looking to further develop and write about in the coming year. I have a pretty good track record of following through, I think—you can check for yourself with the previous two iterations of this list in the “Related Reading”—and while I obviously have lots of ideas throughout the year, I like to give you a preview of what I’m thinking about, and also help focus my own mind.

So here we are, the third New Year’s list I’d like to work on, for 2024. And as we kids used to say to each other at 11:59pm on New Year’s Eve, see you next year!

Visit another non-Lancaster Amish community

Last spring, I visited and drove around Charlotte Hall, Maryland, in St. Mary’s County. It was one of the most enjoyable trips I did/pieces I wrote in 2023. The area is home to a sizeable Amish population which is much less tourist-ified than Pennsylvania Amish Country. In fact, there’s almost no tourism, and the Amish businesses you’ll find are just there, unselfconsciously, largely serving locals and other Amish.

There are some other Amish communities in Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware, and I’d like to see them. The Amish, of course, are tight-knit and communitarian, and also famous for their small-scale commerce.

In a lot of ways, Amish life resembles the kind of life urbanists want to see in cities. In some ways it escaped the break in continuity that the rest of us felt in the 20th century. The communitarian element, the richness, the sense of place in these communities—we want more of that. Yet for the Amish, this is taking place more in a working, live countryside than an urban environment. I find this really interesting...