- On the virtues of franchises.
- ”More than 75% of young renters still think they someday will own a home, according to a survey by John Burns Research & Consulting,” reports WSJ in a story on Berkshire’s continued bet on home ownership in America.
- Here’s an enjoyable review of a book on the Psalms in medieval art and life, in LRB: “Groups of psalms were sung in the eight daily services, with the entire psalter being sung every week. The dominance of music in the practice of medieval Christianity can hardly be comprehended now. The image of David as a musician was taken in the medieval church as a command. The sheer amount of music that was composed for all of the many services was immense, and new music was regularly and lavishly introduced for major feast days, especially Christmas and Easter. Monks, nuns and clergy had a stream of music to learn and sing, in proliferating genres: hymns, sequences, antiphons, responsories and sung prayers based on devotional texts. Ecclesial life was so rich with sound in part because singing was intrinsic to learning to read: young children in monasteries, nunneries and cathedral schools were taught literacy through memorising the psalms, trained to utter complex thoughts and feelings through song.
“The initial ‘C’ illustrated in the Windmill Psalter marks the beginning of Psalm 97, ‘Cantate domino canticum novum’ (‘O sing unto the Lord a new song’), from which this book takes its title. The line also occurs in five other psalms and in Isaiah 42. Filling the initial with singing monks was a fitting emblem for the magnificent task of humbly praising God, in the smallest local church as well as in the mighty institutions of the Christian West.” - The rankings for results from PISA 2022 are here. Singapore led with an aggregate score of 1679. The U.S. scored 1468 (between Denmark and Sweden), Canada 1519, Mexico 1220. PISA 2025 will be released on September 8.
- Nvidia announced a “superchip” to make available “AI supercomputers in your house, running agents and assistants,” says Semafor.
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Tuesday review
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Remote work vs AI?
A new study argues that remote work is to blame for weak hiring of entry-level employees. John Burn-Murdoch in FT: “the rise of remote work has worsened the trade-off for hiring entry-level workers [who require more supervision and need to build skills, knowledge, and social capital in person], while leaving the calculus for senior hires unchanged.”
The abstract for the original study is this:
Is generative AI replacing junior workers? A growing literature answers yes, citing large declines in early-career hiring concentrated in GenAI-exposed occupations. We argue that this verdict is premature because GenAI exposure is strongly correlated with another post-pandemic shock, working from home (WFH). Using two data sources spanning 243 million new hires and 407 million online job postings, collected across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia during 2017-2025, we estimate difference-in-difference designs at the occupation, region, and firm level. When estimated separately, a two-standard-deviation increase in GenAI and WFH exposure each predicts, by 2025, a fall of around 5pp in the junior-share of new hires and around 3pp in the share of job ads requiring limited experience. Estimated jointly, the WFH effect remains, while the GenAI coefficient attenuates sharply and is often statistically indistinguishable from zero. Alternative exposure measures, residualization designs, flexible non-parametric co-treatment controls, and replacing exposure-measures with actual WFH adoption as the treatment all support our finding that WFH is a robust predictor of the decline in early-career hiring.
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Monday review
- “Those who ultimately fell into a midcareer slump averaged 30% wage growth in their first 10 years of work, compared with 71% for those who kept progressing… The good news is that obtaining a few strategic skills to shift into a more promising, adjacent field can significantly reduce the risk,” reports WSJ.
- Sanjana Friedman, City Journal: “In the debate over data-center construction, we are indeed deciding how much electricity to allocate or how much water to conserve. But we are also deciding whether the risks of progress outweigh the risks of stagnation, and whether we are still the sort of society willing to find out.”
- “The scene of the ransom of Hektor, originally configured in terms of archaic gift-exchange, increasingly [over the 6th and 5th centuries, especially 570-430] drew upon the form and symbols of imperial expression found in West Asia and then, finally, in classical Athens itself…”–based on Athenian vase paintings, argues Margaret C. Miller in Antike Kunst.
- JRR Tolkien drew extensively on his classical education and classical sources, which is finally being appreciated, says a recent review in Acta Classica. Note the Old Forest as an Ovidian landscape, Tom Bombadil as a Christianized Orphic figure, hospitality as xenia, Numenor like a Platonic Atlantis, reappropriating ancient models of idealized communities, etc.
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Sunday review
- JS Bach Cantata for Trinity Sunday, O heilges Geist- und Wasserbad, O sacred bath of water and the Spirit (BWV 165, Netherlands Bach Collegium); the final chorale, Sein Wort, sein Tauf, sein Nachtmahl: His word, his baptism, his supper / serve us against all misfortune / The Holy Spirit in faith teaches us to trust in these things.
- Yuval Levin of AEI responds to Magnifica Humanitas.
- Remedial education needed without the SAT.
- Shocking: “A separate Lumina-Gallup study found that more than half of students said their college discourages or prohibits AI use entirely, while another majority said at least some of their courses have no clear policy at all. The difference leaves students to absorb contradictory signals about a technology that is simultaneously reshaping their future job market and their present classroom.
‘Students are making decisions on their own, which may not always be the best decisions for them,’ Brown said. ‘Higher ed isn’t there to guide them.’” - The coming physical AI boom: “Venture-capital investment in global robotics and physical AI grew to $26 billion in 2025 from $4.2 billion in 2019, according to PitchBook data. This year, companies in those sectors have already raised more than $23 billion as of May 20.”
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Saturday review
- How France’s education system fell, via NR.
- Robert Doar fittingly praises Robert Woodson after Woodson’s death on May 19, 2026.
- Among those raised with no religion, 71% still have no religion, according to Ryan Burge.
- AI as a religion: “‘Practically speaking, it will achieve the outcomes that many religions claim their deities would be able to achieve,’ [David Nixon] said. This is an increasingly common belief among researchers in Silicon Valley. They insist they are on their way to building a more powerful species — or even a new God,” reports the NYT. “A.I. researchers are trying to build technologies that have jobs, feel joy and pain, and exhibit all sorts of qualities that match and even exceed the traits that make us human. He believes it could happen within the decade.”
- FT: “OpenAI’s foundation has said it will grant $250mn to promote research into AI’s impact on the economy and jobs, as the ChatGPT maker’s charitable arm aims to soften the impact of the powerful technology.”
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Friday review
- A pessimistic article on optimism, via Economist.
- Here’s a review of a recent book on the function argument in Aristotle’s ethics, which, because the book uses “inventive translations,” includes nice discussions of bios, teleios, physis, and others.
- “A record 29% of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated — the largest single religious cohort, surpassing Catholics (19%) and evangelical Protestants (23%), Pew Research Center reports,” via Axios.
- Robert Watson is the chief concierge at the Willard in Washington—here’s a fascinating profile.
- Chronic absenteeism or a performance review from students?
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Thursday review
- Americans watched 33 billion minutes of Star Wars on TV in 2025, with the leading film being the 1977 original.
- Adventures in cosmetic surgery: zombie fillers.
- Civics education is rebounding since its nadir a decade ago, argues Danielle Allen. And from her org this week.
- A relationship seems likely between rising R&D expenditures and declining cash reserves relative to total assets, says the Federal Reserve.
- This is one version of the future of public research universities.
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Wednesday review
- “The future of American philanthropy isn’t the central drama of the A.I. age, but it isn’t a sideshow, either. As Nan Ransohoff wrote this week on Substack, A.I. wealth could soon add as much as $100 billion to American charitable giving every year. She describes this as a potential “third wave” of philanthropy, after the now-distant Carnegie and Rockefeller era and the recent Bill Gates and Warren Buffett wave. And she expects it to be focused on the “A.I. transition” and what lies beyond, especially questions of “flourishing, meaning and what makes a life good” in the shadow of increasingly capable machines,” writes Ross Douthat.
- “China is speeding towards a future in which AI chooses, purchases and delivers many of the goods and services people consume, upending its digital economy in the process,” via Economist.
- The blazer’s definition has expanded and so has its popularity.
- From Brandon Vaidyanathan on a new Gallup survey on beauty funded by a JTF grant: “The second is that 89% of Americans find beauty in relationships and in moral/virtuous behavior of others.”
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Tuesday review
- From Grant’s Almost Daily: “Meme stocks are so 2021: Retail investors have found a “shiny new toy” in the form of prediction markets, analysts at Barclays wrote last week, as notional trading volumes across Kalshi and Polymarket topped $24 billion last month according to Dune Analytics, compared to less than $5 billion in April 2025.”
- The Economist: “Many of America’s advantages are hard to emulate. The country’s continental scale, single language, natural-resource wealth and the fiscal space that comes from issuing the world’s safe asset give it a unique economic advantage over Europe. America’s federalism is helpful, too. Misguided policies at the state level—like data-centre moratoriums or proposed wealth taxes—do not encumber the whole country. People and businesses can move to a different state.”
- And again: “SpaceX is an imperfect company and Mr Musk an imperfect man. The marvel of capitalism is that it can harness their talents to create something extraordinary. While his investors take the risk, the rest of humanity can strap in for the ride.”
- AI’s effect on McKinsey’s pricing, via FT: “Billable hours, subscriptions and flat fees will always be part of the equation. But the proportion of outcome-based pricing will undoubtedly expand — and that goes down as a definite tick in the column under the benefits wrought by AI.”
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Monday review: Memorial Day 🇺🇸
- On Hadrian’s Adventus coin, in JJS: “While most probably for the Romans the coin had no special anti-Jewish meaning but only the celebration of a new Roman colony, for the Jews the transformation of Jerusalem into a Roman colony dedicated to Roman and Greek deities was perceived as a religious and national tragedy.”
- Reflections in Compact on young religious converts tending toward anti-institutionalism: “Rather than functioning as bubbles of piety or ideological echo chambers, religious communities and institutions ought to strive to become spaces where people can learn to, as the Italian theologian Luigi Giussani put it, ‘live the real intensely.’”
- After John Gray’s recent rejection of MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Unherd offers a reconsideration.
- ”Amy Wallace has spent two decades guarding the human her brother was—against a world that prefers David Foster Wallace as a puzzle.”
- Chinese AI is cheaper, more adaptable, and almost as proficient—how?
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Constantine’s law on Sunday rest
The Justinianic Code attributes a law that “the people of the city” and “those employed in all trades” rest on Sundays.
A constitution preserved in Justinian’s Code (CJ 3.12.2) attributes to the emperor Constantine the introduction of a general Sunday rest in the Roman Empire. In modern historiography, this famous constitution has long been considered a crucial step in the Christianization of the Roman calendar in Late Antiquity. However, this modern consensus contrasts with the silence of ancient sources regarding the promulgation and reception of the law. Moreover, contextualizing this rule within the fourth-century legislative and religious documentation pertaining to Sunday observance proves extremely problematic. Through an analysis of the text and its transmission in the ancient law codes, this paper challenges the traditional interpretation of the document, demonstrating that the introduction of a general Sunday rest cannot be attributed to the first Christian emperor and that the content of CJ 3.12.2 does not reflect the legal situation of the fourth century.
The full paper by Andrea Bernier in JLA is here.
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Sunday review
- JS Bach cantata for Pentecost, O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe, O eternal fire, O source of love (BWV 34, Leipzig, 1 June 1727); German-English interlinear; Netherlands Bach Collegium. Opening chorus: O eternal fire, o source of love,
enkindle our hearts and coonsecrate them. / Make heavenly flames penetrate and flow through us, / We wish, o most high Lord, to be your temple, / Ah, make our souls pleasing to you in faith. - One in seven dating, engaged, and married young adults using AI chatbots that simulate a committed romantic partnership: “Using an AI romantic companion on a regular basis was associated with significantly less likelihood of being in a stable relationship and lowered this likelihood by 46 percent,” according to a new study from IFS.
- JPS published a brief flourishing scale by Burns and Crisp; helpful literature review.
- On the professionalization of scholarship in Roman province of Achaia, via JLA: “[S]cholars from Achaia were disproportionately not exceptional individuals but rather members of scholarly families for whom education was a trade, and that peace paradoxically brought with it the decline of these local families as teachers from throughout the eastern Mediterranean increasingly settled in Athens.”
- Josephus’ audience, again: “Josephus implies in Antiquities 1.6 that the laws of Moses lead to the practice of virtues for the Jews, most of all the proper worship of God (eusebeia). In Antiquities 1.14, however, Josephus highlights the benefits of a way of life in line with the Jewish laws and he states that the observance of these laws brings happiness to all. This passage seems to concern a wider audience, Jews as well as non-Jews. Indeed, God’s watchful care (pronoia) over all humans, Jews and non-Jews alike, is an important and consistent theme in Josephus’ narrative and a pivotal point in the moral lessons taught in the Antiquities.” That’s Van Henten in JJS.
- JS Bach cantata for Pentecost, O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe, O eternal fire, O source of love (BWV 34, Leipzig, 1 June 1727); German-English interlinear; Netherlands Bach Collegium. Opening chorus: O eternal fire, o source of love,
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Saturday review
- Several good points in Ross Douthat’s interview with Jennifer Frey.
- The history of Memorial Day, via WSJ.
- ”Standard GDP accounting glosses over several channels through which the tech capital spending boom is affecting the economy: equity wealth supporting consumption and equity-driven tax windfalls supporting state government budgets. Put differently, if all the AI capex boom were doing is adding half a percentage point to quarterly GDP growth, one might expect little blowback to the rest of the economy when the cycle slows,” according to Bloomberg.
- We appreciated attending the final chapel service for the class of 2026 at LPS.
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Friday review
- NYRB review of the latest sociobiology tome begins like this: “It turns out that if you begin an assertion with “it turns out” and sprinkle it with statistics and acronyms—especially if it’s expressed in the passive voice and followed by a footnote—up to 83 percent of the variation in whether people buy it is explained by their SCI (science credulity index) and 78 percent by their BDS (baloney detection score).”
- Harvard’s faculty approved (70%) a proposal to limit the number of A’s given in undergraduate classes to 20%. A- has no limits.
- The Economist reports on homeschooling’s popularity.
- Jim Houston died several weeks ago. Going back through some of the recordings I’ve listened to since I left Regent in 2000, here is one of his lectures on CS Lewis, whom he knew in Oxford in the 1950s.
- The academic journal article: a living document enabled by AI.
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Thursday review
- Matthew Continetti: DEI isn’t dead; the response to Jonathan Haidt is exhibit A.
- Data centers by any other name: “The term data centre was not used in Monday’s deal announcement, instead referred to euphemistically as ‘large-load opportunities,’” says FT of the Dominion-NextEra deal.
- “Young workers primarily rely on internal learning, as it is relatively cheap and the probability of encountering coworkers with higher human capital is high. However,
as workers age and climb the human capital ladder, the availability of coworkers with higher human capital decreases, prompting a shift toward external learning, since trainers have higher average human capital than production workers. Eventually, as workers continue to age, the opportunity cost of learning increases, and the benefits decline due to a shorter remaining work horizon, resulting in a reduction in external learning.” That’s from Ma, Nakab, and Vidart, NBER.