Aretai

Category: Review

  • Wednesday review

    by

    Ryan Olson

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    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    1. The first American restaurant was Delmonico’s in NYC, 1837, discovered on the way to the best “free” bread in America (in Las Vegas but Red Lobster and Cheesecake Factory make appearances).
    2. Brooks Koepka, winner of 5 majors: “I understand that there’s prices to pay for coming back [to the PGA Tour], and I’m willing to accept those and whatever I have to do. … The answer to everything is play better,” he said, “and you’re in.”
    3. “Increasing levels of literacy [in archaic Greece], especially among craftsmen, no doubt account to some extent for the growth of interest in combining inscriptions with figures [from 650-450 BCE]. This is an argument, then, for the novelty of writing exerting a certain charm and inspiring its integration with images. … Inscriptions were drawn into the world of pictorial narration while inviting viewers to speak and tell the depicted myths themselves; they played into the culture of oral storytelling in which they were embedded. … Another vital factor…was Greek interaction with Egyptian material culture. The intimacy between figural representation and hieroglyphic writing is one of the most salient and abiding features of ancient Egyptian art. By the mid-5th century BCE, a new mode of visual representation had emerged in Greek art––characterized by the techniques of contrapposto, perspective, foreshortening, and anatomical verisimilitude––which was geared for a kind of pictorial illusionism largely incompatible with the ways that Archaic artists had integrated writing with figural images,” argues Hugo Shakeshaft in Hesperia.
    4. With nearly 2x $30M households (190k+), major gifts fundraising is changing, says Chronicle of Philanthropy: “The archetype of the road warrior who charms donors and single-handedly lands big gifts is still a fixture. But it’s giving way as more gift officers work within a sophisticated infrastructure that includes data analysts, communications professionals, and top leaders. Success is a byproduct of that system’s effectiveness, not a single fundraiser’s charm offensive.” Even titles are morphing toward guidance and advice.
    5. Suicide is back in the top 10 causes of death, reports Pew.

  • Tuesday review

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    Ryan Olson

    in

    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    1. Ross Douthat interviews Ray Dalio: more interesting at 26:00.
    2. Isaiah 32:15-17: “…until the Spirit is poured out on us from on high,
      and the wilderness becomes a fertile field,
      and the fertile field seems like a forest.
      Then justice [מִשְׁפָּ֑ט] will dwell in the wilderness,
      and righteousness [צְדָקָ֖ה] will live in the fertile field.
      The result of righteousness will be peace,
      and righteousness will bring lasting tranquility and security (trust, confidence) [וָבֶ֖טַח עַד־עוֹלָֽם].” (Hebrew here).
    3. The Atlantic: the appeal of John Mark Comer?
    4. Xi’s current economic mess: trillions-destroying property bust, low consumer confidence, bleak job market.
    5. Wichita “maintains a smaller-town feel. The cost of utilities, food and transportation is lower than in the rest of the U.S. And locals like to say that everything is a 15-minute drive to everywhere else, from downtown to acres of farm land.” And nursing will be important for economic mobility there and elsewhere.

  • Monday review

    by

    Ryan Olson

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    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    1. Expensive urban parenting: “Cities across America are losing children fast. Across Chicago, between 2010 and 2024, according to census-bureau data, the total population aged under 18 declined by 22%. In Los Angeles the figure was 23% and in New York, 12%. And yet in the country’s richest, densest cities, there is one group noticeably defying the trend: wealthier white families. In Chicago the population of non-Hispanic white children grew by 6% from 2010 to 2024, faster than the white population grew overall. In Washington, DC, it rose by a truly remarkable 62%. Their parents are professionals who grew up in boring suburbs and do not want their kids to.”
    2. One out of 8 Americans is taking a GLP-1.
    3. Thirty percent of Americans consult horoscopes, tarot cards, and fortune tellers: “Absolute belief is beside the point for many, who use it as entertainment or escapism. Others tap in for a sense of structure around certain tasks, like buying real estate or planning vacations.”
    4. Physical AI is the next horizon.
    5. “The danger of living funerals is that they cement and perpetuate the performative aspect of the good life, the notion that to be a good person we must undertake publicly acceptable deeds, that we can be judged on appearances and signals.”

  • Sunday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    1. JS Bach cantata for Easter 5 (Rogate): Wahrlich, wahrlich, ich sage euch, Truly, truly, I say to you (BWV 86); English interlinear. The bass arioso: Wahrlich, wahrlich, ich sage euch, / so ihr den Vater etwas bitten werdet in meinem Namen, / so wird er’s euch geben | Truly, truly, I say to you, / whatever you ask the Father in my name /
      will be given to you       (John 16:23). The chorale ends: He knows well what is best / and uses no cunning deceit with us; / therefore we should trust him. This was the cantata for the Sunday after I returned from Germany last year. I will always treasure memories from the trip, especially Leipzig and Dresden.
    2. Harvard’s curriculum biased by “administrative social engineering”? An analysis from 1999-2025 by Harvard Salient.

  • Saturday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    • “Frictionmaxxing” tries to avoid cognitive laziness from AI (30% of workers), but employees are more ready to use agents than employers, via FT.
    • “As disciples of Jesus, we must not live as if we are autonomous individuals with infinite options. We must allow others to lay claims on us, to limit us even. To go deep with God always involves going deep with others, being rooted in a place, a community, a tradition, a church,” writes Tish Warren in her new book, excerpted in Common Good.
    • Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute: “…producing wealthy, successful grads can end up being a bad thing if they’re ignorant, morally adrift, and easily manipulated by bad actors—human and machine alike—in the attention economy.” Via EdNext.
    • David Brooks’s latest: “What we should take from the traditionalists is the idea that restoring our society’s connection to its humanistic legacy and long-standing sources of meaning can actually better help us realize the promises of progress.” He covers Spengler, Guénon, Kingsnorth, Lasch, Reno. His historical narrative acknowledges that “there’s never been a tranquil resting spot, and there never will be.”
    • Anthropic could grow 80x this year, via NYT. Amodei: “I’m hoping for some more normal numbers.”

  • Friday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    • Six million messages in a bottle have been cast into the sea since the 1950s: Lauren Collins.
    • “Professors should also stop treating the humanities as something confined to the campus. The humanities flourish in every public library, publishing firm, playhouse, concert hall, art gallery, museum, book group poetry reading, and magazine rack,” writes Eric Jager for Compact.
    • “The main thing I try to help people with is to trust that they can read less more, and to have a repertoire of questions handy as they’re reading. Focus on the how question more than the what question… — and noticing how how leads to why,” says Marilyn McEntyre to Aaron Cline Hanbury at Common Good.
    • The promise of social prescribing, according to Sean Geraghty and Mike Goldstein of the Center for Teen Flourishing, via EdNext. As of 2025, the evidence base is improving.
    • Phone bans at work: mixed results, via FT.

  • Thursday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    • Richard Dawkins: are Claudia and Claudius conscious?
    • Zotero keeps improving. I’ve used it for at least 22 years.
    • Why do airlines always go bankrupt? “[W]hichever side of the integer you land on—one firm too many, one firm too few—there is some coalition of firms and customers that can profitably reorganize the market against the existing arrangement. In the language of cooperative game theory, the allocation is always vulnerable to defection by some coalition. The core is empty.” It’s cooperative game theory, says David Oks.
    • OECD TALIS 2024: “On average, teachers in the United States spend 73% of class time on teaching and learning. With a one-standard deviation increase in [general pedagogical knowledge], the share of class time spent on teaching and learning increases by 3 percentage-points on average.”
    • “The best time for us is when everybody’s looking at their feet and saying, ‘Woe is me, the world’s coming to an end,’” says Henry Kravis as KKR turns 50.

  • Wednesday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    • “The almost dreamlike movement of the story is at times closer to Ishiguro or even Kafka than your standard spy thriller. The trick is to give up trying to make too much sense of what’s going on and enjoy the ride – the sentences, the wisecracks, the atmosphere,” from LRB on Len Deighton’s spy novels.
    • Harvey Mansfield’s grading: award an “ironic” grade reported to the university and a “real” grade, usually much lower, reported privately to the student.
    • The moral emptiness of celebrity, via Unherd: “The [Met Gala] further reifies the hold that celebrity has over the American psyche, while conflating fashion as craft or art with fashion as spectacle.”
    • A survey of Stanford students: “Conservatives [12% of respondents], ironically, are more interested in changing institutions than any other group, even so-called progressive ones.”
    • Linguistic sloppiness may soon be stigmatized? Via Joshua Katz.

  • Tuesday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    • Inside the fed’s balance sheet, with John Cochrane and Darrell Duffie, close colleagues of Kevin Warsh.
    • “According to new research from Zurich Insurance, 51 percent of people aged between 15 and 19 now have a mental or behavioral disorder such as anxiety, depression or ADHD, and if present trends continue as they have, by 2030 this figure will hit 64 percent”—an “inauthentic crisis,” says Patrick West.
    • “Algorithms optimize for efficiency. Human beings are optimized by effort.”
    • John Arnold is taking on prediction markets, which grew from $2 billion in early 2025 to $23 billion as of March 2026, reports Semafor.
    • Yann LeCun, a “godfather” of AI, puts recent developments in perspective for Axios.

  • Monday review

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    Ryan Olson

    in

    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    • It’s Star Wars Day.
    • Celebrating the life of James M. Houston, founding principal of Regent College in Vancouver, who died at 103; I would like to write about his profound influence on my life and will at some point, hopefully soon. Here’s a CT profile.
    • Joel Kotkin on the twilight of the Information Age: “the opportunities seem to be in the production [and maintenance] of tangible goods, which could be very good news indeed for the majority of young Americans who lack a four-year degree.”
    • An interview with Harvey Mansfield: “I believe in reading whole books” and “I have never had an honor that didn’t come from a conservative organization.”
    • Happy 10th birthday to the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard!
    • HBR explores the psychological debt of adopting AI.

  • Sunday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    • JS Bach cantata for Easter 4 (Cantate): Wo gehest du hin? Where are you going? (BWV 166, Leipzig, 1724); English translation. The bass recitative: Just as rainwater soon flows away / and many colours easily fade / so is it also with joy in this world, / which many people value so highly; / even though sometimes people are seen / to be flourishing with the good fortune for which they longed / still even in the best days / quite unexpectedly the last hour may strike. And the final line of the chorale: My God, I entreat you through the blood of Christ: / just let me make a good end!
    • LIV Golf spent $5B over 4 years and is pulling the plug.
    • America 250: a calendar.
    • “Voters’ statement that [46%] they want younger candidates is, to some extent, symbolic,” says John Sides at Vanderbilt in the Economist.
    • Scott Bessent interviewed Kiril Sokoloff at 13D in 2022; Bessent has been a subscriber for 30 years.

  • Saturday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    • On the college-educated working class.
    • Against screen-time panic: “anti-screen discourse undermines parental authority by presenting devices as a source of extraordinary risk that must be handled according to expert advice.” Note also: “sociologist Ellie Lee and her colleagues highlight…that ‘what can possibly go wrong is equated with what is likely to happen.’”
    • “In 2025, Scotland sent almost $1 billion of Scotch whisky to the US…”
    • The new oracle in Omaha?
    • The anti-Mamdani, Reihan Salam of the Manhattan Institute: WSJ profile.

  • Friday review, May Day edition

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    Ryan Olson

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    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    • The case for a national assessment of flourishing and participation, via EdNext.
    • Adam Gopnik on Nina Livesey’s argument that St. Paul was a second century author? Frederiksen and Walsh don’t buy it; neither does Cardona in BBR.
    • Great to hear Rachel Aviv at Boston College last week; here’s her latest in The New Yorker. I hadn’t realized that she wrote this incisive profile of Martha Nussbaum from 2016.
    • Becca Rothfeld skewers Arthur Brooks’s latest book (to sample: “morality is not simply a matter of taste…it transcends personal preference–and getting it right matters;” and “his fatal mildness;” and “a fanatical belief in something…is far more invigorating than the all-encompassing blandness of the therapeutic imperative”)—I would love to see a rebuttal; and writes on looksmaxxing, with a nod to Thomas Chatterton Williams.
    • Emma Green explores the aspirations of evangelical women and Catholic young men, with a quote from Matt Crawford on manual work.

  • Thursday review

    by

    Ryan Olson

    in

    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes

  • Wednesday review

    by

    Ryan Olson

    in

    / Reading time:

    1–2 minutes
    • Chronic absenteeism (missing 10% or more of the school year) is an ecological problem.
    • Iris Murdoch’s new poems: “among the cobwebbed chaos of the attic they found an oak chest … containing more than 500 poems by the late novelist, mostly unpublished. The poems were in notebooks, handwritten, with multiple drafts and revisions, and it has taken nine years to transcribe and edit them into this short but intriguing selection.”
    • David Bromwich: “The understanding that was lost is how public higher education—and specifically liberal arts education—prepares you for life in a way that will serve students well in getting jobs, but also make them thoughtful citizens.”
    • The culture of Greek comedy, from BMCR.
    • “Over 100,000 accounts lost at least $1,000 on Polymarket… Prediction markets are being touted on social media as a lucrative side hustle for young Americans squeezed by rent and student loan bills.”