- “Among some movie lovers, the mediocre appearance of the average new release has a name: The Netflix Look.”
- “From seizing satellites to striking Earth from orbit — Beijing is developing dual-use capabilities in an intensifying arms race with the US,” reports FT.
- Half of adolescents spend 10 or more hours daily on devices, with 63% preferring to follow influencers, from JAA Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
- Students’ drive to be perfect is prevalent; this study of teachers sheds light on threats to students’ physical and mental health, relationships, stress levels, and learning.
- The first complete English translation of Dialogues of Confucius, reviewed by Daniel A. Bell.
Category: Review
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Tuesday review
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Monday review
- AI as complement vs. replacement: terrific piece by Glenn Loury.
- Don’t close schools for the NFL draft; Pittsburgh, Green Bay, and Kansas City did. Detroit did not in 2024.
- Posthumous Tim Keller, part 1.
- “By foregrounding strong ties, trust and repetition, it argues that complex religious and ideological change cannot be explained by connectivity alone, but requires dense, emotionally grounded networks capable of sustaining persuasion and commitment over time.” Review of Anna Collar on ancient networks and spreading of ideas in JRS.
- Hayek’s papers online, via Hoover Institution. Notebook for The Pretense of Knowledge—amazing.
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Sunday review
- JS Bach Easter 3 Cantata: Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, BWV 12. German-English text; JE Gardiner recording. It ends with the great chorale Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan, What God Does, That Is Done Well; the hymn is Whate’er My God Ordains Is Right (German).
- “Microlooting” is at the very least a case of “elite moral confusion.”
- AI complements proficiency/expertise, FT reports on AI use survey.
- The latest on exercise, anxiety, and depression.
- “If you can’t do a hundred push-ups or a hundred squats, you’re in for a bad day,” says one Hyrox champion. Then there’s the running, as this study emphasizes. I’m looking forward to the DC competition in September.
- Eager to see this new study of childhood in the early Roman empire, combining “Latin epigraphy with an anthropologically informed social and cultural history approach.” JRS review.
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Saturday review
- LLM coaching is better than a UPenn-trained Applied Positive Psychology graduate coach and GPT-4, according to a RCT.
- “Increases in women’s education, occupational status, and earnings have meant that increased levels of mothers’ status account for more of the increase in children’s college completion than does fathers’ status among cohorts born since the 1960s,” write Christine Schwartz and Michael King in ASR.
- Josephus’ version of Areus’ letter contains clauses that are similar to inscriptions of archived documents in Hellenistic cities, “archival metadata” not in the same letter quoted in 1 Maccabees, suggesting Josephus used an independent source, Claude Eilers finds in JHS.
- “In 2025, the U.S. raised average tariff duties from 2.4% to 9.6%, bringing protectionism to its highest level in eighty years… we find an overall welfare impact ranging from a loss of 0.13% of GDP to a gain of 0.10%,” See NBER paper.
- Good backgrounder on prediction markets with updated statistics, via ARK Invest.
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Friday review
- Fantastic profile of Danielle Allen with incisive quotes from her teachers and students.
- Collecting white wines?
- One-third of Gen Z has “either invested in prediction markets or has considered doing so.” And maybe AI helps?
- “[Gen Z is] trying to climb an economic ladder that started to splinter before they were even born. They’re hanging on for dear life.” NBER paper here.
- A River Runs Througb It turns 50.
- Waterstones is going strong, thanks to good carpet and welcoming staff. I’m not a fan of their new location in Oxford but the shop is worth the walk.
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Thursday review
- Bret Stephens: “[The university is] not just a credentialing agency — their de facto current role — or even a knowledge factory, which is the Yale committee’s aspiration. It’s something altogether deeper: a place where the universe of knowledge connects; where sustained engagement across multiple disciplines, enlivened by a genuine contest of ideas, nurtures the capacity for mature independent thought; where the rigor of a difficult education, enforced by a realistic prospect of failure, puts sharp young minds on a path to originality and self-understanding.”
- The primary lesson of global financial history: leverage can turn a “conflagration into an inferno,” says the FT.
- UK bans phones in schools, though nearly all were already restricting use in schools; social media under 16 may be next.
- The economics of sold-out concerts, via Bloomberg.
- Raphael was the “politest apparatchik of the High Renaissance.”
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Wednesday review
- “Large statistical models have compared data from thousands of languages, and the results appear to confirm the suppositions of earlier investigators, Socrates included.”
- The fall of Rome, revisited again.
- “For the past 75 years, academics have been telling a story about how we enhance democratic dialogue and understanding. Yet we don’t really believe it,” writes Jonathan Zimmerman.
- On preserving Iranian civilization, according to Joshua Katz.
- The “hermeneutic of persistence” extended Greek and Roman religion into later periods.
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Tuesday review
- “Dinergoth sexuality isn’t ‘liberated’ — that implies there is something to escape. It’s post-liberation. They inherited a world where boundaries already collapsed, so they’re just vibing in the ruins.”
- Implications of rising electricity prices; data centers consume 7 percent.
- “Virtuous computer scientists are necessary but insufficient to enact AI ethics,” says Boyd in response to Burbidge.
- “AI penetration scaled to ~20% in three years, more than twice as fast as consumers gravitated to the internet”; infrastructure “spending to triple to nearly $1.5T in 2030.”
- “Too many people with Ph.D.s, with tenure, are producing work that is not contributing to human knowledge.”
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Monday review
- The Lord of the Flies has sold 25M copies worldwide: “The classics-loving [William] Golding sometimes identified his standpoint as ‘Aeschylian’ rather than Christian: either way, it was one that sought to confront the ‘underlying sickness rather than the symptom.’”
- “Maybe don’t read [Ackroyd’s] Auden. Read Auden instead.”
- Bernard Herrmann and John Williams revealed.
- “It’s almost like AI is your monetary policy…,” according to Northern Trust.
- “You might almost forget you are suspended above the traffic until you look up over the Greek vases.”
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Sunday review
- Annual research review on self-harm in youth, via Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry: lifetime prevalence is 20 percent.
- Mary Beard’s defense of classics: “Rather than simple answers to complicated questions, she offers yet more complicated questions. This is, in fact, just what she says classics itself does.”
- Kidfluencing: “…the top accounts charge as much as $200,000 per sponsored post, bringing in between $8m and $10m a year.”
- The annoyance economy: $165bn a year in the US alone.
- John Burn-Murdoch on young adult earnings: the aspiration gap.
- AI-enabled cyber attacks were up 89 percent in 2025 vs. 2024.
- Common characteristics of effective school climate interventions: external support from beyond the school system for implementation of change; a focus on reviewing and revising existing policies and practices to make contextually driven changes, rather than just ‘adding on’ new interventions; revising disciplinary policies, and promoting alternative forms of discipline beyond punishment; positive relationship building between students and between staff and students, emphasis on preventing interpersonal violence, including bullying; mechanisms for young people to feedback on current assets and problems, and into decision-making regarding priorities for change and their implementation; classroom curriculum components or skills workshops for young people.
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Saturday review
- AI and the formation of students, Chris Sibben via Mere Orthodoxy.
- “Situations are all highly concrete, and they do not present themselves with duty labels on them. Without the abilities of perception, duty is blind and therefore powerless.” Martha Nussbaum, “…Literature and the Moral Imagination.”
- Classics and Christians in the 12th Century by Jamie Collings in Antigone.
- American tort reform to prevent $500B+ costs annually is also tied to America’s moral culture and a revival of our ethical framework.
- Reviewing Leah Libresco Sargeant’s Dignity of Dependence, Rita Koganzon writes, “It may well be that a more care-oriented state is needed to prop up the sagging American family. But what will protect that family from the state’s exuberant outpouring of love?”
- Via the Journal of American Psychiatry: “Large-scale diffusion MRI and network-level analyses now demonstrate that human brain maturation is neither linear nor complete by age 18 or even 25. Instead, the period from late childhood through early adulthood is characterized by ongoing reorganization of white-matter topology, integration of distributed networks, and refinement of executive control systems, with measurable inflection points extending into the early 30s…. [Thus,] Substance use during adolescence and early adulthood should be understood not merely as a behavioral risk for addiction but as a potential threat to ongoing brain development and neurological integrity.”
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Friday review
- Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma podcasting: “’We’ve developed a sixth sense,’ Ma said, after the show. ‘We’re not looking at one another, but we know exactly when to do something.’ ‘You have a very expressive back,’ Ax said.”
- The film Nuremberg: “The movie doesn’t show how the specially designed space at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice really looked on November 29: overhead lights were shone on the defendants so the entire courtroom could see them taking in the reality of their crimes. Madeleine Jacob, who covered the trial for the French newspaper Franc-Tireur, wrote: ‘I’ll never forget their faces broken by the horror when they found themselves suddenly face to face with the incriminating evidence: a documentary film on the concentration camps, presented in court this afternoon.’”
- Sports gambling increased to $160 billion last year, up from $4.9 billion in 2017.
- Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch, as a girl: “‘I loved things that made me feel small. I loved looking at the night sky, oftentimes between the pine-tree branches. Or, I love the ocean. North Carolina also has mountains…I just love the vastness of all those things.’”
- Brene Brown in the anti-empathy age.