- 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.
Category: Review
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Thursday review
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Wednesday review
- “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.
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Tuesday review
- 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.
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Monday review
- 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.
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Sunday review
- 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.
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Saturday review
- 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.
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Friday review, May Day edition
- 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.
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Thursday review
- An interview with Freya India, “The Extreme Crisis of Young Women.”
- Fighting moths with the Gentleman’s Gazette.
- The best entrepreneurs, according to a survey of business historians, changed the way people “lived, worked, consumed, and thought about tomorrow.” Ford, Rockefeller, Jobs, and Carnegie topped the list.
- A case for character among investment bankers?
- YouTube in school: “A 2025 internal document spotlighted YouTube’s ‘two biggest challenges’ for teen well-being: low-quality recommendations that can ‘normalize unhealthy beliefs’ and ‘prolonged unintentional use.’”
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Wednesday review
- 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.”
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Tuesday review
- “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.
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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.”