Aretai

1. LXX: πρεσβύτερος in the Septuagint is a word increasingly “imbued with associations of authority and leadership” in Hellenistic Egypt, according to Jewish documentary evidence, argues a new study in JSJ.
2. “There are estimated to be more than a million papyrus texts excavated from Egypt in Greek, less than 10 per cent of which have been fully published,” writes James Clackson about a six-volume collection of Latin papyri. It’s unlikely there will be many more remaining in Latin than appear in those volumes.
3. LRB has a review by Diarmaid MacCulloch of two books on the end of pagan Europe and the Baltic crusades, e.g., “The Protestant Reformation was the delayed nemesis of the Teutonic Knights after a century of decay.”
4. A fragment of Aristotle from a lost work on animals, via a 5th century grammarian?
5. The Luddite Club has 30 chapters, Bloomberg says.

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2. A sociologist surveys the evidence so far on AI therapy: it’s mixed but ultimately lacks emotion and memory—so far, via TLS.
3. A new study in JLA reinterprets Christian graffiti in late antique Delphi, Sardis, Aphrodisias, and Hawarte, especially clusters of crosses, as remembrances of prayers and other acts of communal piety.
4. AI backlash at commencements and in surveys, via Axios: “Only 18% of young people ages 14 to 29 say they feel hopeful about AI, according to a recent Gallup survey. The disdain spans generations and political parties. An Economist/YouGov poll released this week showed more than 70% of Americans think AI is advancing too quickly, with 68% of Republicans and 77% of Democrats saying it’s moving too fast.”
5. Richard Sennett reviews Rowan Williams: “Like Williams, Levinas is minded to complex, uncertain, difficult, liminal, confused experiences – experiences that are non-infinite. Yet they remain mysteries that human beings can never, ultimately, fathom or share with one another. It is best, he says, to remain a neighbour: near, sympathetic, tolerant, but not together doing spiritual labour.”

1. On the videos from the PRC: “But for many accounts [of Chinese citizens scaling the Great Firewall and] commenting on the ceremony, those children represent something else completely: the forced conformity demanded by ruthless authoritarians. Social media users paired the video of the children with footage of North Koreans cheering for their leader, Kim Jong-un. … ‘Is China moving backward?’ he asked. ‘A society that is truly confident doesn’t need children chanting slogans to prove its enthusiasm. A country that is genuinely open doesn’t need to repackage diplomatic events as collective performances.’”
2. Sal Khan is launching a four-year university. The Chronicle reports: “Much of the instruction will be self-guided, he said. Students will focus more on doing than listening, building a portfolio of the kind of work that’s hard to outsource to AI. Specifically, group projects, simulations, and discussions.” First students in 12-24 months.
3. Some 20,000 seafarers are stranded aboard ships in the Strait of Hormuz. FT reports on what their life is like now.
4. Hoover is starting a Civic Profile tool led by Checker Finn.
5. Manhattanhenge, 42nd and Times Square.

1. JS Bach Easter 6 Cantata: Sie werden euch in den Bann tun euch, BWV 44. German-English text; recording. The chorale: Therefore, soul, now be yourself / and trust in him alone / who has created you. / Come what may your Father in heaven / knows what is best in everything.
2. Matthew Continetti has a terrific column in WSJ, “AOC’s Poor Understanding of America.”
3. “According to one estimate, more than a quarter of the nation’s 1,700 private nonprofit four-year colleges and universities, serving some 670,000 students, are at risk of closing or merging within the next decade.Simply put, graduates want jobs,” says Bloomberg.
4. Signs that AI is causing massive labor market disruption would be sharp rises in productivity, weak real-wage growth in the US, an increase in per-person GDP and corporate profits, and of course big job losses in several industries. Almost 20% of American workers think AI is very or somewhat likely to replace them, according to the Economist.

Learning loss and its consequences, with Eric Hanushek, Nat Malkus, and Macke Raymond. Astounding.

1. Jonathan Haidt is being canceled at his own university?
2. “An Emerson College survey last year put overall support for the tax-credit program at 64%, including 61% of Democrats, 68% of Hispanics and 63% of blacks,” reports Jason Riley in WSJ. “‘Families shouldn’t lose out on resources just because of where they live or what party their governor belongs to,’ said Jorge Elorza of Democrats for Education Reform, the advocacy group that sponsored the poll. ‘These findings show that voters, especially those in communities of color, want leaders who will say yes to opportunity.’”
3. Andy Smarick in National Review: “Schooling builds the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for succeeding as a citizen, neighbor, employee, spouse, and parent. If you want to debilitate a generation, take away all of their practice at developing that knowledge and those skills and dispositions. And if you want to debilitate them while having society believe you’re doing us all a favor, tell them you are providing ‘innovative’ tech tools that enable ‘efficiency’ and ‘progress.’”
4. Jill Lepore on the drafting of the Declaration of Independence: “While Congress went about its edits, eliminating adverbs, altering verbs, and slashing whole paragraphs, Franklin tried to distract the miserable Jefferson by telling him a story about why he had his rule about never writing something that other people would revise. When he was a printer, Franklin said, a friend who was about to open a hat shop wanted to hire a painter to make him a sign: a picture of a hat and the words ‘John Thomson, Hatter, makes and sells hats—for ready money.’ Before setting the painter to the task, Thomson asked his friends for their advice on the design. The first suggested striking out the word ‘hatter,’ as ‘tautologous, because followed by the words “makes hats.”‘ The second proposed ‘that the word “makes” might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats.’ The third said “the words ‘for ready money,’ were useless as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit.” And the fourth pointed out that what was left—’John Thomson sells hats’—was wordy, too. Why ‘sells hats,’ he asked, given that ‘nobody will expect you to give them away’? In the end, all that was left was a picture of a hat and the words ‘John Thomson.’” Don’t miss the America at 250 series from AEI, especially Democracy and the American Revolution, with essays by Levin, Wood, Garsten, Berkowitz, Allen, and Weiner. Amazing–and free.
5. McKinsey shifts greater percentage of profit sharing to equity, in a move said to be responding to pressures from AI.

1. Top 100 restaurants in NYC; #62 is a food truck in Brooklyn run by a former Tibetan monk.
2. “China vs. God,” via the Free Press.
3. Axios: “Reining in Sin Nation could be one of the rare issues that unites left and right.”
4. A professor at a Christian university reflects on teaching now: “This confluence of eroding trust, a sense of powerlessness, exposure to intense suffering of others, and desensitization to political violence leaves Gen Z looking for judgment—and justice. My students know all too well that bad things happen to good people. They want to know when bad people will get what they deserve.”
5. “Our baseline estimate implies that preserving trust in the integrity and quality of official [BLS] statistics generates economic benefits of about $25 for every $1 spent on the agency’s budget,” says a new NBER paper by Nicholas Bloon, Erica Groshen, Duncan Hobbs, and Michael Strain.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

• “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.”