Aretai

  • A social ecology for children’s mental health

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes

    We are seeing many young people with mental illness who benefit from our treatments, yet too often they lack the personal, family, or community resources to move beyond symptom relief to full recovery. We also see a growing number of young people who might otherwise be well but arrive overwhelmed by despair, disconnected from peers and school, and unprepared for a rapidly changing world. Their families and communities are under strain and need a clear roadmap to support their children, restore connection, and bring calm and predictability to daily life.

    That’s John T. Walkup of Northwestern University and president of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, in his inaugural address to the academy, published in January 2026. He advocates “population-based approaches—prevention, mental health promotion, and recovery strategies with a focus on community-based programming.”

  • Monday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • 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.

  • Quotes on the moral imagination

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    Ryan Olson

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    Zygmunt Bauman: “We are…moral beings… we are faced with the challenge of the Other, which is the challenge of responsibility for the Other, a condition of being-for.” Relationships are “shot through with ambivalence” because responsibility for one’s neighbors has “no obvious limits” and “does not easily translate into practical steps.”

    Eugene Peterson: “God was the reality with which David had to do; giants didn’t figure largely in David’s understanding of the world, the real world.”

    Martha Nussbaum: “Situations are all highly concrete and they do not present themselves with duty labels on them.”

    Iris Murdoch: “I have used the word attention to express a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.”

    Johann Gerhard: “Even if the parents do not protect themselves and do not shy away from loading punishment upon themselves through godlessness, why should they not protect their poor children, so that they do not bequeath to them God’s wrath and punishment instead of God’s fatherly inheritance? If the parents someday will see their children beside them in hell, the children whom they misled by their evil example, their pain and suffering on account of this will be increased in immeasurable manner.”

    Ernst Sartorius: “Where self-love is thought of it is always interwoven with the love of God and our neighbor, and regulated and hallowed thereby. It is in God that man is to love himself, his higher self, that the copy is to love its original. The love of God will prepare him for true happiness, while, if he love himself out[side] of God, he gains harm to his soul.”

  • Sunday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • 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.

  • Urban redevelopment in Rome

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes

    What were public buildings like baths and monuments built on top of in ancient Rome? Sometimes residences and neighborhoods, which problematizes euergetism, although evidence of eminent domain in the Roman empire still seems to be thin, according to a new article in G&R by Christopher Siwicki.

    Said Cicero when his house was destroyed during an exile (de Domo Sua 41.109, trans. Watts):

    What is more sacred, what more inviolably hedged about by every kind of sanctity, than the home of every individual citizen (domus unius cuiusque civium)? Within its circle are his altars, his hearths, his household gods, his religion, his observances, his ritual; it is a sanctuary so holy in the eyes of all, that it were sacrilege to tear an owner therefrom.

  • Saturday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • 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.

  • How have universities survived for nearly a millennium?

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    Ryan Olson

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    How have universities managed to survive and evolve over almost 1,000 years to become wildly heterogeneous, unusually fractious, multi-product, non-profit entities? Universities began as teachers’ guilds, and they still give faculty a remarkable degree of autonomy. That structure attracts and empowers intellectuals, who are selected in part on their taste for knowledge, and those entrepreneurs and philanthropists have enabled universities to morph in ways that firms rarely do. Intellectual autonomy can also explain why universities are so often at odds with legal authorities and why faculty fight so often with each other and with their bosses. This essay presents a model of university organization and sketches the evolution of the university’s products and conflicts over the last 900 years. We also discuss the social value of university education.

    That is from an NBER working paper by David M Cutler and Edward L. Glaeser.

  • Friday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    • 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.

  • Roman persecution of Christians

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    Ryan Olson

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    2–3 minutes

    An article in the latest Journal of Roman Studies upsets decades of consensus on Christian persecution in the first three centuries.

    We tend to read backwards, seeing contemporary issues as having their origins in the distant past. We often see Christian exceptionalism, then, in the Roman empire, including in our understanding of how Christians were treated. Persecution is the most common lens. And certainly we see this in the New Testament, not least in Jesus’ words to the apostles and in 1 Peter.

    The standard account created by modern Roman historians rests on a letter from Pliny to Trajan (10.96). The letter has been used as the sole legal basis for suspicion toward and prosecution of persons for being Christians. One problem is that this account ignores the evidence provided by Christian authors of the range of charges brought against their number (cannibalism, arson, theft, murder, and so on), not only the nomen Christianum.

    James Corke-Webster assembles a picture that accounts for most of the evidence. He interprets identification as a Christian as a marker that then could, and often did, lead to suspicions and charges for other crimes. He sees this as fitting a newer interpretation of the use of law in the early empire, as a weapon against opponents, creating a litigious culture. He suggests this was not only the case with criminal charges but, with less evidence, civil charges, too.

    One implication is doing away with the standard three-period persecution arc: pre-Nero, pre-Decius, and post-Decius. Instead, “Christians experienced Roman law just like their non-Christian contemporaries—as the means by which diverse local antagonisms acquire institutional force.”

    There was, still, the religious identity. It may only have concerned magistrates or neighbors as a “marker.” But it appears in any case to have been a distinctive identifier, the likes of which didn’t trouble practitioners of most other religions.

    The new reading does perhaps shed light on the earliest ethical exhortations to Christian communities. A Christian, 1 Peter says, should live such a good life (τὴν ἀναστροφὴν καλήν) among their neighbors that they cannot be accused of any crimes or misdemeanors but cause others to praise God by their good works (τῶν καλῶν ἔργων, 2:12).

    In the Acts of Justin, the prefect’s question suggests this: Τίνα βίον βιοϊς, What sort of life do you live? (Acta Just. Rec. A 2.1)

  • Thursday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    • 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.”

  • Wednesday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    • “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.

  • Tuesday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    • “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.”

  • Monday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • 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.”

  • Sunday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    • 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.

  • Saturday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • 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.”