Aretai

1. A pessimistic article on optimism, via Economist.
2. Here’s a review of a recent book on the function argument in Aristotle’s ethics, which, because the book uses “inventive translations,” includes nice discussions of bios, teleios, physis, and others.
3. “A record 29% of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated — the largest single religious cohort, surpassing Catholics (19%) and evangelical Protestants (23%), Pew Research Center reports,” via Axios.
4. Robert Watson is the chief concierge at the Willard in Washington—here’s a fascinating profile.
5. Chronic absenteeism or a performance review from students?

1. Americans watched 33 billion minutes of Star Wars on TV in 2025, with the leading film being the 1977 original.
2. Adventures in cosmetic surgery: zombie fillers.
3. Civics education is rebounding since its nadir a decade ago, argues Danielle Allen. And from her org this week.
4. A relationship seems likely between rising R&D expenditures and declining cash reserves relative to total assets, says the Federal Reserve.
5. This is one version of the future of public research universities.

1. “The future of American philanthropy isn’t the central drama of the A.I. age, but it isn’t a sideshow, either. As Nan Ransohoff wrote this week on Substack, A.I. wealth could soon add as much as $100 billion to American charitable giving every year. She describes this as a potential “third wave” of philanthropy, after the now-distant Carnegie and Rockefeller era and the recent Bill Gates and Warren Buffett wave. And she expects it to be focused on the “A.I. transition” and what lies beyond, especially questions of “flourishing, meaning and what makes a life good” in the shadow of increasingly capable machines,” writes Ross Douthat.
2. “China is speeding towards a future in which AI chooses, purchases and delivers many of the goods and services people consume, upending its digital economy in the process,” via Economist.
3. The blazer’s definition has expanded and so has its popularity.
4. From Brandon Vaidyanathan on a new Gallup survey on beauty funded by a JTF grant: “The second is that 89% of Americans find beauty in relationships and in moral/virtuous behavior of others.”

1. From Grant’s Almost Daily: “Meme stocks are so 2021: Retail investors have found a “shiny new toy” in the form of prediction markets, analysts at Barclays wrote last week, as notional trading volumes across Kalshi and Polymarket topped $24 billion last month according to Dune Analytics, compared to less than $5 billion in April 2025.”
2. The Economist: “Many of America’s advantages are hard to emulate. The country’s continental scale, single language, natural-resource wealth and the fiscal space that comes from issuing the world’s safe asset give it a unique economic advantage over Europe. America’s federalism is helpful, too. Misguided policies at the state level—like data-centre moratoriums or proposed wealth taxes—do not encumber the whole country. People and businesses can move to a different state.”
3. And again: “SpaceX is an imperfect company and Mr Musk an imperfect man. The marvel of capitalism is that it can harness their talents to create something extraordinary. While his investors take the risk, the rest of humanity can strap in for the ride.”
4. AI’s effect on McKinsey’s pricing, via FT: “Billable hours, subscriptions and flat fees will always be part of the equation. But the proportion of outcome-based pricing will undoubtedly expand — and that goes down as a definite tick in the column under the benefits wrought by AI.”

1. On Hadrian’s Adventus coin, in JJS: “While most probably for the Romans the coin had no special anti-Jewish meaning but only the celebration of a new Roman colony, for the Jews the transformation of Jerusalem into a Roman colony dedicated to Roman and Greek deities was perceived as a religious and national tragedy.”
2. Reflections in Compact on young religious converts tending toward anti-institutionalism: “Rather than functioning as bubbles of piety or ideological echo chambers, religious communities and institutions ought to strive to become spaces where people can learn to, as the Italian theologian Luigi Giussani put it, ‘live the real intensely.’”
3. After John Gray’s recent rejection of MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Unherd offers a reconsideration.
4. ”Amy Wallace has spent two decades guarding the human her brother was—against a world that prefers David Foster Wallace as a puzzle.”
5. Chinese AI is cheaper, more adaptable, and almost as proficient—how?

1. JS Bach cantata for Pentecost, O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe, O eternal fire, O source of love (BWV 34, Leipzig, 1 June 1727); German-English interlinear; Netherlands Bach Collegium. Opening chorus: O eternal fire, o source of love,
   enkindle our hearts and coonsecrate them. / Make heavenly flames penetrate and flow through us, / We wish, o most high Lord, to be your temple, / Ah, make our souls pleasing to you in faith.
2. One in seven dating, engaged, and married young adults using AI chatbots that simulate a committed romantic partnership: “Using an AI romantic companion on a regular basis was associated with significantly less likelihood of being in a stable relationship and lowered this likelihood by 46 percent,” according to a new study from IFS.
3. JPS published a brief flourishing scale by Burns and Crisp; helpful literature review.
4. On the professionalization of scholarship in Roman province of Achaia, via JLA: “[S]cholars from Achaia were disproportionately not exceptional individuals but rather members of scholarly families for whom education was a trade, and that peace paradoxically brought with it the decline of these local families as teachers from throughout the eastern Mediterranean increasingly settled in Athens.”
5. Josephus’ audience, again: “Josephus implies in Antiquities 1.6 that the laws of Moses lead to the practice of virtues for the Jews, most of all the proper worship of God (eusebeia). In Antiquities 1.14, however, Josephus highlights the benefits of a way of life in line with the Jewish laws and he states that the observance of these laws brings happiness to all. This passage seems to concern a wider audience, Jews as well as non-Jews. Indeed, God’s watchful care (pronoia) over all humans, Jews and non-Jews alike, is an important and consistent theme in Josephus’ narrative and a pivotal point in the moral lessons taught in the Antiquities.” That’s Van Henten in JJS.

1. Several good points in Ross Douthat’s interview with Jennifer Frey.
2. The history of Memorial Day, via WSJ.
3. ”Standard GDP accounting glosses over several channels through which the tech capital spending boom is affecting the economy: equity wealth supporting consumption and equity-driven tax windfalls supporting state government budgets. Put differently, if all the AI capex boom were doing is adding half a percentage point to quarterly GDP growth, one might expect little blowback to the rest of the economy when the cycle slows,” according to Bloomberg.
4. We appreciated attending the final chapel service for the class of 2026 at LPS.

1. NYRB review of the latest sociobiology tome begins like this: “It turns out that if you begin an assertion with “it turns out” and sprinkle it with statistics and acronyms—especially if it’s expressed in the passive voice and followed by a footnote—up to 83 percent of the variation in whether people buy it is explained by their SCI (science credulity index) and 78 percent by their BDS (baloney detection score).”
2. Harvard’s faculty approved (70%) a proposal to limit the number of A’s given in undergraduate classes to 20%. A- has no limits.
3. The Economist reports on homeschooling’s popularity.
4. Jim Houston died several weeks ago. Going back through some of the recordings I’ve listened to since I left Regent in 2000, here is one of his lectures on CS Lewis, whom he knew in Oxford in the 1950s.
5. The academic journal article: a living document enabled by AI.

1. Matthew Continetti: DEI isn’t dead; the response to Jonathan Haidt is exhibit A.
2. Data centers by any other name: “The term data centre was not used in Monday’s deal announcement, instead referred to euphemistically as ‘large-load opportunities,’” says FT of the Dominion-NextEra deal.
3. “Young workers primarily rely on internal learning, as it is relatively cheap and the probability of encountering coworkers with higher human capital is high. However,
   as workers age and climb the human capital ladder, the availability of coworkers with higher human capital decreases, prompting a shift toward external learning, since trainers have higher average human capital than production workers. Eventually, as workers continue to age, the opportunity cost of learning increases, and the benefits decline due to a shorter remaining work horizon, resulting in a reduction in external learning.” That’s from Ma, Nakab, and Vidart, NBER.

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.