Aretai

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.

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.