- Ross Douthat interviews Ray Dalio: more interesting at 26:00.
- 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). - The Atlantic: the appeal of John Mark Comer?
- Xi’s current economic mess: trillions-destroying property bust, low consumer confidence, bleak job market.
- 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.
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Tuesday review
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Imagining the future in ancient Greece and Rome
In this paper, my aim is to rely on Graeco-Roman sources to explore further the ways in which future directed imagination may quench, rather than fuel, our emotions. In this context, I take imagination to involve lingering in thought on possible future scenarios with or without picturing something to oneself. Thus, imagination differs from perception in that it does not require the imagined thing to be present, and it differs from memory in that it does not require the imagined thing to be something one experienced in the past. I focus in particular on the Stoics and the Cyrenaics. As Cicero reports (Tusc. 3.28-31; 3.52; 3.59), the Cyrenaics advocate pre-rehearsal of future evils (praemeditatio futurorum malorum) to prevent grief or distress. While there is no explicit report that the Stoic Chrysippus also endorsed this practice, Cicero’s reconstruction of his view at Tusc. 3.52; 3.59; 3.76 suggests that he could have endorsed it and he could have also explained how it works. Finally, Galen reports that the Stoic Posidonius also recommended pre-rehearsal, understood as dwelling in advance on the image of future evils. I look at how these practices work, and I show that they can be seen either as affecting the structure of our beliefs or as providing a sort of surrogate satisfaction or desensitisation.
If my reconstruction of these ancient sources is correct, it suggests that they uncover unexplored ways in which future directed imagination can affect our emotions. Unlike contemporary scholars, who focus on how future directed imagination and episodic future thinking affect planning (Ballance et al. 2022), or on how imagining future goods improves our well-being (Benoit et al. 2016), these ancient thinkers focus on the benefits of imagining future evils.
That is from a new paper in Apeiron by Elena Cagnoli Fiecconi.
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Monday review
- 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.”
- One out of 8 Americans is taking a GLP-1.
- 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.”
- Physical AI is the next horizon.
- “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.”
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Sunday review
- 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. - Harvard’s curriculum biased by “administrative social engineering”? An analysis from 1999-2025 by Harvard Salient.
- 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 /
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Saturday review
- “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.”
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Using LLMs to clarify psychological concepts
The American Psychological Association’s PsychTests database contains 38,000+ constructs and 43,000 measures, according to Dirk Wulff and Rui Mata in a new CDPS article. They write:
Psychology has long struggled with conceptual redundancy, particularly in the form of “jingle-jangle fallacies,” in which different constructs share the same label or the same construct is described using different terms. This lack of conceptual clarity has hindered cumulative knowledge and comparability across studies and subfields. We propose that large language models can help address this issue by placing constructs into a shared semantic space, enabling the systematic mapping of conceptual overlap and clarification of taxonomies and generating clearer construct definitions. Although automation plays a crucial role, we argue that meaningful progress requires a coordinated, community-wide effort, combining computational advances with expert deliberation. Our approach provides a pathway toward greater conceptual clarity in psychology, fostering a more unified and rigorous framework for the discipline.
The full article is here.
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Friday review
- Six million messages in a bottle have been cast into the sea since the 1950s: Lauren Collins.
- “Professors should also stop treating the humanities as something confined to the campus. The humanities flourish in every public library, publishing firm, playhouse, concert hall, art gallery, museum, book group poetry reading, and magazine rack,” writes Eric Jager for Compact.
- “The main thing I try to help people with is to trust that they can read less more, and to have a repertoire of questions handy as they’re reading. Focus on the how question more than the what question… — and noticing how how leads to why,” says Marilyn McEntyre to Aaron Cline Hanbury at Common Good.
- The promise of social prescribing, according to Sean Geraghty and Mike Goldstein of the Center for Teen Flourishing, via EdNext. As of 2025, the evidence base is improving.
- Phone bans at work: mixed results, via FT.
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Thursday review
- 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.
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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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“How the 2020s broke our brains”
American sadness this decade has been forged by the fact of, and the feeling of, a permanent unrelenting economic crisis, amplified by a uniquely negative news and media environment, and exacerbated by the rise of solitude and the declining centrality of trusted institutions. Inflation has made today’s life harder to afford, while the ambient awareness of other people’s triumphs on social media had made tomorrow’s success feel harder to achieve. The ongoing collapse of confidence in the establishment has made Americans feel unusually adrift and dissatisfied with institutions outside of their control, while the chosen self-isolation of modern life has demolished communal trust, as we increasingly experience other people’s minds through the toxic surreality of our screens rather than through the embodied reality of strangers who are, for the most part, just as nice as we are.
Derek Thompson’s piece sorts through a few years of research on sadness among all populations in the Anglophone world.
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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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Mercatus: The impact of public debt
Higher public debt levels are associated with slower economic growth, particularly when debt ratios exceed a critical range. While the precise threshold varies across studies and contexts, the bulk of the evidence places it between 75 and 80% of GDP for advanced economies—a level that the United States has materially exceeded since 2020. This matters, not because debt is inherently destructive, but because its long-run accumulation imposes tangible costs: reduced private investment, upward pressure on interest rates, and heightened inflation and credit risk premia.
Moreover, the meta-analytic estimate indicating a 3.3 basis point decline in growth for each additional percentage point of debt-to-GDP above this threshold implies a cumulative drag that compounds meaningfully over time. Even seemingly modest reductions in growth have profound implications for future living standards, economic resilience, and fiscal space.
That’s from a paper by Jack Salmon updated twice yearly as new empirical research is released, last time on January 7. Current count is 80 studies.