Aretai

  • “How the 2020s broke our brains”

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes

    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.

  • Saturday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • 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.

  • Mercatus: The impact of public debt

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes

    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.

  • Friday review, May Day edition

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • The case for a national assessment of flourishing and participation, via EdNext.
    • Adam Gopnik on Nina Livesey’s argument that St. Paul was a second century author? Frederiksen and Walsh don’t buy it; neither does Cardona in BBR.
    • Great to hear Rachel Aviv at Boston College last week; here’s her latest in The New Yorker. I hadn’t realized that she wrote this incisive profile of Martha Nussbaum from 2016.
    • Becca Rothfeld skewers Arthur Brooks’s latest book (to sample: “morality is not simply a matter of taste…it transcends personal preference–and getting it right matters;” and “his fatal mildness;” and “a fanatical belief in something…is far more invigorating than the all-encompassing blandness of the therapeutic imperative”)—I would love to see a rebuttal; and writes on looksmaxxing, with a nod to Thomas Chatterton Williams.
    • Emma Green explores the aspirations of evangelical women and Catholic young men, with a quote from Matt Crawford on manual work.

  • Thursday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes

  • Charles III on our common sources

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    Ryan Olson

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    2–3 minutes

    King Charles III delivered a speech yesterday with remarkable and refreshing references to the shared moral, philosophical, and legal sources on which the United States and the United Kingdom draw. Here are a couple of excerpts from the King’s speech to a joint meeting of the US Congress.

    As I look back across the centuries, Mr Speaker, there emerge certain patterns; certain self-evident truths from which we can learn and draw mutual strength. With the Spirit of 1776 in our minds, we can perhaps agree that we do not always agree – at least in the first instance! Indeed, the very principle on which your Congress was founded – no taxation without representation – was at once a fundamental disagreement between us, and at the same time a shared democratic value which you inherited from us. Ours is a partnership born out of dispute, but no less strong for it… So perhaps, in this example, we can discern that our Nations are in fact instinctively like-minded – a product of the common democratic, legal and social traditions in which our governance is rooted to this day. Drawing on these values and traditions, time and again, our two countries have always found ways to come together. And by Jove, Mr. Speaker, when we have found that way to agree, what great change is brought about – not just for the benefit of our peoples, but of all peoples.

    The Founding Fathers were bold and imaginative rebels with a cause. 250 years ago (or, as we say in the United Kingdom, just the other day….) they declared Independence. By balancing contending forces and drawing strength in diversity, they united thirteen disparate colonies to forge a Nation on the revolutionary idea of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. They carried with them, and carried forward, the great inheritance of the British Enlightenment – as well as the ideals which had an even deeper history in English Common Law and Magna Carta.

    These roots run deep, and they are still vital. Our Declaration of Rights of 1689 was not only the foundation of our constitutional Monarchy, but also provided the source of so many of the principles reiterated – often verbatim – in the American Bill of Rights of 1791. And those roots go even further back in our history: the U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances. This is the reason why there stands a stone, by the River Thames at Runnymede where Magna Carta was signed in the year 1215. This stone records that an acre of that ancient and historic site was given to the U.S.A. by the people of the United Kingdom, to symbolise our shared resolve in support of liberty, and in memory of President John F. Kennedy.

  • Wednesday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • Chronic absenteeism (missing 10% or more of the school year) is an ecological problem.
    • Iris Murdoch’s new poems: “among the cobwebbed chaos of the attic they found an oak chest … containing more than 500 poems by the late novelist, mostly unpublished. The poems were in notebooks, handwritten, with multiple drafts and revisions, and it has taken nine years to transcribe and edit them into this short but intriguing selection.”
    • David Bromwich: “The understanding that was lost is how public higher education—and specifically liberal arts education—prepares you for life in a way that will serve students well in getting jobs, but also make them thoughtful citizens.”
    • The culture of Greek comedy, from BMCR.
    • “Over 100,000 accounts lost at least $1,000 on Polymarket… Prediction markets are being touted on social media as a lucrative side hustle for young Americans squeezed by rent and student loan bills.”

  • Tuesday review

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    Ryan Olson

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    1–2 minutes
    • “Among some movie lovers, the mediocre appearance of the average new release has a name: The Netflix Look.”
    • “From seizing satellites to striking Earth from orbit — Beijing is developing dual-use capabilities in an intensifying arms race with the US,” reports FT.
    • Half of adolescents spend 10 or more hours daily on devices, with 63% preferring to follow influencers, from JAA Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
    • Students’ drive to be perfect is prevalent; this study of teachers sheds light on threats to students’ physical and mental health, relationships, stress levels, and learning.
    • The first complete English translation of Dialogues of Confucius, reviewed by Daniel A. Bell.

  • 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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    1–2 minutes

    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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    • 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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    1–2 minutes

    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.