- “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.
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Wednesday review
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Tuesday review
- “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.”
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Monday review
- 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.”
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Sunday review
- 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.
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Saturday review
- 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.”
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How should the law treat men and women in the workplace?
Given our emphasis on individuals’ and families’ supporting themselves through ties to the paid workforce, employment law properly provides critical safeguards to American workers. Indeed, much of America’s dynamism and economic success is drawn from its distinctive emphasis on work, including access to workplace benefits. That means it’s critical to get this issue right.
In National Affairs, Erika Bachiochi of Arizona State University and Ivana Greco, an attorney, examine the current state of employment law and the new realities of women and men in the workplace.
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Friday review
- Emanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma podcasting: “’We’ve developed a sixth sense,’ Ma said, after the show. ‘We’re not looking at one another, but we know exactly when to do something.’ ‘You have a very expressive back,’ Ax said.”
- The film Nuremberg: “The movie doesn’t show how the specially designed space at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice really looked on November 29: overhead lights were shone on the defendants so the entire courtroom could see them taking in the reality of their crimes. Madeleine Jacob, who covered the trial for the French newspaper Franc-Tireur, wrote: ‘I’ll never forget their faces broken by the horror when they found themselves suddenly face to face with the incriminating evidence: a documentary film on the concentration camps, presented in court this afternoon.’”
- Sports gambling increased to $160 billion last year, up from $4.9 billion in 2017.
- Artemis II astronaut Christina Koch, as a girl: “‘I loved things that made me feel small. I loved looking at the night sky, oftentimes between the pine-tree branches. Or, I love the ocean. North Carolina also has mountains…I just love the vastness of all those things.’”
- Brene Brown in the anti-empathy age.
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Formation and flourishing
The aim of human flourishing can be assessed in educational institutions with the Human Flourishing Measure. Educational institutions could more effectively promote human flourishing, especially the formation of character and the virtues, with concepts that correspond to the five domains of human flourishing and deepen their understanding and practice. These concepts are moral sources and culture (for the domain of happiness and life satisfaction), anthropology (for the domain of physical and mental health), agency and motivation (meaning and purpose), performance and context (character and virtue), and love and pedagogy (close social relationship). In view of the diversity of educational settings in the UK and USA, each concept is elaborated in thick and thin versions to guide evaluation and implementation.
The full paper is here.