“America Is Slow-Walking Into a Polymarket Disaster.” Saahil Desai reports on the dangers of prediction markets. Sadly, Polymarket is what a culture of political hobbyists deserves: “this is what happens when media outlets normalize treating every piece of news and entertainment as something to wager on. As Tarek Mansour, Kalshi’s CEO, has said, his long-term goal is to ‘financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.’ (Kalshi means ‘everything’ in Arabic.) What could go wrong? As one viral post on X recently put it, ‘Got a buddy who is praying for world war 3 so he can win $390 on Polymarket.’ It’s a joke. I think.”
“What Gambling Has Done to Sports—and to Us.” In this excerpt from his new book, Everybody Loses, Danny Funt describes the mania legalized betting has unleashed: “Taunting and harassing athletes is bad enough. But sports gambling has the ability to stoke a level of rage that could lead to something far worse. In recent years, several men have been arrested for threatening to murder athletes and their relatives in the most gruesome ways imaginable. After this past season, San Diego Padres manager Mike Shildt resigned, in part, he said, because he was exhausted from receiving so many death threats. Jeffrey Miller, a former chief security officer of the NFL, told me it’s ‘only a matter of time’ before a gambler tries to kill someone.”
“In the Land of the Data Blind.” Jason Blakely eviscerates the failings of political wonks who who substitute a data-blinded social science for the art of pursuing the common good: “This ‘scientific’ framework is so pervasive that the general public experiences its gamified scorekeeping and endless reams of data as quasi-natural occurrences. Data analysis, polling, and electoral strategy are simply part and parcel of the landscape of American politics. The result of this is a disconnected, data-obsessed electorate flabbergasted by a furious ideological brawl that may yet prove to be the final act of the American republic. The ‘sciences’ that elite technocrats and policy wonks have marshaled to adjudicate past trials are manifestly unequal to the task of today’s politics. Unless experts and much of the wider public break free of the spell of these approaches, we will remain not only ignorant of the situation we face but incapable of forming an effective response.”
“Big Food has Devoured British Farmers.” James Rebanks warns that the British food system has become far too reliant on unhealthy, processed foods: “As a farmer, I work hard to look after my land and my animals in a way that you, the consumer, would approve of. But in recent years, farmers have come to be seen as an unnecessary and archaic part of this food system, rather than its foundation. Whole foods make up only about half of the average Brit’s diet today; the other half is made up of ultra-processed food (UPFs) — these don’t come from farms, they come from factories, and even labs. A farm-free future is closer than you might think.”
“Christian Writer Daniel Nayeri Dreams from Home.” Jonathon Crump puts the Iranian-American author in conversation with Paul Kingsnorth and Wendell Berry: “In his what-makes-a-house-a-home criteria, Kingsnorth listed ‘the coming together of man and woman in partnership,’ ‘the education of children,’ the ‘cooking, storing, and eating of food,’ and the limiting of technological distractions. Daniel and his family check the boxes of Kingsnorth’s rubric, though they aren’t Luddites. Alexandra has an iPhone, and their son has a Nintendo Switch, but nobody texted during meals. They’ve learned how to keep the hearth burning without completely eschewing technology.”
“AI Companies will Fail. We can Salvage Something from the Wreckage.” Cory Doctorow isn’t impressed with the AI sales pitch: “A reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine. For example, an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing is not allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they do not make quota. . . . Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaurlike, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse centaurs, which none of us want to be.” (Recommended by Adam Smith.)
“Save the Humanities from the Slop.” Alan Noble warns about the spiritual and personal risks of forgoing real education: “My concern is that with the use of AI, we off-load our cognitive abilities to a large language model that does our thinking for us. There may be a case for using AI in limited situations, but when it comes to the pursuit of wisdom or the cultivation of our gifts, we should be concerned about how we’re shortchanging our maturity.”
“What Is the University For?” Meghan Sullivan (whose center at Notre Dame recently received a $51 million grant for research on AI ethics) writes about how AI fuels atomization and erodes authority and considers how universities should respond: “Generative AI, by its nature, draws us away from others. It delivers a personally optimized experience by generating a style, a tone, a set of facts, an experience that is just for you. Its inputs come from anywhere and everywhere, a Frankenstein of scraped websites, stolen books and articles, and data labelled in distant sweatshops. A student who used to puzzle through a difficult text with classmates and a professor now pastes a prompt into a chatbot and receives a tidy summary. She may not even realize that she’s forfeiting experiences like struggle, or discernment, or collaboration, or discovery. The AI simply gives her what she wants—or, rather, what it predicts she will want right then.”
“You Can’t Clear Cut Political Society.” Miles Smith draws on Wendell Berry to offer a vision for evangelicals seeking to chop down secularism: “Kentucky agrarian writer Wendell Berry made sustainability a calling card of his own approach to a distinctively Christian moral economy, and his passion for a sustainable ecology, economy, and social structure is a useful mirror for Christian political theology. In a speech given in 1994, Berry explained how the conservation of forest communities reflected America’s own profound callousness towards forests. If American secularism is like a forest, then Berry’s own remarks on the role of forests within an ecosystem can offer us a great deal of wisdom and guidance.”
“Tobacco Ruminations No. 4.” Brian Miller ponders the reasons why he finds himself once more building a new fence: “Perhaps today these aches and pains acquired all for the sake of some damn cattle and their seductive up-in-the-stratosphere auction prices would be one answer to why I continue the hard work of caring for this land. Another could be that the Big Guy has deemed suffering, for some unknowable reason, to be the price of stewardship. Whatever He wants me doing, I wish He could have asked for it on a farm with far fewer rocks and a far flatter landscape.”
