“Saving a Lost Generation of Young Men—with Chop Saws.” Emma Green profiles the College of St. Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, Ohio, and explains its appeal and the culture it’s contributing to: “One evening, I visited Jubilee House, one of the men’s dorms on North Fourth Street. Twelve students, including Brendan LaFave, the high-achieving kid from Ann Arbor, live in the three-story brown-brick house, which has white columns along its wide front porch. As I pulled up, one of the students, Anthony Skinner, was climbing a column toward the roof. These guys weren’t scrolling on their phones to kill time. They were just being normal idiots.” If you’re interested in these liberal arts trade schools, read Nathaniel Marshall’s three-part series on the movement.
“Who Killed the Florida Orange?” Alexander Sammon narrates the incredible, complicated, tragic story of Florida’s dying crop: “In 2003, the mighty Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of fruit, with 90 pounds of oranges per box, most of which went on to become orange juice. Now, not even 25 years later, the United States Department of Agriculture was forecasting a pitiful 12 million boxes of oranges, the least in more than 100 years, the worst year since last. A decline of more than 95 percent.”
“Students are Speeding Through their Online Degrees in Weeks, Alarming Educators.” Todd Wallack describes what happens when efficiency and optimization are pursued to their logical end: “It takes most college students at least four years to earn a bachelor’s degree. Christie Williams finished in three months. The North Carolina human resources executive spent two months racking up credits through web tutorials after work in 2024, then raced through 11 online classes at the University of Maine at Presque Isle in four weeks. Later that year, she went back to earn her master’s — in just five weeks. The two degrees cost a total of just over $4,000.” I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s famous anecdote: “It is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel at all.”
“Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?” David DeSteno argues morality depends on embodiment: “Anthropic’s intentions are admirable, but the project of drawing on religion to cultivate the ethical behavior of Claude (or any other chatbot) is likely to fail. Not because there isn’t moral wisdom in Scripture, sermons and theological treatises — texts that Claude has undoubtedly already scraped from the web and integrated — but because Claude is missing a crucial mechanism by which religion fosters moral growth: a body.” (Recommended by Tom Bilbro.)
“Alienated Leisure.” Adam Smith turns to Marx to make sense of the strange state of leisure in a digital economy: “Perhaps one reason it is easier than ever to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism is that the most valuable corporations in history have managed to supplement and maybe even replace the false distinction between work and leisure with a new form of ‘leisure’ which is actually a new kind of alienated work, and is therefore what we might call ‘alienated leisure.’”
“You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education.” Molly Worthen articulates the vital distinction between making education a game and making it genuinely engaging: “This has been the greatest blunder in the past decade of K-12 education: the decision to give every child a personal computer and to gamify everything from standardized test preparation to recess. Mistaken ideas about the nature of learning have combined with a hefty dose of Big Tech propaganda to distort our picture of what school is for. Technology must return to its proper place in the classroom — as a supplemental tool, rather than the source and summit of education.”
“What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools?” Jessica Winter compiles chilling accounts of how AI is intruding into education: “Then, in March, students at my eleven-year-old daughter’s public middle school began receiving new Google Chromebooks, and that is when I heard the tap-tap of the cloven hooves approaching our doorstep. The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: ‘Help me write.’ If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is ‘Help me visualize.’ She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: ‘Help me edit.’ ‘Beautify this slide.’ The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one.”
“Who Is Blake Whiting?” Andrew Lawler describes the amazing output of a shadowy AI “author”: “No living American historian is as prolific as Blake Whiting. In one week alone last fall, he published 13 books on a host of complex archaeological and historical subjects, ranging from the collapse of Near Eastern civilizations in 1177 BCE to the recent discovery of a huge Silk Road–era city in Central Asia.”
“Pattern Recognition.” Sara Hendren draws inspiration from Christopher Alexander to imagine how we might design for humans: “Like Alexander (who decried a simplistic ‘claustrophobic conservatism’) and many design professionals, I don’t think the patterns indicate straightforward architectural answers—‘objective beauty exists, and it is therefore Doric columns’—but I’m persuaded by the robust dynamic realism of the books’ project, which does embody a spirited conservationist commitment. The most exalted ideals are held in the modest structures of our lives: patterns that invite us to see, understand, replicate, and make new buildings that nurture life.”
“A Letter to General Motors.” Jason Peters asks GM to make trucks repairable again: “The check engine light has been on since I don’t know when, but check engine lights, like tire pressure lights (also on), are, in my view, about as trustworthy as all of our major institutions, up to and including the New York Times and the federal government. I ignore the lights and the institutions and encourage others to do the same.”
