Aretai

1. Dan Blumenthal on Xi’s visit: ‘Washington would do well to remember that it too has leverage. The Chinese economy is struggling. Deflation had persisted for 10 straight quarters, finally lifting only due to rising global energy costs; property investment has collapsed by nearly 44 percent; and youth unemployment has hit nearly 17 percent. On its current trajectory, China is not catching the US—it’s leaning more heavily on trade surpluses, having posted a record trade surplus exceeding $1 trillion in 2025. Beijing’s dependence on foreign markets absorbing its surplus is a source of American leverage if Trump coordinates market closures and supply-chain cutoffs with Beijing’s other big markets.’
2. Geoff Shullenberger, Behind MAGA’s Anti-Colonialist Turn, via Compact
3. A vision of “market socialism” from Beggs, Burgis, and Sunkara, via Compact: ‘Their version of market socialism combines employee-owned firms with a large public sector that provides health, education, many care services, public banks, and regulatory agencies. The employee-owned firms would compete on the market to provide consumers with products and many of those would be sold in stores that would also be collectively owned by their employees. Wage rates for different industries would be set by a national wage board, and wages could be supplemented with dividends as firms distribute profits to their members. In larger firms, employees would elect representatives to manage the firm while smaller firms could engage in collective democratic decision-making.
   ‘The authors go into considerable detail about the organization of these employee-owned firms to avoid some of the historic difficulties that employee cooperatives have encountered. Most new investments that firms undertake would be financed by loans from a large network of public banks. Interest rates would be more favorable when projects were good for the environment or could lift up a less prosperous region. A central bank would continue to manage interest rates to avoid the economy overheating or sliding into recession.’
4. Nice touch at the end! Chris Scalia: ‘Now that I think of it, the next time I address one of my boys, I think I’m going to call him . . . bruh or dude or anything but buddy!’

1. Piero Cipollone via Economist: ‘The early crypto movement may have imagined a world with no central banks, where finance could operate without governments, public institutions or trusted intermediaries. But the financial system now taking shape points to a different destination. The history of digital finance is often presented as an attempt to escape public money, but all along it may have been a search for a better way to use it.’
2. Matt Continetti in WSJ: ‘The sight of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights might make Mr. Xi uncomfortable. After all, he approved his government’s 2013 “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” which labeled “Western Constitutional Democracy,” “universal values” and “civil society” as threats to the Chinese Communist Party. The lengthy memo, known as “Document Nine,” is directly opposed to the principles of the Declaration of Independence—America’s Document One.’
   
   ‘Why then has America avoided debating values with China? Why haven’t our leaders spoken up more forcefully for dissidents? Why have we let this powerful tool go to rust? Economic entanglement is one reason. A loss of confidence is another. Patriotism is in decline. American exceptionalism is considered outmoded—a pleasant story that every country tells itself. Domestic concerns predominate. Why worry about democracy abroad when so many of us consider it threatened at home?
   This is a trap. A nation without pride is unlikely to summon the resources necessary for its defense. A nation afraid to promote its distinctive ideals is defenseless against ideological assault.’
3. Mark Schneider, AEI: ‘NCLB’s focus on proficiency was needed to pressure states and the nation to improve all students’ learning. But by focusing on proficiency, we’ve left too many children behind, as reflected in the growing percentages of those who score below NAEP Basic. We’re also leaving behind middle school teachers who will instruct a growing number of students who are lacking the fundamental reading skills teachers likely assume their students already have. And we’re leaving the nation behind by not preparing a growing number of students for a future when proficient reading comprehension will set them apart from AI.’

Truly astounding, from Forbes, on America’s favorite pastime:

In 2025, Americans placed roughly $166 billion in bets on sporting events. That’s more than the entire U.S. movie, music, book, and museum industries generated in revenue combined.

The North American box office totaled $8.87 billion in 2025, which is still 22% below pre-pandemic levels. Recorded music revenue hit a record $11.5 billion. Live music like concerts and festivals brought in $18.51 billion. Meanwhile, book publishers tracked by the Association of American Publishers reported $14.6 billion for the year. And the U.S. museum industry generated an estimated $16.4 billion. Add it up and the total comes to roughly $70 billion, which is less than half what Americans wagered on sports.

1. University students on socialism: “the increasing socialist sentiment in young people stems from a largely aesthetic basis and attraction to abstract ideologies of socialism—a picturesque utopianism” and “Young people wouldn’t be receptive to this messaging if the current system were working for us. We’re not ideologically committed to socialism. We’re desperate for someone, anyone, to take our economic anxiety seriously…” — and many other smart insights.
2. From the New Yorker: ‘Isaiah Berlin famously observed that there is no social world without loss. We want and value many things that cannot be had at the same time. Say we want people to be free and also to be equal and to live in happy, unalienated communities. What if some people’s exercise of freedom renders things less equal, or less happy and more alienated? Berlin thought it a contemptible sleight of hand to insist that such freedom was not “true freedom.” To hope to honor all our values, he believed, is not simply overoptimistic but incoherent. What makes some political choices tragic is not that we have failed to think hard enough about how to have it all but that there is, in fact, no way to have it all. Politics, then, is the always unsatisfying project of managing loss; at its best, it consists of doing this without self-deception.’

1. This interview with Matthew Continetti gets especially interesting when they discuss the current state of the conservative movement, but the whole video is worth watching.
2. “Americans are addicted to apocalypse porn,” writes Ben Sasse in WSJ. “These warnings cause a cortisol spike in the body politic and fry the nation’s nervous system, exhausting the citizenry.”
3. Samuel Abrams on the rise of socialism: “If the problem is formation—and that certainly appears to be the case—the real answer is to rebuild what once formed young Americans into confident, connected participants in a free society.”
4. ‘Citizens learn liberty the way they learn anything difficult: by practicing it, defending it, and living its reciprocal obligations (and in our time, I think too many of us forget those reciprocal obligations). “There is nothing more fruitful in wonders than the art of being free,” Tocqueville writes, “but there is nothing harder than apprenticeship in liberty” (p. 229), says L. Lynne Kiesling.’

Insightful interview with Yuval Levin at AEI in the WaPo: “I’m hopeful. I’m not an optimist — I’m a conservative, so I have low expectations of people. But hope says we have the resources to do this right. Americans have always been attracted to a certain pessimism about the prospects of our society. From the very beginning, we’ve thought we’re not really up to this — or more specifically, our children are not really up to this. Our national anthem is a song about barely surviving the night: The great American achievement in that song is that the flag was still there. We’re worried now, and we should be. But Americans have proved themselves to be able to act on that worry. And if you think about the next 25 years, the next 50, who’s going to dominate that period? It’s the United States. This is ours to lose, and we could lose it. But I am hopeful that we may make the most of it.”

1. Avoiding dementia: “Yet there is one direct way to improve your chances of staying mentally sharp, and it involves almost no toil, tears or sweat. One of the most exciting scientific findings in recent years is that a course of the shingles vaccine may reduce the risk of dementia by about 20%. For a simple intervention, that is a huge benefit. Exactly why this happens is still being debated.”

1. JS Bach cantata for Trinity 6: Es ist das Heil uns kommen her, Salvation has come to us (BWV 9, Leipzig between 1732-1735); interlinear; Netherlands Bach Collegium recording; opening chorus: Der Glaub sieht Jesum Christum an / Der hat g’nug für uns all getan / Er ist der Mittler worden, Faith looks towards Jesus Christ who has done enough for all of us.
2. IAD to eliminate ‘mobile lounges‘?!

1. The implications of “postliteracy” are staggering, via Atlantic: “And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.
   
   “Things are about to get worse, and fast. The next generation reads much less than today’s adults did when they were kids. Kindergarten teachers say that many of their students don’t know nursery rhymes or fairy tales, Benjamin Powers, the director of Yale and the University of Connecticut’s Haskins Global Literacy Hub, told me. (In the study of 236,000 American adults, only 2 percent read to a child on a given day.)”
2. On Norway’s football formation, from a profile in WSJ: “Inside a small dome where they could practice year-round, through Scandinavian winters and darkness, the kids of Bryne FK played without pressure. Their volunteer coaches preached a simple philosophy: ‘As many as possible, for as long as possible, and as good as possible.’”

1. Ryan Burge: 85 religious traditions—share with bachelor’s x mean income.
2. At 94, Ed Meese looks back.
3. AI as mental exoskeleton?

On AI adoption in schools, from Campos and Singleton: “We find that AI use has spread rapidly across schools, largely as a productivity aid. Students mainly use AI for homework help and writing, while educators primarily use it for lesson planning and administrative tasks. The development of teacher training, guidance, and school policies has lagged adoption. We next document two diffusion gaps across schools: First, lower AI integration is associated with a higher share of disadvantaged students (a one standard deviation increase in disadvantage is associated with a 0.07-0.11 SD lower score on an index of AI integration); Second, private and charter schools score 0.23-0.44 SD lower on the AI integration index than traditional public schools. Although several surveyed school-level factors strongly predict AI integration, they do little to explain these gaps. Differences in district size account for roughly one-third of the disadvantage gap between public schools. These findings suggest that the factors associated with greater AI integration differ from those needed to narrow disparities in how schools support and guide AI use.”

Paul Carrese (ASU) in a new report from AEI on Civic Thought and Leadership: “There are plentiful signs from beyond the conservative community that CTL reform is needed academically and for America’s civic health. The field and its supporters should keep moving and building, given the opportunities of the moment and the long-term stakes. Fifty years from now, this movement could mark not just the founding of a few schools and centers across the country but the beginning of a broader restoration of the university’s civic mission.”

1. Amazing use of machine learning: “PHerc. 1667 began as a blackened, rolled mass of carbonized papyrus. To read it, we never unrolled it physically. Instead, we scanned it with high-resolution X-rays, reconstructed the wound sheet inside the volume, flattened it into a readable surface, and used machine learning to bring out the faint traces of ancient ink.”
2. Steven Pinker: “If critical thinking skills are so fragile that they can erode when people use AI, those skills could not have been robustly taught in the first place.”
3. Yes and based on OECD data reported by the Economist: “The best are cleverer than ever, but a growing number have basic skills that would embarrass a child half their age. About one in seven students at American colleges and universities scores no better in literacy tests than a typical ten-year-old. For numeracy, it is nearly one in five.”
4. The Socratic method improves AI?

1. JS Bach cantata for Trinity 4:
   Ein ungefärbt Gemüte, An unstained character (BWV 24); Netherlands Bach Collegium recording; German-English interlinear; II. Tenor Recitative: “Honesty is one of God’s gifts.
   The fact that in our time
   so few people have it
   is because they do not ask God for this. For by nature what our hearts contrive is nothing but evil;
   if our heart is to direct its way to something good, then God has to rule it through his spirit
   And lead it on a path of virtue.”
2. Michigan: “Of 20,595 jobs promised from these [corporate welfare] deals, only 602 have been created—a mere 3%, estimates Mr. [James] Hohman.”
3. Semiquincentennial: Robert Pondiscio, via AEI—“As I’ve written elsewhere, anticipation for the approaching Semiquincentennial pales in comparison to the 1976 Bicentennial, but if schools have failed to cultivate students’ gratitude, civic affection, and love of country, parents can still do so. In fact, they must.”
4. Religious education 📉

Harvey Mansfield in WSJ: America is “an exemplar of something important, which is a successful republic. But it needs to be continually refreshed, as Machiavelli said all regimes need to be.”