The Bank
ICYMI
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Articles
On the connection between today’s online culture and the ancient vice of akrasia
The ancient vice akrasia is a lazy inclination toward base desires that we know are bad for the soul
What would Augustine say about our current political moment? That is the question James KA Smith endeavors to answer.
“When Boniface gets impatient and wants to impose the kingdom (or his version of it), Augustine tells him, Stop trying to live ahead of time… Given when we are [before eternity], politics requires persuasion, compromise, and tempered expectations. Politics is not indifferent to the good, but neither is it the means by which the kingdom arrives. Rather, politics is a mode of bearing witness to the good and enacting love of neighbor in the meantime of the saeculum. The saeculum is a long season of mixing with neighbors who share very different visions of the good. Ours is the time of wheat and tares, sheep and goats, deep differences lived out in close proximity.”
Contemporary Christian Music is one of the fastest-growing genres. Why?
I take some consolation in the growing public awareness of the harm done by generative AI. A new study makes clear how much people dislike this technology.
This survey of more than 2,000 Americans reveals:
83% believe AI will reduce trust in journalism.
76% believe AI will make users lazier.
65% believe AI will make it harder to trust other people.
62% believe AI will make people less intelligent.
Only 18% of respondents want less government regulation of AI
What 570 experts predict the future of work will look like https://substack.com/redirect/92824be5-a87f-4286-8d41-bc4a54f78a87?j=eyJ1IjoiMnFqazFwIn0.6wkuAUUlgt-UsrwztPjJQMjB_RHPrk0BP3aRYEuAblY
A Leftist laments the rise of the Post-Christian Right
“Once Christian universalism, egalitarianism, and injunctions to peace and love are thoroughly discredited, the slope gets pretty slippery. If there is no appeal to goodness but instead only the cool, rational appeal to strength, if the pursuit of equality itself is seen as a distortion of human nature, if violence is recognized as the natural order of things, and if tribal nationalism supersedes the embrace of a global fraternity, then what? Well, a disturbing emphasis on heredity, genes, and race quickly takes hold.”
Finish your projects the way Hemingway finished his novels (see if you can add a quote)
Hitler replaced Jesus as the most animating moral figure in America’s post WWII culture — until now.
“More fundamentally, replacing a positive exemplar (Jesus) with a negative one (Hitler) comes at a heavy cost. It teaches us what to hate but not what to love. Our culture assures us that we are each free to pursue our own good, but—quite deliberately—gives us no resources to discern what that good might be. It assures us that we have rights and freedoms. But what are they for? Not, presumably, for triumphantly denouncing one another on social media. To get past that, however, we would need gentler virtues and sharper insights than the value-system the age of Hitler provides. We would need to recognize that evil is infinite in its varieties, and that Nazism is only one of its flavors; that evil is distributed, not personified; and that it is usually rooted inside ourselves. We cannot defeat it by jumping into a Spitfire and shooting at it.”
Paywalled
On Gentle Parenting: Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta wants parents to avoid punishing their kids and focus on “loving connection” instead. Do her methods work—or do they turn kids into little tyrants
On Social Media and Teen Mental Health — again. (New Yorker)
Why do today’s young people lean left? Not because of policy, but better vibes according to Andy Kessler. (WSJ)
This is born out by the data on Americans’ greatest fears. According to an annual study by Chapman University, in 2014, Americans’ top ten biggest fears were public speaking, heights, scary animals, drowning, blood/needles, claustrophobia, flying, strangers, zombies, and darkness. But by 2023, that had wildly shifted. Instead, it was corrupt government officials, economic/financial collapse, Russia using nuclear weapons, the US becoming involved in another World War, people I love becoming seriously ill, people I love dying, pollution of drinking water, biological warfare, cyber-terrorism, and not having enough money for the future.
Multimedia Content/Headliner
I loved this, from Reductress: Woman Retires After Long, Fulfilling Life Spent Trying to Find a Job: “Nadine will certainly be missed… She was always posting on LinkedIn. Like, almost constantly. It was nice to know that while I wasn’t doing great in my career, someone out there was doing way, way worse.”
Deep Dive
Tik Tok (From the recent Lawsuit)
From (Alan Noble): They include tidbits like the fact that it only takes 35 minutes for the average user to get addicted to TikTok. And the fact that “TikTok’s own research states that ‘compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.’” That seems bad. And that TikTok sees itself in an “arms race for attention,” which is not really surprising so much as it is depressing. And with every profound problem that is identified with TikTok, the company executives seem to be both aware of the problem and unwilling to do anything meaningful to stop it. The profits are too great. And the consequences are severe, in some cases, deadly.
One Last Thing
This quote: “You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Michael Crichton”
