But these renters, who are on the verge of homeownership, seem to be “gambling for redemption”—that is, taking bigger risks on speculative bets to get that final windfall that will make homeownership possible. In essence, these economists discovered a large group of younger Americans who are treating the US economy like a slot machine that they... See more

The age of alcohol is over, and the future looks ominously like hundreds of millions of people getting high alone rather than getting tipsy together. In the last two decades, Americans under 25 have reduced the time they spend partying by 69 percent, which is not nice. Humanity will be extremely attractive, with better weight-loss drugs, better... See more

But excessive chronic inflammation, which results from an immune system over-policing threats throughout the body, is a leading cause of organ damage, stroke, and neurological problems. GLP-1 drugs seem to bind to receptors throughout the body—in our gut, on our immune cells, and throughout the central nervous system—to broadcast the same message:... See more

The Canadian scientist Daniel Drucker, who has done more than practically anyone in the world to illuminate the benefits of GLP-1 drugs, proposed that GLP-1’s anti-inflammatory effects could provide a “unifying” mechanism for these drugs’ effectiveness:

In his book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory , the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that the modern world had lost the sort of shared moral language that was once provided by virtue systems, such as religion. I think that’s half-right. We have lost something with the erosion of religion, perhaps, but we’re still bound by an ethical... See more

There is an idea that comes from the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard that, whereas pre-modern people were lost in finitude—that is, their choices were constrained by tradition or religion or economy—modern anxiety comes from an opposite affliction. We are lost in infinitude , the boundlessness of choices. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,”... See more

The future will be filled with slop. But it will also be filled with stories, images, videos, and writing that will seem indelibly human, even when its silicon-based author lives in a data center in Virginia.

In one 2025 study by researchers at Stony Brook, Columbia University, and the University of Michigan, three top AI models were pitted against MFA-trained writers. In initial tests, expert readers clearly preferred the human writing. That’s comforting. But once researchers fine-tuned ChatGPT on an individual author’s full body of work, the results... See more

Throughout the 1990s, the share of teenagers who read daily outnumbered the share who read “hardly ever”, according to long-term reading surveys. But in the last 25 years, this has flipped so dramatically that today roughly half of teens say they hardly ever read for fun. The teen who reads daily is on track to become an endangered species.