Surprise, surprise: four out of five dentists agree that the Citizens United decision has likely led to increased corruption in political spending and thus in American politics. (Just kidding about the dentists, of course. They're a much more polarized lot than that.)
"It is only a matter of time." Economists, glum about the future.
Star Wars and the Culture Wars. “The problem is that nobody agrees anymore on what the good guys look like, nor what this century’s global threat really is. Fights over “Star Wars” cut to the core of American identity — all the way down to our childhood selves — because they aren’t just squabbles over whether Rey’s Force powers are realistic. They’re about who we are as a nation, and how we will survive as a people in the future.”
Fascinating article about the resurgence of intentional communities:
“IN 2017 BJORN GRINDE and Ranghild Bang Nes, researchers with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, co-authored a paper on the quality of life among North Americans living in intentional communities. Along with David Sloan Wilson, director of the evolutionary studies program at Binghamton University, and Ian MacDonald, a graduate assistant, they contacted more than 1,000 people living in 174 communities across the U.S. and Canada and asked them to rate their happiness level on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), a globally recognized measurement tool. They compared these results to a widely cited 2008 study by the psychologists William Pavot and Ed Diener, which surveyed past studies that used the scale to analyze 31 disparate populations — including Dutch adults, French-Canadian university students and the Inuit of northern Greenland — and discovered that members of intentional communities scored higher than 30 of the 31 groups. Living in an intentional community, the authors concluded, “appears to offer a life less in discord with the nature of being human compared to mainstream society.” They then hypothesized why that might be: “One, social connections; two, sense of meaning; and three, closeness to nature.””
The decline of the US birthrate continues apace. I would like articles like this not to imply--as I think they imply--that this is somehow primarily, or even exclusively, due to women's agency. But that is a side point. The main point is ominous.
OK piece on the history of happiness. Spoiler alert: “what happiness means is far from self-evident.”
Christopher Tolkein has died. He really gave his father a second whole career, and in many ways a far richer and more profound body of work. Publishers had to be overridden first.