The Top 5: Dr. Fauci speaks, normal conservatism, Big Questions, Ukraine's children
+ catch up on Wear We Are
Welcome to your weekly edition of the Top 5 articles we’ve read this week. Each week, we read dozens of articles in the hope we find essays and reporting that speak to big ideas, trends, future looks, and incredible human stories. We hope you enjoy our list, and do always let us know if you have a suggestion or a recommendation! Please also consider becoming a paid subscriber if this is one of those newsletters you open up all the time or look forward to each week. We also greatly encourage gift subscriptions!
The Top 5 articles for your week:
“Dr. Fauci Looks Back: ‘Something Clearly Went Wrong’” (NYT Magazine)
Because this extensive interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci is an act of public service. I can’t recommend reading this interview highly enough as an act of civic responsibility.
“Thoughts on Today's Upheaval and Its Implications” (Substack)
Because N.S. Lyons argues that there is “a bit of an ongoing intellectual renaissance that seems to be happening right now as the ‘big questions’ return to the forefront of society…” Again, it’s a really strong week for the top 5, and I’d encourage you to spend time with this one.
“Searching for a Conservatism of Normalcy” (The Atlantic)
Because “What the former president’s Republican rivals are missing, in short, is a compelling ideological thesis, one that offers a clear alternative to Trump’s class-war conservatism and that resonates with the ‘somewhat conservative’ voters who are the party’s center of gravity. What they need is a conservatism of normalcy. Rather than offer a substantive vision for the remaking of a given social order, the task of conservatism is to defend established institutions and beliefs against those with the power and determination to remake them.”
“Inside the Chaotic World of Kids Trying to Play Video Games on School Laptops” (Vice)
Because “Kids have been trying to play video games on school computers for as long as computers have cropped up in schools, but decades ago, they jumped through those hoops in a dedicated computer lab, or secretly downloaded homemade games to their TI-83 calculators while pretending to crunch equations. But these days, computers are deeply intertwined into education, and many school age children have regular access to a computer, usually a Chromebook or iPad, as early as 1st grade, when kids are only six or seven years old. What exists now is an escalating game of whack-a-mole between students, teachers, and IT departments, as kids hopeful to do anything but school work try to find a way to play games.”
“How the war in Ukraine has forever changed the children in one kindergarten class” (NPR)
Because this is a portrait of the tragic upheaval that Ukrainian children have faced since the war began.
From Lyons, do you think this is accurate?
"Our culture is actively de-masculinizing, dispiriting, demoralizing, degenerating, and frankly desexualizing (in the sense of putting men and women at odds and undermining truly fulfilling relationships between them, while elevating what Crawford has amusingly termed the amorphous, sexless “gender blob” as individual ideal). It provides normal young men with, quite literally, nothing to live for."