The Top 5: Leisure ethic, maternal mortality, Facebook babies + low-tech universities
+ Catch up on Wear We Are -- we're looking at the new 2024 announcements
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.
Also, if you haven’t already done so, please pre-order Michael’s book, “The Spirit of Our Politics: Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.” Pre-orders are so helpful!
The Top 5 articles for your week:
“The First Social-Media Babies Are Growing Up—And They’re Horrified” (The Atlantic)
Because the rapid development of our online social presence will continue to bear social consequences — one of the first being privacy and consent in the parent-child relationship.
“Toward a Leisure Ethic” (Hedgehog Review)
Because “To most people today, the notion of a leisure ethic will sound foreign, paradoxical, and indeed subversive, even though leisure is still commonly associated with the good life. More than any other society in the past, ours certainly has the technology and the wealth to furnish more people with greater freedom over more of their time. Yet because we lack a shared leisure ethic, we have not availed ourselves of that option. Nor does it occur to us even to demand or strive for such a dispensation.”
“Why Universities Should Be More Like Monasteries” (NYT)
Because Molly Worthen argues that in university settings, students should be offered a low-tech first year program. “Pondering ultimate questions and cultivating cognitive endurance should not be luxury goods.”
“Backsliding on Maternal Mortality” (Project Syndicate)
Because “Human devastation on this scale is usually met with weeks of news coverage, an outpouring of public support, and calls for urgent action. Yet the staggering number of women dying every year in the act of giving life remains largely a silent crisis. Even more worrying, the group found that progress on reducing maternal deaths has ground to a halt. How many of us know someone who died, or came close to dying, during pregnancy or childbirth? Perhaps the pervasiveness of suffering is part of the problem – maternal deaths may seem inevitable.” I (Melissa) developed pre-eclampsia — one of the three leading causes of maternal death globally — when I was postpartum with our second child.
“My neighbor lived to be 109. This is what I learned from him.” (Washington Post)
Because WaPo’s David Von Drehle wrote a book about his neighbor Charlie White. He examines White’s stoicism and his ability to weather huge societal changes in the 1900s that is applicable to young people who must weather today’s upheavals.
Bonus: “The Surprise of Tim Keller” (Comment Magazine)
Because Michael wrote a lovely reflection on his friend, Tim Keller.
ICYMI on Wear We Are:
Episode 67: Tim Scott & Ron DeSantis announce + we’ve got a debt deal
The Morning Five: May 24, 2023