The Top 5: Resilience, Ben Sasse, & the cost of living crisis
Plus: Canada's euthanasia program
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.
“Resilience, Another Thing We Can't Talk About” (Freddie deBoer)
Because Freddie deBoer argues, “But we also need to understand that no political movement, no matter how effective, can ever end suffering and thus obviate the need for resilience. Even after the revolution, people will need to be tough and to learn to face the inevitable traumas and disappointments of human life. Even in Utopia.”
“No Other Options” (The New Atlantis)
Because “Justin Trudeau promised that the euthanasia system would not lead anyone to choose to end his or her life due to a lack of social support. But in private, even practitioners say that the support that Canada most efficiently provides to many vulnerable patients now is death.”
“Pope Benedict Wasn’t Conservative. He Was Something Much More Surprising.” (NYT)
Because “This is why it seems to me that Benedict’s greatest legacy is the one that he has bequeathed — unasked for, needless to say — to nonbelievers. In 2011 he devoted an unusually large portion of his remarks at the World Day of Prayer for Peace not to his fellow Christians or even to members of other religions but to agnostics, who are ‘seeking the truth,’ he said, ‘the true God, whose image is frequently concealed in the religions because of the ways in which they are often practiced.’ For Benedict the ‘struggling and questioning’ of agnostics was an admirable posture, a radical openness that ought to motivate believers ‘to purify their faith, so that God, the true God, becomes accessible.’”
“Ben Sasse and the Institutions” (Washington Examiner)
Because this is a very good closing interview as Sen. Ben Sasse moves into his new role as president of the University of Florida.
“No one is safe until everyone is safe – we applied it to the pandemic, but why not our economy?” (The Guardian)
Because “A “cost of living” crisis is a sign that something basic about how we imagine society has gone fantastically wrong. When “living” becomes a commodity that some can afford and some can’t, the assumption that we ought to be able to trust one another to sustain our security is being challenged at the root. We are being lured into that most destructive of myths: that the essential human position is as an individual purchaser acquiring desirable goods – not a contributor to the building of a trustworthy network of relations, dependable enough to allow more people to become active and generous contributors.”
ICYMI on Wear We Are
Episode 48: We have a House Speaker!
The Morning Five: January 2, 2023
The Morning Five: January 3, 2023