The Top 5: The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, social media and brain drain, and happy marriages
Plus, catch-up on the Wear We Are podcast
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.
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The Top 5 articles for your week:
“I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway.” (The Free Press)
Because Isabel Hogben, a 16 year old, wrote for The Free Press’ essay contest on her personal experience encountering porn at a very young age: “I was ten years old when I watched porn for the first time. I found myself on Pornhub, which I stumbled across by accident and returned to out of curiosity. The website has no age verification, no ID requirement, not even a prompt asking me if I was over 18. The site is easy to find, impossible to avoid, and has become a frequent rite of passage for kids my age. Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eating nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily. She was attentive, nearly a helicopter parent, but I found online porn anyway. So did my friends.”
“Ukraine’s Most Powerful Spiritual Force Faces a Choice” (Politico Magazine)
Because Cole S. Aronson chronicles the power, history, and future of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church during and after Russia’s war. “Once the fighting does stop, Ukraine will likely be a full member of the European community — and Ukrainian youth, like youth elsewhere in the West, are much more secular than their parents. What that will mean for the church and society is unclear, but the OCU seems intent on keeping Ukrainian society basically traditional, even as Ukraine depends for its security on nations that are anything but.”
“The Albanian town that TikTok emptied” (Coda Story)
Because Isobel Cockerell examines the experience of one small town in Albania, and how young people are leaving it in droves in pursuit of a wealthier lifestyle in the UK that they see on social media. “Billa feels like he’s fighting against an algorithm, trying to show his nephews that the lifestyle that the videos promote isn’t real. ‘I’m very concerned about it. There’s this emphasis for kids and teenagers to get rich quickly by emigrating. It’s ruining society. It’s a source of misinformation because it’s not real life. It’s just an illusion, to get likes and attention.’”
“Take a Wife … Please!” (The Atlantic)
Because Olga Khazan explores the data on marriage: “One paper alone might be easy enough to dismiss, but this is a fairly consistent finding dating back decades in social-science research: Married people are happier. Period.”
“The Memory Picture” (Longreads)
Because Paulette Perhach writes about planning her grandparents deaths, “When I began to visit websites that advise on ‘advance planning,’ I became struck by their pragmatism and cheeriness. So many offered visitors an ‘end of life checklist,’ a string of words I’d never thought to put together. They warned that too few think about their death, and promised that those who do feel good about this thinking. Setting affairs in order, drawing up one’s will, declaring medical directives—these give agency to those who’ll die, and peace of mind to loved ones. Those who will die must make things easier for their survivors. Make your death neater, the sites say, so that no one’s undone by the mess that ensues. This sounded right to me, but it was also so American, so middle class. To sort out one’s estate requires having one. My grandparents do not. They don’t own homes or even cars. There’s nothing of financial value to split up, just objects to clear out or save for sentimental reasons.”