five quotes (2.21.25)
five things I read in the eighth week of 2025
But here’s the real reason: The travel team dads and the dance moms are the secret high-trust society hiding within suburbs that have lost the habits of neighborliness.
My kids can’t have my childhood because the culture of our neighbors is nothing like the one I grew up in. In Halcyon Park in the 1980s, I knew the names of every single neighbor several houses in every direction, and I could and did call on them regularly. If I was locked out of my house, there was no question about their letting me in to have a caramel candy and sit until my people got home. A pair of old ladies living two doors down from us drove me to school each morning for two years. They were happy to help.
—Michael Brendan Dougherty, “In Defense of Travel Teams” (Commonplace)
This is a contrarian take, for sure. I think I understand what Doughtery is getting at, but consider me unconvinced. His broader point about societal breakdown is true. I also think that there can be travel teams with good team cultures. But Doughtery’s experience is anecdata. The meta-data on travel teams is. . . bad. Kids burn out by age 13. They specialize too early. Teams become insular and more about paying to play than the actual talent of the kids. Yes, let’s fix societal breakdown. Retweet. But travel sports is the wrong mechanism for rebirth.
I was begging to be given values, community, a purpose, a vocation—and found none. Instead my teachers repeated what they’d heard on the news. In due time, by forcefully pursuing what was left of a liberal arts education at a large research university, I met professors who were eager to teach me. My entire life I had been told that conservatives, religious people and men were monsters, idiots, abusers or dangerous bigots. The very first conservatives I’d ever met, it turned out, were among the few faculty at my university who took their disciplines seriously on their own terms, at least during Trump’s first term. Whether philosophy, literature or ancient languages, the few conservative, apolitical or moderate professors I worked with on campus never asked me where I stood, but how I thought. They saw a young woman, choosing to study the liberal arts on scholarships, and gave me an education.
—Mana Afsari, “Last Boys at the Beginning of History” (The Point)
This is a fantastic article. Afsari visits a couple of gatherings of young conservatives and talks to them about their political convictions and evolution—it is worth reading for that alone. Alan Jacobs, an English prof at Baylor, often comments about the academic freedom at Christian institutions compared to the ideological lockstep at secular schools. I think Afsari’s reflections speak to this: what she found when she actually encountered conservatives in the wild were people interested in education and learning. There were no ideological litmus tests. The Left likes to pretend that it is the Right that is closed off and narrow-minded. Experience has taught me otherwise. The least curious people I have ever met have been the most liberal and the most conservative. There’s a horseshoe element here, no doubt.
In January, the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch published an analysis of the “relationship recession” that lent strong support to Stone’s theory. Contrary to the idea that declining fertility in the U.S. is mostly about happily childless DINKs (dual-income, no-kid couples), “the drop in relationship formation is steepest among the poorest,” he observed. I asked Burn-Murdoch to share his analysis of Current Population Survey data so that I could take a closer look. What I found is that, in the past 40 years, coupling has declined more than twice as fast among Americans without a college degree, compared with college graduates. This represents a dramatic historic inversion. In 1980, Americans ages 25 to 34 without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than college graduates to get married; today, it’s flipped, and the education gap in coupling is widening every year. Marriage produces wealth by pooling two people’s income, but, conversely, wealth also produces marriage.
—Derek Thompson, “America’s ‘Marriage Material’ Shortage” (The Atlantic)
The social stratification of our country keeps escalating. I just don’t see this ending anywhere positive. Charles Murray told a joke about college-educated liberals needing to preach what they practice. His point is that elite people practice, for the most part, traditional values. They get married, they have kids, and they even go to church more. The problem is they don’t preach the virtues of this lifestyle. We have taught people to be afraid of convictions—even when those convictions make life better. Can you have a successful single mother? Yeah, of course. Is it the ideal? Are the outcomes better for kids raised in a two-parent household? We have to stop pretending like these things aren’t true. We built a lot of the traditions that we did because they work. Marriage works. Raising kids with a spouse works.
At the same gathering in Charlottesville where Tal Brewer spoke of “degenerative AI,” sociologist Joseph Davis pointed out that AI is rushing into domains that have already been vacated of the full exercise of human judgment, making the substitution less obviously a degradation. Education is conceived as the mere exchange of information, unconditioned by relations of authority and care between teacher and student. The practice of medicine has been partly reduced to following guidelines that claim to advance “evidence-based medicine” (but with outcomes that are often worse than those produced by the judgments of experienced practitioners).[iii] Dating apps render the process of selecting a mate as something machine-optimizable through search criteria and “cross-platform integration with social media accounts” (or something like that).
—Matthew Crawford, “AI As Self-Erasure” (Archedelia)
I don’t have much to add to this. We have farmed out a lot of our deep thinking already; in a world where we just need to follow prompts, AI makes perfect sense. Just do what the machine tells you.
Payne argues that uplifting and commercially successful songs like “Awesome God” helped evangelical churches fine-tune the message and the rhetorical key that would attract new members, creating a feedback loop of sorts. As she writes, “[T]he charts displayed what sorts of ideas about God, the world, and the people of God were bankable evangelical theologies.” The reliably cheerful soundtrack may have swelled the Sunday attendance numbers and reinforced a white suburban wholesomeness, but it ultimately left little room for the outcasts and holy fools like Rich Mullins who make up some of the truly prophetic figures in Christian history. The music’s stale conformity created a kind of bondage, the inverse of the ecstatic freedom that the lyrics promised.
—Tom Zoellner, “What Would Becky Buy” (LA Review of Books)
This was an interesting review of a book about the rise of CCM (contemporary Christian music). The last line is devastating. I actually don’t think Christian music is as bad as some people do. It’s a popular complaint and there is some awful stuff out there, but that is literally true of every genre of music of all time. Most artistic productions are mediocre. Some are very, very bad. A few are very, very good. So it is with Christian music.