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She had an interesting article in her own Substack about whether artists are conservative, transgressive, or neither. It draws on a recent journal publication she had on the vocation of the artist.

She joins me on the podcast this week to discuss that topic. She draws on the philosophy of Jacques Maritain to explain how the artist cooperates with divine inspiration to create beautiful works that point toward the good, the true, and God Himself. We discuss romanticism vs. ordered creativity, abundance vs. desecration in culture, and how conservatives can reclaim beauty, joy, and cultural renewal.

Be sure to sign up for her Substack.

The Graced Imagination

I'm passionate about beauty, the arts, and my Catholic faith. I love to share news and events from Scala Foundation, my articles about the graced imagination, notes and videos from my public speaker, and my musings on mystical Mary, the Mother of God.

By Margarita Mooney Clayton

Here’s the Youtube version.

If you liked my repost of Anthony Bradley’s post about evangelical “cubicle men,” be sure to go read part two in his series and sign up for his Substack.

Market Failure and the Mansophere

Last week’s Financial Times weekend essay was one of the best things I’ve seen in mainstream media about the rise of the manosphere. It’s about the market failure beneath the manosphere.

The clip had promised a raging misogynist. What I encountered was a boy whose insecurity and ambition were fighting over control of his face. Davey’s dad died young. What he wants now, more than anything, is to give his own children what that death has taken from him: a strong father figure at the centre of things, providing and steadying, the man of the house.

This innocent ambition had curdled into something else entirely: a search for a “tradwife” and contempt for a woman he barely knew.

What took him from one to the other is the manosphere, the sprawling online ecosystem of influencers who have built profit-making careers telling boys the world is rigged against them. The manosphere has two unifying elements: escaping the so-called matrix, a worldview that tells you your role as a man is already fixed and the system has you under its thumb; and the corruption of modern society by feminism.

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American young men are significantly less likely to identify as conservative than their elders, with 68 per cent in one recent poll disagreeing with the idea that society would benefit from a return to traditional gender roles. Young people of both sexes are more liberal than ever. 

Whatever the indicator you look at in the World Values Survey — women in political leadership, abortion, homosexuality — the long-run trend across western democracies is the same: young men aged 18 to 29 are becoming less conservative. This is quite the narrative violation in the manosphere debate, where the dominant framing treats the whole phenomenon as the visible tip of a deeper ideological shift.

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I propose a different explanation. Strip away the misogyny, the supplements, the snarling podcasts, and what remains is a disarmingly simple promise: you can make something of yourself. Yes, the manosphere is ideological but its core appeal is about agency, about giving young men a navigable path through a world that grades them hard on success but offers them little guidance on how to achieve it.

In polite society, talking too openly about success is not quite the done thing. This is understandable, but it also creates a vacuum. And a crude, extractive definition will always find buyers among young men who cannot get their answer elsewhere.

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There is a moment, somewhere between puberty and adulthood, when something ignites in many young men: an almost physical conviction that you have to make something of yourself. Earn money, get fit and, perhaps most pressingly, become “high-value” on the dating market.

I recognised it in friends, in classmates, in boys I shared a single cigarette with outside clubs. I felt it myself. It arrived alongside the first cold suspicion that nobody is going to do this for you, and that the clock, for the first time, is actually running.

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At school, we learnt about Pythagoras’s theorem and the Treaty of Versailles, neither of which proved especially useful outside a debating society. Nobody told us how to approach a girl, how to build a network or what success actually meant.

There is a reason for that silence. Success, examined closely, is an uncomfortable subject for anyone who takes seriously how much of it is unearned. Before your first breath, your genes have already set margins for your height, your hair, your metabolism and your predisposition to anxiety.

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Religious communities, sports coaches, teachers (politicians, at present, perhaps less so): all present and dispense wisdom about the good life. What they share, however, is a certain reluctance to name what success looks like for a young man, and to say plainly how it is achieved. The manosphere has no such reluctance.

Many young men are intensely competitive, and there is nothing wrong with that. The question is simply what that drive gets aimed at.

The manosphere is not uniquely well-positioned to reach people such as Davey. It wins simply because it shows up, because a crude map beats no map. It’s ultimately about demand and supply. That is the market failure beneath the manosphere.

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If this captures the appeal of the manosphere, then the way to beat it is to offer boys an alternative story about male success, about what it means to win and how to get there. Let me offer one.

The lives I find most impressive share a single feature: the person has found a way to make their own flourishing and someone else’s point in the same direction. What they share is the understanding that individual ambition and collective benefit are not at war.

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Rather than being primarily about ideology, the manosphere is a contest over who gets to define success for a generation of boys actively searching for an answer. Young men in a capitalist society understand perfectly well that they will pay the price if they have no answer to what success means and how to get there.

The manosphere gets at least one thing right: this demand is real and will not go away. The “red pill” it sells (don’t just accept the hand you’re dealt) contains a kernel that is not wrong. The problem is that it then uses it to sell shortcuts that don’t work and views that harm women.

The FT has a very hard paywall, but you can try to click over to read the whole thing. I excerpted as much as I could justify.

There’s clearly something to this. Society at large seems indifferent if not outright hostile to male success. Instead, men are delivered hectoring Man up! lectures about how they need to be less toxic or sacrifice more for other people.

As I’ve said before, in most evangelical teachings, a man has no legitimate claims of his own he can assert and no legitimate desires or aspirations he can hold.

Even this piece hits similar themes. He author says men should find “a way to make their own flourishing and someone else’s point in the same direction.” This is good so far as it goes. But I wonder how many people in our society would be willing to qualify women’s ambitions similarly, to say that they are only legitimate if they lead to someone else’s flourishing? I rarely hear female ambitions talked about this this way.

Related in the Dispatch: The Dispatch: The Rise of the “Gentlemanosphere”, the Anti-Manosphere - While some of these people like Richard Reeves and Arthur Brooks clearly deserve the title of gentleman, the main person featured in this piece, Prof F-Bomb Galloway, certainly does not.

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The Old Guard

The new issue of Harper’s has a great essay on the crisis of America’s gerontocracy called “The Old Guard.” It’s very much worth reading. Some excerpts:

During the 2024 presidential campaign, the revelation of Joe Biden’s decline altered the course of American history, leaving a storied republic on the brink. The experience brought home the crisis of the country’s aging leadership: our politicians are dangerously old. I bring little news on this front, but the facts are startling nonetheless. Between 1960 and 1990, the median age of members of Congress was in the early fifties. In the three decades that followed, the median surpassed sixty. Among the effects of this trend has been the on-­the-­job senility or death (or both) of those who govern us.

Take, for example, the Texas representative Kay Granger. Eighty-­one years old in 2024, she chose not to seek reelection and disappeared from the Capitol after casting her last vote that summer, only to be found six months later in a senior-­living facility, where she had ended up, without resigning, after experiencing “dementia issues,” as her son put it when reporters tracked him down. Granger’s is an isolated case only in its absurd extremity. At least half the Democrats in the House who are seventy-­five or older—there are nearly thirty in all—are running again this year. Last year, a seventy-­five-­year-­old, Gerry Connolly of Virginia, bested Alexandria Ocasio-­Cortez for a leadership role on the House Oversight Committee before dying of throat cancer soon after, which made it easier for House Republicans to pass President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, slashing taxes and welfare.

The overrepresentation of the elderly in political office is hazardous beyond the most obvious risks. Political theorists would call this situation a failure of “descriptive representation”: ideally, a political class resembles the people it serves. But it might not concern you who holds political office if they deliver good governance for you and yours. Indeed, one reason gerontocracy has escaped scrutiny until recently is that it was commonplace to believe that elderly politicians would act benevolently, as the best grandparents do. But the increasing mismatch between the nation’s demography and its leadership is clearly galling to many.

The prevalence of aged politicians is almost certainly increasing the mass abstention of the young from political participation. The older the politicians, the less credence younger constituents give to the idea that their votes matter. They may even start to doubt the basic worth of the political system and let it fail. A study comparing different countries, including the United States, concluded that the bigger the age gap between people and their politicians, the weaker the population’s confidence in democracy.

In short, it’s not just that our politicians are old. It’s not just the cognitive or bodily decline they suffer. What’s most important is that such leaders represent an aging constituency that controls the political system. They are also the visible face of the elderly’s domination of private forms of power, chiefly wealth: aging Americans control the biggest bank accounts and stock portfolios, partly as a result of living long enough to accumulate more and more without giving much away. The government is bought and paid for by members of the oldest generation, and it is organized for their sake. There is no way to separate the age of our elites from their ascendancy.

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America faces a gerontocratic crisis of succession on the scale of society itself. The melodrama of succession—­waiting for the old to make way for the new—­defines not only our politics but also our economy and our culture writ large.

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That question ignores the relationship between the aging of politicians and the disaffection of the young, who prefer to vote for candidates closer to themselves in age, all other things being equal. We know that the age skew of voters is among the best explanations for the elderliness of our politicians, and it has created a self-­fulfilling prophecy: the young stay home, and then have an even better reason to do so in the next election, because the old vote old politicians into office.

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Elder power in the public realm has a private foundation: above all, old Americans are disproportionately rich. Gerontocracy overlaps with plutocracy—­or more precisely, it is one of its most consequential forms. Of course, poor old people exist, just as rich young people do. You can imagine, just barely, a society in which elder rule is not so intertwined with wealth. But that place is not America today, and the correlation of age with wealth is anything but random.

According to a 2011 study, the median senior citizen had forty-­seven times more wealth than the median American between the ages of eighteen and thirty-­four. This disparity had gotten remarkably worse over time. In 2009, households headed by adults older than sixty-­five had improved their median net worth by 42 percent over the prior quarter century. By comparison, the median net worth of households headed by adults eighteen to thirty-­four fell by 68 percent during the same period.

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It’s no mystery why the old want to retain their privileges. That they can keep them so easily is in large part because the age of gerontocracy has been an age of tax revolts on behalf of the propertied. A house isn’t just a place to live; older people also have fanatical attitudes toward the disturbance of their property. “They are not generous,” Aristotle noted, for “they know from experience how hard it is to get and how easy to lose.” Beyond blocking development that would benefit those who do not yet own homes, the old evince a hostility to taxing property for the sake of social goals. Americans in their final decades go even further than the libertarian American default. Not only do they feather their nests; they also secure them against predators, even though they hurt their own young in doing so.

The primary agenda for old people has long been avoiding property taxes, even when the immunities they win are regressive in the extreme, as in the case of California’s Proposition 13….The purported rationale for property-­tax relief is that old people no longer have the salaries coming in that they would need in order to pay their share to the state. But this is mostly a smoke screen, because of just how much property wealth many older Americans control.

Property-­tax limits have further abetted the elderly’s monopolization of housing. Places with higher property taxes predictably have lower house prices, leading to younger ownership. After all, it’s easier to pay even a high tax bill than to make a giant down payment. So it follows that when property taxes are held down, and home prices rise, young people are kept away.

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The effects on all levels of American government are tremendous. It has been estimated that various property-­tax breaks for seniors cost states the equivalent of 7 percent of their income-­tax revenue.

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If we want to counter their power, it won’t work to suggest that elderly people have the same stake in building a better world for the future, because they don’t. Their eagerness to avoid taxes that benefit younger generations demonstrates as much. It won’t work, either, to paper over the enormous differences between the precarity of some seniors and the situation of the mass of younger people living without the specific privileges correlated with, and often reserved for, older people. Those differences imply that seniors will sometimes be allies of progress, but not always, and opponents more often. Age-­related class advantages are in many cases far more profound than the intersection of class with gender or race. There is no way to ignore them if we want a fairer future.

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Legally, it became possible for workers to stay longer and longer, and many do, clustering in elite professions, in contrast to manual or menial work that people leave if they can or because they must. America’s corporate leaders exemplify the situation. The average hiring age for CEOs at the top American companies—­those included in the Fortune 500 or the S&P 500—­has risen dramatically, from forty-­six to fifty-­five in the past two decades. That is the same period during which executive compensation has soared, with direct implications for the fusion of age and class inequality in America today. It is not hard to think of leaders who stay on and become hard to eject even for sound business reasons, as they control their own companies or stand symbolically for them.

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There is no known reason to believe that corporate performance has improved as a result. Indeed, there are many reasons to think that there is a price to pay, and it is not borne only by younger workers who are unable to break into the upper ranks. The market speaks clearly about the profitability of younger leadership. According to a recent study, stock prices decline when younger CEOs die unexpectedly, while the sudden deaths of the doddering and wizened drive price spikes.

According to their official purpose, corporations should be engines of change and novelty; part of what drives profits is the creation of new and better products that consumers will buy. But corporate America is hampered in this mission by its laboring gerontocracy, and by the conversion of society into a static domain for hoarding seniors. While Monsieur Grandet eventually dies in Balzac’s novel, his successors are alive and well in America today.

Click over to read the whole thing.

It’s interesting that almost all of the discussions about the implication of gerontocracy, such as incredible generational inequality in favor of largely Boomer seniors, is happening in secular society but not in the church.

There’s frankly enormous injustice in wealthy, selfish seniors who continue to push for policies that benefit themselves at the expensive of younger generations and the future of the nation. This form of selfishness is basically never called out by pastors as near as I can tell, however.

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Foreign Influence in American Universities

Kite and Key is a great media non-profit that produces informative explainer type videos designed for social media. The recently turned five years old, and just released this really great video about the way foreign governments like China have acquired undue influence over our universities.

Best of the Web

The Federalist: Project Hail Mary Is The Masculine Christian Film You’ve Been Waiting For - See also Joseph Holmes’ review if you missed it.

The Guardian: Despite their bad reputation, parenting group chats are – for some – the village that never sleeps

NYT: Why College Graduates Feel Betrayed (gift link) - Their anger goes far beyond the recent rise of unemployment and the looming threat of A.I.

WSJ: More Americans Are Breaking Into the Upper Middle Class (gift link) - Research shows that ranks of higher earners have grown markedly over last 50 years, while lower rungs of middle class have shrunk

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention this week in Mere Orthodoxy.

New this week:

• When Bad Social Practices Drive Out Good - Why it’s getting harder to do the right thing — whether hiring legally, waiting for sex, or running for office — as bad social practices take over

• Evangelicals Don’t Produce Leaders. They Produce “Cubicle Men.” - Why a culture obsessed with safety, reputation, and moral control is quietly eliminating the kind of risk-taking required to build institutions - A guest repost by Dr. Anthony Bradley.

Be sure again to check out Bradley’s second installment in this series.

Cover image: Andrew Tate by James English/Wikimedia, CC BY 3.0

Bradley has his own Substack where he posted this great essay with his reflections on why evangelical men don’t become elites. He graciously gave me permission to republish it. You should definitely subscribe to his newsletter, as part two of this series is coming out today - Aaron.

A few years ago, I was at dinner with a group of Christian college men and asked them what they planned to do after graduation. As they went around the table, each one described some version of the same goal: find a job that pays “good money” and allows them to support a family. That aim is not wrong in itself, despite what some argue.

What was striking was not what they said, but what was missing. There was no sense that a career might be pursued because it could shape an institution, serve a community, or leave a meaningful mark on the world. No one talked about building anything. No one talked about leading. No one talked about risk. Their imagination stopped at stability and safety.

They were not describing vocations. They were describing outcomes: a paycheck, benefits, and predictability. In other words, they were not aspiring to become builders or leaders. They were aspiring to become well-positioned employees. What they wanted was not a mission or purpose-driven life. It was a safe and respectable life, secured in advance.

Aaron Renn has spent considerable energy documenting the absence of evangelical elites from the commanding heights of American culture. His diagnosis is serious and worth engaging. His Washington Post piece and his longer First Things essay point to weak institutions, thin intellectual networks, and cultural retreat from public life. These observations are accurate as far as they go. But Renn’s framing stops one level too shallow, because it focuses on what evangelical culture lacks rather than on what it systematically and reliably produces. The problem is not an absence. It is an output. Evangelical culture has spent generations overproducing risk-averse men, and risk-averse men do not build, disrupt, or lead at the levels Renn is describing. They fill cubicles.

The pattern is visible in almost every earnest Christian household. Boys are formed around a coherent set of virtues: responsibility, deference to authority, moral seriousness, and reputation management. Pastors and parents, motivated by genuine love, channel young men toward careers that signal stability and respectability. Law, medicine, ministry, corporate management. These are honorable vocations, but they share a defining feature. They are low-variance paths inside existing systems, not launching pads for building new ones. A young man who lands a comfortable, well-paying job with good benefits and a respected title is celebrated in these communities as a success. What rarely gets asked is whether he is a builder, a founder, or a leader in any substantive sense, or simply a well-compensated follower operating inside an institution someone else had the courage to create. Getting a safe, respectable job is not leadership. It is the appearance of it, and evangelical culture has spent generations treating the appearance as the substance.

The specific failure is not simply that these men avoid risk in the abstract. It is that they are trained to avoid failure, which is a different and more crippling problem. Failure tolerance is not a personality quirk. It is a developed capacity, built through repeated exposure to real stakes, real uncertainty, and real loss. The men who found companies, reshape industries, and accumulate lasting institutional power were not simply born with thicker skin. They were formed in environments where failure was treated as information rather than indictment, where a collapsed venture or a bad bet was processed and learned from rather than moralized over. Evangelical formation runs in the opposite direction. Failure in these communities frequently becomes a spiritual category. Poor discernment. Lack of prayer. Insufficient accountability. When failure gets theologized, young men learn to avoid it at all costs rather than absorb it and move forward. That single dynamic, more than any institutional weakness Renn can identify, explains the scarcity he is documenting.

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Karen Horney, the mid-century psychoanalyst, described a personality pattern she called “self-effacing,” characterized by a deep need to avoid conflict, subordinate personal ambition, and seek safety through compliance and approval. She also identified what she termed “self-resignation,” a settled acceptance of limits driven by anxiety about failure and rejection. Evangelical formation does not set out to produce these profiles, but it frequently does, because it prioritizes moral safety over institutional ambition and mission.1 The working goal of much evangelical parenting is to produce a young man who does not do anything wrong, who keeps his reputation clean, who stays inside the lines of acceptable behavior. This is understandable. It is also, functionally, a training program for followers rather than leaders. The man preoccupied with not doing anything wrong is not free to take the kind of action that building something significant actually requires.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff traced this impulse at the cultural level in The Coddling of the American Mind, arguing that American culture has broadly embraced safetyism, the belief that young people must be shielded from risk, failure, and discomfort. Evangelical households do not invent this pattern, but they intensify it by adding theological justification. Caution becomes prudence. Risk avoidance becomes faithfulness. The result is a formation environment that does not simply fail to produce bold men. It actively trains boldness out of them.

The research makes this concrete. A working paper on religion and risk attitudes found a consistent positive correlation between religious participation and risk aversion in economic behavior, with church membership linked to more cautious financial and career decisions. A meta-analysis on religion and entrepreneurship found that higher religiosity correlates with lower rates of new venture creation. Research published in the Journal of Comparative Economics found that religious entrepreneurs who do emerge tend to self-select toward lower-risk business activities to manage uncertainty. And a global behavioral study on entrepreneurial risk-taking and culture found that cultures with high uncertainty avoidance produce significantly less entrepreneurial activity than those that reward initiative and normalize failure. Evangelicalism, at its cultural center of gravity, looks far more like the former than the latter.

This is the formation pipeline Renn’s institutional analysis cannot see. Family environments and church cultures shape psychological dispositions. Those dispositions drive career selection. Career selection, aggregated across tens of thousands of men over decades, produces the social outcomes we observe. Evangelical men are not absent from elite spaces because institutions failed them. They are absent because they were formed to prefer the spaces where they are present: stable, predictable, bounded environments that reward rule-following and competence over the willingness to build something that does not yet exist. Getting a safe, respectable job is not leadership. It is the appearance of it, and evangelical culture has spent generations celebrating the appearance while the substance slips away.

Some voices inside the church have begun to say this plainly. Writers working in the Christian leadership space have argued that congregational cultures have become risk-averse organizations where bold action is treated with suspicion and failure is something to be avoided rather than processed and learned from. This is not a management problem. It is a spiritual formation problem with structural consequences.

The biblical tradition is full of figures who act under radical uncertainty, leave behind security without any guarantee of return, and pursue callings at enormous personal cost. Abraham leaves without a destination. Joseph endures catastrophic failure before any vindication arrives. Paul builds something new in every city he enters, usually at the cost of his physical safety and social standing. That tradition is not a template for cubicle life. The gap between what the faith actually commends and how evangelical formation actually operates is large, and closing it will require far more honesty than most communities are currently prepared to offer.

Bradley is planning to post a second installment with his proposed solutions today. Be sure to check out and subscribe to his newsletter.

Anthony B. Bradley

Anthony B. Bradley, PhD helps institutions reverse the boy-to-man collapse by fixing fatherhood and fraternity culture with data, theology, and field-tested programs and the pursuit of justice through personalism.

What this means is that if there are multiple forms of currency with the same nominal value but different actual values, people will hoard the valuable form and spend the less valuable form.

We have actually seen this phenomenon in the United States. Up until 1965, our silver dimes and quarters used to contain actual silver. Since then, they contain no silver. Hence, you almost never see a pre-1965 quarter or dime in circulation. (If you ever get one - save it!)

The same general idea applies to other social concepts as well. We often see situations in which bad social practices starting driving out good.

My wife came across a great example of this recently. She’s still a member of Upper West Side moms social media groups. Recently someone in one of those groups posted asking for help for a problem. She and her husband wanted to hire a nanny, and they wanted to do it right by paying the person on the books, pay taxes, etc. They were willing to pay more to do this right, but even when offering the same net pay as with a cash under the table deal, no prospective nannies were willing to actually work on the books.

Essentially, even for the rare people who want to do the right thing and follow all the rules, it’s difficult to do so because other participants in the market do not want to.

Labor practices are a good example here. Once a critical mass of firms in an industry start hiring illegals at scale, others are almost forced to do so in order to remain competitive. Then legal workers rightly decide to avoid that line of work because the compensation is being set by the marginal illegal worker, which entrenches illegal labor even more.

Another example people like to use is premarital sex. There used to be at least some barriers for men to obtain it. Now that premarital sex is completely legitimized, and out-of-wedlock births fully preventable, it’s more or less expected that people who are dating will have sex relatively soon within the relationship - as early as the first date in many cases.

In this environment, it’s more difficult for women who may not want to have pre-marital sex, or even just to wait a while to ensure they have an actual relationship with the man before having sex with him, to decline to do so. Most men today are simply not willing to date a woman on that basis, so women who refuse to provide sex find their potential dating pool shrinks significantly.

In practice, this might not affect the average woman all that much. That minority of women who do want to avoid pre-marital sex are likely doing so for religious reasons, and thus only want to date men from that smaller pool of other similarly religious people anyway.

But some reports suggest similar things are happing to sexual practices under the influence of pornography. There’s perhaps a greater expectation that younger women will engage in degrading sexual acts that men see in porn. If a large enough pool of women do start performing them, then those who decline to do so will see their dating prospects shrink significantly, putting pressure on them to get into the game.

And of course, given the widespread consumption of pornography today, women don’t have a lot of dating market leverage to insist that men who want to date them don’t watch it.

Another one we see in progress is soaring rates of disability accommodation claims. Substantial percentages - 30% or more in some cases - of students at elite universities are receiving accommodations for a claimed disability. They are getting things like extra time to take tests. You can easily see how this would benefit their competitive standing academically. So people who don’t claim to suffer from anxiety or some such in order to level the playing field are putting themselves at a disadvantage.

It strikes me that in cases of this nature, it’s unlikely there will be that many people who simply refuse to play the game on principle.

Politics and our institutions also suffer from these dynamics. Look at how dysfunctional our political system is, and how shamelessly you have to behave in order to succeed within it. No surprise, most of the high-minded, public-spirited people of good character that we might want in politics take a look at this and decide to stay out of it. This, of course, only makes politics even more of a circus. (Frankly, it’s amazing how many decent people still decide to get involved in politics these days, given the current conditions).

Similarly, we all know that our society would be better if we had functional, trusted institutions. But we are far from that point. Hence the rational move from an individual perspective in many cases is to adopt a strategy of insulation. You exit from institutions and structure your life to buffer yourself against institutional failure. This causes institutional trust and performance to decline further.

We have been seeing this with public schools in many cases. In some places, the primary public school district is in a slow motion collapse, as everyone who can gets out.

Or think about geographic political segregation. Everybody knows we are better off with competitive elections, but people are moving to jurisdictions where others share their politics. This “big sort” phenomenon has led to a number of one party cities, counties, and states, with the bad governance outcomes you’d expect.

It seems to me that there are quite a number of areas in our society where we’ve been caught in this sort of spiral where bad practices are driving out good.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Sometimes, good practices drive out bad.

The most famous case here is probably Henry Ford’s $5 a day wage. By paying more than other car makers, he secured a quality labor force and reduced turnover. This also led to workers being able to afford the cars they were producing. Competitors had to level up their labor practices.

Very often, a competitive market will produce this dynamic from a customer perspective, as improvements from one provider pressure others to adopt them in order to stay competitive. That’s why many of our consumer products have gotten better.

We obviously want to have more of this dynamic.

Gresham’s Law is an important concept to keep in mind when assessing the world. We have to recognize when we are dealing with a situation where bad practices are driving out good. If we don’t understand that dynamic at work, and take actions that will fundamentally disrupt it, then our solutions to various negative things we see are likely to fall short of what’s needed because they don’t address the underlying incentive structures at play.

I’ll again highlight the pending release of a new Canon Press book with people engaging with my “Negative World” idea. It’s called Welcome to Negative World: How to Read the Times You’re In, and you can now order it on Amazon.

I also want to make you aware that Real Clear Investigation is accepting applications for $20,000 grants to fund investigative reporting projects. Details await at the link.

What I’ve Been Up To

I’m presently in Savannah, Georgia, where I’m speaking at a small conference. This is part of an intense stretch of travel and speaking. I’ve got three events in three different cities the week of April 20, then hopefully a bit of a break.

I wanted to share pictures from some of the events I’ve done so far this year.

Back in January I spoke at the David Network conference. The David Network is a great group of faith-based Gen Z people from Ivy+ institutions. I was on a panel on the future of conservatism with Robert George from Princeton University, Patrick Deneen from Notre Dame, and Margarita Mooney Clayton from Princeton Seminary.

I previously had George on my podcast talking about the future of conservatives in academia, a topic he not only talks about, but has done a lot about. I’m planning to have Margarita Mooney Clayton on very soon, and Patrick Deneen is on my list.

I also spoke at an event sponsored by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. I was on the keynote panel about troubled young men called “The Lost Boys.” The other speakers were Richard Reeves of the American Institute of Boys and Men, and Alvaro de Vicente, headmaster of the all boys school The Heights. UVa sociologist Brad Wilcox moderated.

The video of our entire panel is also available to watch.

I have not gotten any photos from my Hephzibah House event in New York, but here’s one from a luncheon event I did at the Manhattan Institute while I was in town.

I was also in Washington, DC recently for a salon dinner hosted by American Affairs to discuss a recent article of mine. While there I was able to spend some time talking with my Senator Todd Young.

I’ve known my other Senator, Jim Banks, since he was in the House, but this was my first time meeting Sen. Young.

This isn’t even all the events I’ve done recently, just the ones I’ve managed to get pictures from so far.

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Visions of Biblical Womanhood

The New Yorker ran an interesting piece comparing the visions of Christian womanhood in books by Jen Hatmaker and Emma Waters. The author, Emma Green, used to be the religion reporter at the Atlantic, and so knows this beat.

Waters is part of an emerging cohort of Gen Z writers trying to reclaim female empowerment for young women who are both religious and conservative. Just as evangelical deconstruction became its own subculture, which Hatmaker helped define, these new, young, family-oriented religious conservatives seem to be forging a potent subculture of their own.

…

At the same time, feminists have never quite known what to do with women like Schlafly or Waters, or, for that matter, with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, other than calling them hypocrites for having big careers while singing the virtues of staying home. That kind of dismissal misses something important about the project that Waters is pursuing. She’s writing about women who find freedom in the constraints of motherhood and marriage, and insisting that there’s room for them to nurture both professional ambitions and a traditional home life, if not necessarily at the same time. Hatmaker felt small in her conservative world, but Waters doesn’t feel small in hers; instead, she feels relief from the relentless pressure to lean in. She doesn’t experience motherhood and marriage as a millstone she must bear on the way to career success, or as a source of ambivalence about her identity. She appears to be at peace in the conviction that she was made for both.

Jael is a sly choice of hero for Waters, because she’s so easy to cast as a girlboss. After all, it takes real determination to drive a tent peg through a man’s skull. But nobody owns Jael, and women don’t have to fit a feminist frame to be powerful. Waters is lucky enough to be a young woman in a world where she can freely choose her remix of a traditional life. The tent peg is in her hands now.

Click over to read the whole thing.

I’ve known Emma since before she married Jack. It’s exciting to see Gen Z people like her get such great press. I believe she’s also been included in NYT cover stories twice as well.

I had her on my podcast to talk about her new book.

All the Single Ladies

The NYT ran an interesting piece (gift link) about single women who are throwing themselves 40th birthday parties that are designed as if they were weddings.

For some single women, the milestone 40th birthday is more than a party. Instead of waiting for a partner to justify a celebration, women are using the moment as a declaration of empowerment and self-love, complete with wedding attire, a curated guest list of their closest friends and family and the joy and excitement of a wedding.

“People are getting married later in life,” said Sarah Adair, the founder of Social Bliss Events in Nashville, who has planned several wedding-style 40th birthdays for clients. “Women deserve to celebrate such a milestone with or without a partner.”

…

“So much of our adult lives are spent marking the traditional milestones you hear about your whole life — engagements, marriages, babies, first homes,” Ms. Bart, 43, said. “For women who aren’t partnered, there’s often no external occasion prompting this kind of celebration, so creating one yourself is a genuine declaration of self-worth.”

Alyssa Pettinato, the owner of Alinato Events in New York, helped her best friend plan a blowout wedding-style 40th birthday in March 2025. “Millennials like to party,” she said. “We like to show up and show out.”

Ms. Pettinato estimates that her friend, who is single and childless, spent nearly $50,000 on her 75-person affair at Le Jardinier in New York, which drew friends and family members from across the country.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Related:

NYT: Why Marriage, for So Many, Is Less Appealing Than Ever (gift link) - From Gen Z to Gen X, a pause in the march to the altar, or a decision to skip it altogether, is becoming more common

The Times of London wrote a piece about why women aren’t having babies. You’ll never guess who they blame.

And the Wall Street Journal wrote on the women who love the manosphere (gift link).

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How We Gave Up on Forgiveness

The Financial Times is the world’s best newspaper, and has the best lineup on columnists, one of whom is Jemima Kelly. Her new piece on how we gave up on forgiveness is stellar. Since the FT has a very hard paywall, I’ll quote as much of it as I can justify.

“Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” These words, spoken by Jesus on the cross at Calvary, according to the Gospel of St Luke, constitute the apotheosis of one of the most important virtues in Christianity.

At the time of his greatest suffering and as his mortal life was about to end, Jesus was asking God to show love and mercy towards those who had wrongfully condemned him to his imminent death. This courageous act of forgiveness, as all good Christians know, is one of Easter’s central messages. The sinless Jesus died on the cross in order to redeem all of us mortal sinners, so that we may be forgiven by God.

Indeed, forgiveness is a key theme throughout the New Testament, and thus forms an important part of what it means to be a Christian (and to be a follower of many other major religions, too). During the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus encouraged his followers to not only love their enemies as they would love their friends, but to pray for those who might persecute them. In the Lord’s Prayer, Christians ask God to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”, connecting divine forgiveness of us imperfect humans with our own commitment to forgive others.

And yet, in our increasingly secular, consequentialist world, in which the very notion of virtue appears to have gone out of fashion, forgiveness is no longer much spoken about, or even held up as something to aspire to. In fact, it often seems to be considered as quite the opposite: something akin to moral weakness, or even altogether immoral.

Bizarrely, this is often the case when someone has not done the wrong thing but has said or even implied the wrong thing. The problem seems to be that they have thought the wrong thing; once they’ve said the wrong thing, they’re out. If you dare to “platform” them so that they might explain themselves or apologise, and in so doing “let them off the hook”, that can mean you’re out too. Guilt by forgiveness, you might say.

And so, faced with no route to redemption, those who are deemed to have done, said or thought the wrong thing are left in moral Mantua with their fellow deplorables, and often drawn into more extreme positions with no incentive to do otherwise, their voice amplified on one side of the spectrum by their very banishment from the mainstream.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

If you didn’t see this new essay in American Reformer from Georgetown professor Joshua Mitchell on the Reformation in America, it’s a very important and thought provoking essay. It inspired an entire newsletter edition from Ross Douthat interacting with his thesis, as well as mentions and comments from others too. I may write more about it, and hope to have Mitchell on the podcast to discuss it, but I wanted to flag this for you now with a very high commendation.

New Yorker: The Camps Promising to Turn You - or Your Son - Into an Alpha Male.

IM 1776: The Food Guidelines They Wanted

New Content and Media Mentions

I got mentions this week from Andrew Sullivan (actually about Joseph Holmes’ article) and Commonplace.

New this week:

• Things That Are Getting Better - A hopeful counterpoint to the endless online negativity: modern life is advancing in surprising and practical ways

• Love, Loss, and Land - In a cynical age, The Madison dares to portray good men, great marriages, and the healing power of place - A guest post by John Seel

As a cultural analyst, I rarely find myself praising contemporary film or television. That is not because good storytelling is impossible today, but because it is increasingly rare. Which is why Taylor Sheridan’s new series The Madison deserves attention.

Hollywood is often criticized—and not without reason. Alongside the academy, media, and advertising, the entertainment industry helps shape what sociologists call the social imaginary: the stories through which we understand reality itself. Stories do not merely entertain. They form moral imagination.

And some cultural influences matter more than others.

When pollutants enter the Mississippi River, it matters greatly whether they enter at Lake Itasca in Minnesota—the river’s headwaters—or near New Orleans after the damage is already done. Cultural problems work the same way. Addressing issues at the headwaters is always more effective than dealing with their downstream consequences.

Two such headwaters’ issues today are masculinity and marriage.

America has one of the highest rates of father absence in the world. Marriage, historically the basic building block of stable societies, is increasingly delayed, devalued, or dismissed altogether. Many now see it as a constraint on personal freedom, a legal liability, or a relic of religious tradition. If marriage were a stock, we would have to say it is trading in a long-term bear market.

It is into this cultural moment that Sheridan’s storytelling speaks.

The Madison offers a surprisingly moving meditation on masculinity, marriage, and the search for meaning after loss. It is, in many ways, a countercultural story—not because it is political, but because it is deeply human. Attempts to interpret it primarily through the lenses of culture-war categories like feminism or “toxic masculinity” miss the point entirely. This is not a story about ideology. It is a story about love, grief, and the possibility of restoration.

The series contrasts two cultural worlds: the status-driven corridors of New York’s Madison Avenue and the wide, restorative spaces of Montana’s Madison River Valley. Unlike Sheridan’s more overtly masculine narratives, this story is largely told through the emotional experience of women navigating grief after the sudden death of Preston Clyburn, a devoted husband and family patriarch.

His unexpected death serves as more than a plot device. It becomes a symbol of the disruptions that come to every life—the moments when comfort collapses and we are forced into what might be called a liminal journey through grief toward renewed meaning.

What makes Sheridan’s storytelling compelling is its emotional honesty. The themes of love, loss, and land do not feel ideological or sentimental. They feel earned. This is storytelling shaped by experience, where pain has been transformed into wisdom rather than bitterness. That combination is increasingly rare.

At the center of the story is the deeply loving but imperfect marriage between Preston and his wife Stacy, played with quiet strength by Michelle Pfeiffer. Through her loss, Stacy comes to recognize both the beauty of what she had and the small ways she had taken it for granted. Her grief is accompanied by regret, making the story both cautionary and invitational. It quietly asks viewers not only to desire a great marriage but to nurture one while they still can.

Perhaps most striking, however, is the series’ portrayal of men.

At a time when male characters are often depicted as either incompetent or dangerous, The Madison presents men whose strength is inseparable from their emotional intelligence. Law enforcement officers in both New York and Montana are portrayed not as caricatures but as men marked by experience, compassion, and quiet steadiness. Even a New York therapist—a character easily written with cynicism—embodies attentiveness and care.

These are not perfect men. They are believable men. Men shaped by hardship who nevertheless display kindness, restraint, and presence. Understanding, gentleness, and loving initiative are treated not as weaknesses but as marks of maturity. It has been a long time since television has portrayed masculinity with this kind of moral seriousness.

The spiritual center of the story, however, may be neither the marriage nor the characters, but the land itself.

Like filmmaker Terrence Malick, Sheridan treats the landscape not merely as scenery but as a character. The Madison River Valley becomes a place of healing, its dawns and sunsets visually capturing the in-between spaces where transformation happens. These women, shaped by the pace and ambitions of New York, find themselves emotionally and spiritually unprepared for tragedy. Their burial for the man they loved is marked by an absence that is striking: no minister, no liturgy, no language of transcendence.

Into that silence steps the land.

The natural world becomes a kind of spiritual presence, offering a form of healing where institutional religion is absent. When grief presses in, it is not to ideology or self-assertion that they turn, but to place. The land becomes what might be called a form of cultural therapy—a reminder that meaning is often recovered not through argument but through encounter.

Their journey through grief is unfinished. Like life itself, it remains messy and unresolved. Fortunately, the story will continue in a second season.

It is not surprising that the series has drawn criticism. Countercultural stories often do. Some critics have dismissed it as simplistic or ideologically suspect. But such reactions may say more about our cultural assumptions than about the story itself.

The Madison dares to suggest something unfashionable: that men can be good, that marriage can be noble, and that place can heal fractured lives. In a cultural moment marked by cynicism about all three, that alone makes it noteworthy.

If our cultural crises begin at the headwaters, then perhaps our renewal must begin there as well.

And that is what The Madison ultimately offers: not escapism, but what might be called headwaters cultural therapy—a reminder that love still matters, that loss can still teach, and that the places that form us may yet help restore us to our better angels.

Renn Report 1q26

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Every year people complain that Google doesn’t create a “doodle” for Easter. This year, they put up a pretty good one in my opinion. More evidence perhaps of a vibe shift.

In case you’ve been wondering about the podcast, I’ve been traveling so extensively that I haven’t had time in my studio to record episodes. This is my last intense week of travel for a while, so hopefully I’ll be able to resume recording soon.

There’s so much doom and gloom in the world that this week I want to feature a couple of positive articles.

First I want to reflect on some of what’s going right in the world.

So much of the vibe in today’s online discourse is basically doomerism. Things are bad, and getting worse. The idea of “ensh—ification” is one that encapsulates the mood. The basic concept is that many of our experiences, such as with technology, are being degraded, often intentionally, by someone looking to make an extra buck.

Let’s be honest, there’s plenty of this kind of negativity that’s spot on.

But there’s also a lot that’s getting better in the world.

Let’s start with airports. America has long been a byword for terrible airports. And while ours still perhaps don’t measure up to the gleaming palaces in some foreign countries, the general airport experience has gotten much, much better.

There are a lot terminals that have been designed and built in the post-9/11 era, and they are generally pretty great. Indianapolis kicked off the trend with a 2008 terminal that’s still regularly rated the best in the country for its size class. Other smaller cities have built or are building brand new terminals. Kansas City just replaced a terminal that might have had the worst design in the country. New Orleans and Pittsburgh have new ones. Columbus is building a new one. Portland’s new terminal building is spectacular.

Big cities are getting better too. Start with New York. LaGuardia’s old Central Terminal was in a class by itself for being terrible. This is the one that caused people to say New York had “third world” airports. It’s been replaced with a very nice new terminal. Terminal C has also been redone to be very nice. JFK’s terminals are getting upgraded, and Newark’s Terminal A is not bad at all. San Francisco’s new Terminal 1 is sparkling.

People like to complain about air travel. And yes, airlines now charge à la carte for basically everything. But as someone who has been flying for a long time, almost always does so in economy, and who doesn’t have access to any lounges, I can tell you that much of the airport experience has gotten a lot better. Not only are many - if certainly not all! - terminals better, but things like Touchless TSA are improving the security experience.

Cars are another one. We visited my mother for Easter. This involves climbing several hundred feet of elevation into the knobs above the Ohio River. I remember growing up that we’d need to gun it as hard has possible after turning onto the road that goes up the hill, because you needed to get a head of steam to help the underpowered cars of that era make the climb at a decent speed. Our cars could rarely get above 45 MPH when floored. Even my dad’s V8 struggled to climb it at speed.

Today’s four cylinder engines like the one in our car are so peppy that they could probably hit 70 climbing that hill. I top it out at 55 MPH because of the curves, but the idea of not having enough power is a thing of the past in new cars.

I bought a new car after graduating from college, but otherwise always drove beaters to save cash. Our old Prius had its hybrid battery go bad during the pandemic, so we were forced to buy a car. Because used cars were so ridiculous, we ended up buying a new one. It’s like driving a different kind of technology: backup cameras, blind spot indicators, remote start etc from my phone, satellite radio, and more. I had no idea cars had improved so much.

Last week I was also in San Francisco and used driverless Waymos as a ride hail service. It was like getting to experience a science fiction future. People are also blown away by Tesla’s Full Self Driving experience, which appears at most a few years away from being able to operate in a true autonomous mode.

Then there are breakthrough medical advances. We have managed to find a cure for about 90% of cystic fibrosis cases, a condition that was previously debilitating and fatal. We now have gene therapy treatments that are enabling some children born deaf to hear. In a slew of other areas from premature births to cancer, we’ve made real progress even if long promised fundamental breakthroughs remain elusive. GLP-1 treatments promise to basically cure obesity. Life expectancy, which was falling, has now risen back to an all-time high.

There have also been incredible communications advances. Elon Musk revolutionized rockets, which enabled the creation of new low earth orbit satellite internet and cell phone service. You can now have real, low-latency, high-speed internet on an airplane. I’ve used it and it’s incredible. Starlink’s direct to cell technology also promises to all but eliminate dead spots, enable emergency communications during natural disasters, etc. Newer iPhones already can automatically detect when you’ve been in a crash and summon help. They can even do so via satellite.

The reality is that in many domains of life, things have been getting better, even in recent years.

I don’t want to make light of the things that are going wrong. We have real problems we have to deal with, and I plan to keep talking about them. But we have to keep a sense of perspective and recognize where things are going well - and being thankful for them.

While there’s no guarantee we are on a track to a fantastic future, we are far from guaranteed to be doomed either. There are actually many things to feel good about.

Cover image: Portland Airport by SounderBruce/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

My most recent significant piece on this was a 2023 column in Governing magazine:

Changes in cities over the course of the last 30 to 40 years have greatly undermined local leadership cultures like the one which produced [Richard] Ravitch, a lifetime New Yorker. Among the biggest culprits was deregulation that led to corporate consolidation, particularly in banking, utilities and retailing. Back in 1980, the banks in most cities were locally owned and were limited by law to their home markets. Their CEOs were extremely powerful both in their companies and communities. And their personal professional incentives were aligned with those of their locality. The only way to grow their banks or electric utilities was to grow the community where they were based.

Today, many CEOs of once-local companies are branch managers of global firms. Their job is to sit on local boards and dabble in community relations, but they don’t really call the shots anymore. Companies that have remained locally based now typically have national or global reach, so the local market is just one element in a vast portfolio. In a more nationalized and globalized business culture, those who aspire to high corporate positions must take great care to echo standardized positions, particularly around ESG (environmental, social and governance goals) and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion). They are constrained by career considerations from taking any truly independent positions or actions.

Civic leadership has been democratized and diversified in recent decades. It’s no longer a small group of connected white male elites along with a Black leader or two, getting together in a room and deciding what to do. More inclusive leadership has brought many benefits — neighborhoods aren’t getting demolished for freeways today, for example — but has greatly complicated reaching consensus. With some exceptions like Dan Gilbert in Detroit or George Kaiser in Tulsa, few local business leaders today are able to step forward and assert leadership publicly or even behind the scenes. Civic leadership has been bureaucratized.

Thomas Edsall in the New York Times quoted me extensively on this, and also featured several other thinkers, in a more expansive treatment of the subject. The Christian Science Monitor also ran an interesting article in 2009 looking at this trend, focusing on Boston and Atlanta.

People have tended not to notice this shift, as it has happened slowly over many years. Although people - even the leaders themselves - in many cities sense that there’s a leadership deficit, they struggle to articulate what has happened and why specifically things are different today.

While it is easy to list major corporations that have been merged out of existence or gone bust, it’s not necessarily easy to see the impact on leadership composition and civic capacity.

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To shed more light on this, I was able to use Claude to help do some analysis I had long wanted to undertake, but was not able to do until now. I look at the composition of participants in civic leadership development programs over time so see what has changed.

I use Indianapolis as the case study here because I am most familiar with it. But there’s no reason to think Indianapolis is unique in what I found. I believe basically every similar sized city and even ones that are bigger are showing similar trends. Claude largely validated this when I asked for cross-regional comparisons.

Every city today has a variety of leadership development programs. These trace back to an original that was launched, I believe, in Philadelphia in the late 1950s. They took off in the 1970s and 80s.

Indianapolis had one of the earlier programs, known as the Stanley K. Lacy Executive Leadership Series, or SKL. While there are several other programs in the region today, SKL remains the flagship, most prestigious one. It was started in the mid-1970s, and program materials from it were used by many other cities to launch their programs. The first trade association group of leadership development programs (now defunct) was headquartered in Indianapolis and helped spread program ideas around.

I actually spoke to an SKL class a few years ago, and it’s a great program from what I see.

SKL publishes a list of every person who has gone through the program, over 1,000 of them it would appear. I have long wanted to do a study looking at how the profile of the participants in the program have changed over time, but it was too difficult a project for me to take on. AI tools like Claude now allow tasks like this to be done in minutes. While its analysis may not be rigorous enough for academic publication, its findings are illuminating.

Claude divided SKL into various overlapping eras in terms of its participants and moderators (cohort leaders). First was what it called the “Founding Era” (Classes I-X, roughly 1976-1986):

The earliest classes drew from the very core of the Indianapolis civic establishment — old-money families, major law firms, banking, real estate, and the emerging Unigov-era Republican power structure. The names read like a directory of the families who built modern Indianapolis.

…

This era’s participants were overwhelmingly white, drawn from corporate law, banking, real estate, and the major Indianapolis firms. The level of subsequent accomplishment was extremely high within the Indiana civic ecosystem — these people became board chairs, managing partners, and institutional leaders. But the scale was distinctly local and state-level.

Second was the “Maturation Era,” (classes VI–XV, roughly 1982–1991). This is when the program reached it apex, with several participants achieving national prominence (like former Bush Economic Policy Council Director Al Hubbard):

This stretch produced some of the program's most consequential graduates in terms of scale of eventual influence…This era shows the program at its peak institutional influence: it was selecting people who would go on to run major national organizations, hold senior White House positions, sit on state supreme courts, and lead the state legislature. The diversity was improving but still limited; the professional mix was broadening beyond pure corporate law into politics, media, and the nonprofit sector.

It then moves on to the “Middle Period”, (classes XVI-XXX, roughly 1992-2006):

The program continued to select solid civic leaders, but the peak concentration of "name brand" graduates begins to dilute somewhat. This is partly a function of time — many in these classes are now in their 50s and still building their legacies — but also reflects a broadening of the program's reach beyond the tight old-guard establishment….The classes get more diverse in this period — more women, more African Americans, more nonprofit and government professionals alongside the corporate lawyers and bankers. The professional profiles shift toward a more typical "emerging leader" mix: marketing executives, nonprofit directors, mid-career government officials, healthcare administrators.

Then there’s the Recent Era (classes XXXI–XLVIII, roughly 2007–2024). These people especially may not have had enough runway to fully rise to their career peak as of yet:

Several notable graduates emerge in this period, though the median profile is arguably more "solid mid-career professional" than "future titan."

Claude’s overall analysis of the trend:

The arc is clear:

The early classes (I–XV) drew from a concentrated, elite, old-guard establishment — the families and firms that ran Indianapolis through the Unigov era. The participants were already well-positioned by birth, education, or firm affiliation, and the program functioned as a kind of civic finishing school for people who were going to lead regardless. This produced an outsized concentration of nationally significant figures (Hubbard, Miles, Selby, Lytle, Bosma, Brooke).

The middle and later classes reflect a genuine broadening — more diverse racially, more women, a wider range of professions (marketing, nonprofits, tech, education, sports), more first-generation professionals rather than establishment heirs. This is a democratization of the program, and it’s arguably a good thing. But it also means the median graduate is a respected mid-career professional rather than a future national power broker.

The honest assessment: SKL's earliest classes caught the Indianapolis establishment at a moment of unusual civic concentration — the Unigov-era Republican coalition that deliberately built the city's sports, cultural, and business infrastructure was tight-knit, and SKL was essentially credentialing the next cohort of that coalition. As Indianapolis has grown, diversified, and become less dominated by a single civic power structure, the program has naturally evolved into something more broadly representative and less exclusively elite. The individual peak accomplishments are lower in the recent classes, but the program is arguably more representative of the city's actual leadership pipeline.

I then asked Claude to drill into the sector makeup of the participants, as it seems to have gone from corporate dominated to non-profit dominated. Here’s what it found:

Your impression is correct, and it's quite striking once you look at it systematically. The program has undergone a major compositional transformation — from one dominated by corporate and professional-services executives to one heavily weighted toward nonprofits, government, and what might broadly be called the "civic infrastructure" sector.

…

The program has essentially migrated from being a corporate credentialing mechanism — where the Indianapolis business establishment identified its next generation and socialized them into civic responsibility — to something closer to a nonprofit and civic-sector professional development program that happens to include some corporate participants.

This isn’t necessarily wrong, but it does represent a fundamental change in what the program is. The early SKL was connecting people who already had, or were going to have, substantial private-sector economic power to the civic apparatus. The implicit theory was: “These people are going to run major businesses and control capital; we need to make sure they understand the city’s needs and feel a responsibility to serve.” The current SKL is more like: “These people are already working in community-facing roles; let’s give them a network and shared vocabulary.”

A civic leader friend of mine took this and ran it through ChatGPT to get some additional perspectives:

Old model: few people with massive concentrated authority. New model: many people with narrower, networked influence

Early SKL solved a key problem: “How do we make powerful people care about the city?” Modern SKL solves a different problem: “How do we connect people who already care?” Those are not the same.

You now have two largely separate ecosystems: 1) Economic Power Network and 2) Civic/Nonprofit Network. SKL used to bridge these two. Now it mostly sits in #2.

SKL has drifted from a power-alignment institution to a values-alignment institution. That’s a downgrade if your goal is influence over capital. It’s an upgrade if your goal is inclusive civic engagement.

Claude’s explanation for these shifts directly hits what I have long hammered about corporate consolidation, as well as the decline of the WASP Establishment. There are simply fewer locally headquartered companies in Indianapolis today, and thus fewer genuine corporate power brokers and “blue blood” heirs to populate this program if that were still the intent

1. The decline of locally headquartered corporate power. Indianapolis’s corporate landscape has changed dramatically since 1976. Many of the major firms whose executives populated early classes have been acquired, merged, or moved — the banking consolidations that eliminated Merchants National, National City, and others; the corporatization of old family businesses. The number of “major local corporate executive” slots available to fill has simply shrunk. Eli Lilly, Anthem, Cummins, and Simon Property Group still exist, but their executive ranks are more nationally recruited and less embedded in the Indy civic network.

The last bit highlights that merely retaining a corporate HQ doesn’t mean its executives relate to the local civic environment in the same way. The reason those corporations are likely still independent is that they became larger, more expansive national and global institutions.

Eli Lilly, for example, is a global juggernaut. It’s the world’s most valuable pharmaceutical company. It’s notable that Lilly CEO David Ricks, who has spent a quarter century at Lilly and built his career there, does not appear to have gone through SKL. Instead, he was doing things like running Lilly’s China business.

Ricks operates at the pinnacle of global capitalism, and, frankly, it would be a misallocation of his time to spend too much of it on local Indianapolis affairs. And even though he runs the company, even he can’t take too much “political” risk in his local engagement, such as by pushing controversial initiatives. Or at least it would be potentially unwise to do so; he needs to be channeling his risk taking into Lilly’s actual business. Notwithstanding that, however, Ricks has arguably done more civically for Indianapolis than any other business leaders since the last actual Lilly family member. He’s in effect padded the coffers of the philanthropic Lilly Endowment by over $50 billion additional dollars - increasing its giving capacity by over $2.5 billion per year, much of it within Indiana.

The key is that the corporate landscape in cities has changed tremendously in the past few decades.

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Claude also highlights the growth of the non-profit sector - candidly, not necessarily a positive thing - self-selection bias, and a focus on DEI as factors driving these shifts. It also highlighted the shift in SKL from being run by the Chamber of Commerce (i.e, the business community) to a standalone non-profit (a civic sector NGO). This is a change that has occurred in other cities as well.

Changes in the composition of SKL are an indicator of changes in the composition of Indianapolis’ overall civic leadership more generally. There are fewer genuine mover and shaker types today, many more corporate functionaries and non-profit people.

The Final Four is being held in Indianapolis again this weekend. This is a legacy of the city’s efforts to use sports as an economic and civic development platform - originally to be “the amateur sports capital of the world” - in the 1980s. While the occasional city had hoped to use the Olympics as a brand booster, Indianapolis really pioneered the idea of American cities leveraging sports in the way we understand it today. It created the first ever city sports commission, the Indiana Sports Corp., for example.

People here have been asking for over a decade, “What’s the next sports strategy?” The reality is, there’s unlikely to be one. The leadership structure of Indianapolis and other cities today is less conductive to initiatives like that - which involve doing unique things that are not being done elsewhere, involving significantly political, civic, and financial risk. Not as many people today are able to take those risks and induce others to follow them.

It’s not that the people here are dumber or less competent than they used to be. But the entire economic and civic structure in which they are embedded is different. They are largely not part of old, influential families. They don’t run locally headquartered firms. If they do run local firms, those firms are part of a new era of globalized capitalism. There are way more of them who are part of non-profit type “stakeholder” organizations. And with the focus on inclusive leadership, there are just many, many more people involved.

The net result is ultimately lower capacity civic leadership.

Again, there’s every reason to believe this is now the norm in most places. I see the same trends playing out in Chicago and other cities I look at. The factors like corporate consolidation that help produce this operate at the national level, and so we should expect the impact to be pervasive (if not exactly the same everywhere).

Because our leadership problems today result in good measure from these kinds of structural factors, this suggests it won’t be easy to change things, at least at the local level.

Now, I don’t want to let our leaders off the hook entirely by suggesting everything is a result of outside forces. In my view, the Boomers have been incredibly bad at developing and empowering talent in subsequent generations, for example. Boomers want loyal soldiers in their own army, not to raise up people who might plausibly be generals in their own right some day.

Still, we have to recognize that structural forces are very much at play here.

Whatever the underlying causes, however, it’s clear that at the national and local levels, people do not even fully recognize the changes that have occurred in the nature of their leadership structures. There’s a sense that something is amiss, but not an understanding of what that is.

You can read Claude’s report on Indy’s SKL program here:

Skl Claude Analysis

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In closing, I’ll note that this kind of analysis shows the new capability space opened by AI. If I had wanted to do this kind of analysis without AI, it would have required enormous resources. I’d need people and money to track down who all the people in the various SKL classes were. Keep in mind, the organization only publishes a list of names by class. It doesn’t give titles, institutional affiliations, or even the year these classes took place. There are over a thousand people on the list, most of whom I’ve never heard of before. Even if someone much more knowledgeable and connected than me wanted to do this, it would be quite an undertaking.

With AI, I can just point Claude at the file, and it will do all the work for me. Perhaps it can’t identify every person on the list, but it can get a sufficient quantity of them to give a high level analysis. If the findings are interesting enough, someone could undertake a more formal study.

So much of the discussion around AI is around all the terrible things it might do or the ways it might harm people using it. But the possibility space opened by AI is endless. We have not yet begun to scratch the surface of the new capabilities that AI is going to put into the palm of our hand.

You should give it a try yourself. Take any historic list of people, run it through Claude, and see what interesting things it found. I ran a similar analysis of two long-running speaker series here in town, and also got really interesting and revealing results.

You now have the power to do things in minutes at nearly zero cost that even the most well-resourced institutions in town couldn’t easily pull off before AI. If you aren’t taking advantage of these capabilities, you are missing out on some very exciting developments in our world.

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Cover image: 2006 Final Four by Stepshep/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0

There’s a good reason we never stop talking about toxic masculinity. Men are powerful, so when they go bad, they’re dangerous. Recently, the Netflix documentary Into the Manosphere and The Young Women Leaving the New Right reignited conversations around how many men have modeled their views off of misogynist and racist figures like Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.

But as many have noted, it’s not enough to criticize. You have to offer an alternative. Author and CEO of the American Institute for Boys and Men, Dr. Richard Reeves, notes that much of the reason men turn to bad men for masculine models is that we often use “toxic masculinity” to refer to simply “masculinity”. “What does non-toxic masculinity look like?’ And people will often say things like ‘well, that’s where you’re more emotionally vulnerable, you’re much more caring, you’re nurturing.’ And then you say, ‘Well, how is that different from stereotypical femininity? Say, positive femininity?’ And then they’ll say, ‘Well, it isn’t really.”

This is one reason I think people found Project Hail Mary to be a breath of fresh air. The film has been a monster success among critics and audiences, achieving a 94% critics and 96% audience Rotten Tomatoes score and the second-highest box-office opening for a non-franchise in the past decade (only behind Oppenheimer) with $140.9 million global and $80.5 million domestic. The film is also a textbook case in positive masculinity. While many Hollywood films make it seem like you have to choose between Barbie’s toxic “Dictator Ken” or “Doormat Ken”, Project Hail Mary’s male heroes are distinctly positive while distinctly masculine. Understanding why can help us give men a viable vision for their manhood today.

Scientific Problem Solving

Ryland Grace–the hero of Project Hail Mary, portrayed by Ryan Gosling–is a problem solver. He’s a scientist who loves picking things apart, experimenting with them, and understanding how things work. And when he does–whether he’s figuring out how the bacteria work, how to translate his alien friend Rocky’s language, or how to save the world–he jumps for joy.

This ethos is at the heart of the film. Ryan Gosling describes it this way: “We’re so saturated with apocalyptic narratives and sort of just bleak outcomes, rarely given solutions. I think what he’s done is he’s giving us this opportunity to say maybe the future isn’t something to fear, rather just something to figure out, and that we’re capable of incredible things as human beings. It’s kind of our thing — that’s what we do.”

What’s fascinating is that this attitude is a well-established hallmark of masculinity. Sociologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt noted in The Anxious Generation that easily the biggest and most replicable cross-cultural male-female sex differences are that (on average) women like people more than things and men like things more than people. As kids, boys overwhelmingly play with trucks and girls with dolls. As teens, boys get addicted to video games and girls to social media. As adults, men choose STEM and women choose HEAL occupations. (Something even more true in more gender-equal societies.) Men choose religion, and women choose spirituality. Men find much more joy in looking at life like a machine to understand, problems to solve, and obstacles to overcome. Women look at life far more as relationships to love and reconcile with. Hence, men’s preference for stories about overcoming obstacles, such as action or sports movies (even when the protagonist is a woman). And why most stories made by women or for women (even when the lead is a man) have their conflicts resolved by people opening up and expressing their feelings (Heated Rivalry, Pride and Prejudice), self-acceptance and acceptance from others (K-Pop Demon Hunters), reconciling with and apologizing for wrongdoing (Frozen, Wicked).

When Moana addressed an environmental disaster like Project Hail Mary, the heroine apologized to the environment and made restitution. When Arrival addressed interstellar relationships, communication is solved through imaginative empathy rather than Project Hail Mary’s analytical problem-solving. This difference between “fixing” a situation and “empathizing” with it is often a source of mutual–often humorous–frustration between the sexes. (The “It’s not about the nail” sketch is one of my favorite examples from the guy’s point of view.)

The trend in Hollywood has been to treat the way men overwhelmingly operate in the world as a flaw. Reed Richards in Fantastic Four: First Steps describes his deeply analytical and scientific self as “broken” compared to his more empathetic wife. (A statement the film validates.) Films like Barbie, Iron Claw, Sketch, Ad Astra, and Deliver Me from Nowhere portray men’s relational style as a weakness to overcome. The main stories where men’s differences are welcome are stories about violence. Superhero movies or action heroes like John Wick, Reacher, or any Jason Statham film celebrate men, but primarily for their capacity to smash someone’s face in. These trends tell men the only acceptable way to be a man is to embrace stereotypical femininity or embrace violent masculinity. It doesn’t take an astrophage scientist to figure out where that leads.

Project Hail Mary portrays men’s orientation not as a barrier to thriving relationships, but as their source. Problem-solving is what brings Ryland Grace and Rocky together and how they solve the communication barrier. Problem-solving orientation is portrayed as a source of co-operation–where people work together to accomplish a goal–rather than something that requires a villain to destroy. (Unless you count the bacteria.)

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Friendship and Purpose

When people talk about the crisis of men, whether it’s male loneliness or men falling behind economically, there is a tendency to blame men and male culture. Movies about male friendship, (like Friendship), male arrested development, like Palm Springs and The King of Staten Island, blame men for maladjusted relational skills and lack of ambition.

But the data shows the opposite. Men still deeply desire to have a life of purpose and responsibility, and “define manhood in traditional terms: responsibility, sacrifice, and the capacity to provide for others.” But they simply don’t see the path available to them to achieve them. As Samuel James writes for the American Enterprise Institute: “For much of the 20th century, the transition to adulthood was guided by clear institutional pathways. Stable employment, often accessible without a degree, provided the foundation for marriage and family formation. Community institutions—religious congregations, civic associations, fraternal organizations—offered mentorship and a sense of belonging.”

The problem is these pathways are increasingly closed to men. Schools largely teach according to girls’ learning styles and grade girls higher than boys for the same work. During the height of the “Woke” era, multiple organizations made it a stated goal to diversify their workplace (without firing any of the guys at the top) by simply not hiring a generation of men. Churchgoing has also collapsed, and with it, a sense of purpose and a built-in community.

Church collapse and workplace instability have hurt both men’s and women’s relationships. But they’ve hit men harder because men tend to build relationships differently. Women build connection through emotional intimacy first. Men do so through shared work, purpose, and goals (as I detailed in my review of F1). Without a central goal–through faith, shared cultural identity, or work–it’s much harder for men to get to emotional intimacy.

We find Ryland Grace in the same place many men today are. He’s shut out of places of cultural respect and influence. He is then called upon to help save the world, and it is through that shared mission that he builds his deep bonds with others–Officer Carl, Eva Stratt, Rocky, and more. This “purpose-focused” relationship building is assumed and celebrated rather than deconstructed. But unlike more “man’s man” movies like F1, which portray relationships of mutual respect that never get to emotional intimacy, Project Hail Mary has its heroes cry and express their love for each other.

Then there’s the demoralization. Even when paths are not totally closed, it can be difficult to go where you know you’re not wanted. A common theme in Hollywood and culture over the past few decades is that a) humans are a cancer in the world that’s destroying it (Princess Mononoke, WALLl-E, Noah, Avatar), b) that things are better once men abandon their positions of power and give them over to women (Avengers: Endgame, Poor Things, The Last Jedi, One Battle After Another, The Bride) and c) institutions are evil/compromised and you can only be heroic and/or free by abandoning those institutions (almost every Marvel movie, Reacher, F1). It also permeates the culture that normalizes women bashing men in songs and on social media.

One of the reasons Dr. Jordan Peterson became so popular with men is he directly condemned that story and told them a different story. One where they were a hero, and investing in themselves and institutions made the world better–not worse. “You have a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter catastrophe of life to face, in truth, devoted to love and without fear.”

Project Hail Mary follows Peterson in flipping the script on how men see themselves. Ryland Grace is likewise called up by the government agent Eva Stratt and told that he is important and that he has a purpose. He constantly insists that he’s just a teacher, but she points to the value that he brings to the world, and that by partnering with the government he can save it. As I wrote in my review for World Magazine: “The world is ending, but in this movie, it’s not because humans are a disease, destroying the planet with climate change. On the contrary, they’re the world’s only hope of survival. Grace is a flawed hero without being a deconstruction of a hero. Human institutions are imperfect, but they aren’t shadowy conspiracies run by corporations endangering the planet to make a profit.”

Men’s power means that justified fears of toxic masculinity will never go away. But the more we have pictures of positive masculinity like Project Hail Mary, the more likely we are to see it in real life too.

Head’s up for those of you in the Bay Area. I’m going to be in San Francisco next week for some meetings, and we are hosting an American Reformer event on Monday at 8pm if you are interested in coming. Here’s the signup link.

Last week I was delighted to be at the University of Virginia to participate in a discussion about the challenges facing young men today. UVa sociologist Brad Wilcox moderated a panel with Richard Reeves of the American Institute for Boys and Men, Alvaro de Vicente of the all-male school the Heights, and me. Here’s the recording of this great event.

The Gen Z Male Attitude

In yesterday’s look at a new Institute for Family Studies survey of young men, I noted in the findings that Gen Z men are emphasizing being financially independent but not having a full time job as a marker of adulthood.

When I took an Uber to the airport yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with my 28yo male driver.

He’s very into the hustle culture. He likes to trade crypto and forex with high leverage. Has a mentor in Mexico and is planning to go visit him soon. That guy runs a discord server for traders. My driver is hoping they can spend some time traveling the world and open some pop-up stores.

He’s not averse to MLMs or any other way to make money, preferably quickly. He want to “get ahead” of AI because getting ahead of trends is how you make money. Has been scammed himself a few times, but doesn’t seem bothered.

He said he’s been to therapy, which sounds more like mindset coaching. He’s not interested in worrying about anything, says money is “just a tool” and is confident that if he keeps working at it, success will come his way - because he knows he has the work ethic.

He’s a trade school product. Has some tattoos, a couple of them crypto related. At no point did he express interest in getting a traditional job.

You can’t read too much into one person’s story - especially when I didn’t validate how much of it was true. But this is very resonant with what I see and hear in Gen Z, particularly those who are not part of the most elite, educated spectrum. (I previously wrote about how I’m bullish on this upscale segment of Gen Z).

Gen Z men just have very different views of the world from previous generations.

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Working at Home and Fertility

The Financial Times had a recent piece asking, “Could working from home solve the global fertility crisis?”

With an 18-month-old babbling and wailing in the back of a car outside her daughter’s primary school, Nicole Greene laughs at how “on-brand” she is to discuss how working from home could help increase fertility rates.

The 39-year-old founder of a communications consultancy says the decision to shift her agency entirely to remote working was a major factor not just in attracting talent in a predominantly female industry, but in deciding she could have another child.

…

Drawing on data from 38 countries, academics from King’s College London, Stanford University and Princeton University concluded that working from home could play a significant role in addressing sliding fertility rates.

“Flexibility over where we work is emerging as one of the most promising and cheapest ways to help people have the families they say they want,” says Cevat Giray Aksoy, associate professor of economics at King’s and lead research economist on the report. “In richer countries women still say their ideal family size is a little above two, but actual fertility is stuck closer to 1.7 or 1.8. That gap between desired and realised family is at the core of today’s demographic problem.”

Drawing on data gathered between 2023 and early 2025, Aksoy’s study found total fertility — including realised births and stated plans for more children — among more than 11,000 surveyed adults was “systematically higher for those who work from home at least one day a week”.

For couples where both partners worked from home at least once a week, total fertility was 14 per cent higher compared to when neither did — equivalent to 0.32 children per woman. The findings hold when controlled for other factors such as education, age or marital status.

The FT has a very hard paywall, but you can click over to try to read the whole thing.

The Barbellization of Venture Capital

There was an interesting recent interview with venture capitalist Marc Andreesen in which he was asked about starting his firm a16z and the research that went into it. It starts around 22:00, and the video embed below should be queued up to the right spot.

The process he describes here is an important one. He studied the trends that were occurring in other industries that were related to VC, and extrapolated those to the industry he aspired to be in.

This sort of study of industry dynamics is key to understanding much of what is happening in the world economically.

I remember once listening to the former CEO of a telecom company talking about how he had hired McKinsey to advise him on the likely future of his industry. McKinsey noted that many industries were consolidating towards a “two towers” model: Walgreens and CVS, Home Depot and Lowes, etc. Telecom was likely to consolidate in the same manner into AT&T and Verizon. This man’s own firm was not going to be a long term survivor, so the management strategy was to build it into the most attractive acquisitions candidate. (In reality, cell phone service at least ended up with three major competitors, but the trend was still correct).

This is a more business than cultural or policy item I know, but I wanted to give you insights into one small way that top business leaders think about and model the world. Obviously there are insights to apply to other fields as well.

Best of the Web

The Atlantic: The Death of Millennial Feminism (gift link) - Lindy West has unwittingly written the obituary for an era

Of course, it’s one thing to set rigid and unforgiving rules of human conduct. It’s quite another to expect anyone to live by them. What killed Millennial Feminism was the gap between what its high priestesses demanded and what they were able to endure themselves. If you insist that accepting polyamory is the price of being a good person, and then write a book about your throuple where the front cover shows you with mascara-streaked tears running down your face, people will spot the dissonance.

Helen Roy: Marriage Is Not a Meme

South Korea’s fertility rate has been infamously low. Apparently, January was the highest level of births in seven years, with the birth rate now reaching 1.0. That’s far below replacement, but progress. He’s an article (in Korean, but my browser could translate it) with more details.

Michael Foster: You Will Own Things, and Actually Care - “The subscription economy and the rented life are not just inconveniences. They are a curriculum.”

Walter Russell Mead: The Rise of the Tech Hamiltonians - The political coalition that has formed under Trump’s banner has the potential to reshape American politics

The Liberal Patriot: No Learning Please, We’re Democrats! - This good publication from Democrats Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin (with 50,000 subscribers) is shutting down because donors no longer want to fund it. Despite reformist ferment across the left and right, few of these outfits have been able to obtain a lot of funding, particularly from traditional sources.

Rutgers published and interesting report and database on affordable housing built on religious property in the US.

New Content and Media Mentions

I got a mention from the University of Virginia. I was also a guest on the Too Mikes podcast.

New this week:

• Why America Needs to Pause Mass Immigration (paid only) - Once a source of high-agency newcomers and entrepreneurial energy, mass immigration now fuels division, scams, and economic harm

• Demoralized Men - A survey of how young men feel about themselves today.

• My podcast this week was with Emma Waters on modern Christian womanhood.

Subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts, Youtube, or Spotify.

I won’t reproduce everything, but here are some highlights.

There’s been an interesting change in the milestones young men perceive as important to becoming an adult.

The study hones in on the drop in formal education, but what I find more interesting is the shift from “working full time” to “being financially independent.” My impression is that Gen Z people, both male and female, do not like the idea of a traditional 9-5 job. There’s an entire genre of Tik Tok videos of 20-something women crying about how they hate their 9-5 job. I hear plenty of stories about businesses struggling to recruit younger workers, who’d rather drive for Uber or Door Dash so that they can control their own schedule (and work on their aspirations to be a social media star). You can also see the popularity of hustle culture as feeding into this.

At the same time, most young men actually do have full time jobs.

There’s also an interesting look at education by various demographic characteristics. Keep in mind, many of the men surveyed are pretty young, and can’t be expected to have completed college yet.

You’ve seen me write and tweet before about how there’s been a big leftward shift in the educated classes in America. Today’s GOP is alienating to educated, high functioning people in many respects, so I expect this trend to continue.

What we see here is that among Gen Z men, liberals are twice as likely to have a college degree than conservative ones. So the idea of young people being more conservative isn’t going to bail Republicans out there.

No surprise, we also see that religious people are more likely to have a degree (religious practice is positively correlated with education), and people from intact families are three time more likely to have a degree.

The survey has questions about dating and marriage. We see here that the majority of young men are afraid to ask women out.

Most men have long been hesitant to ask women on dates. One of the biggest planks in the manosphere was about men forcing themselves to approach women in order to overcome “approach anxiety.” Their mantra was “always be approaching.” Helping men overcome nervousness here - and frame rejection as nothing shameful but something that happens to basically all men the majority of the time if they are actually asking people out - was one of the successful self-improvement items on their list. Today’s manosphere is more about validating men in not asking women out.

Lastly, I’ll highlight this interesting poll question about masculinity. The study emphasizes men agreeing with the idea that manhood is about sacrifice.

I find it more interesting that an even higher percentage of men said it included “strength” and “leadership.”

Almost everyone agrees that manhood involves sacrifice and service. But our society too often reduced it to that. I think this survey shows men are hungry for a definition in manhood that has more positive elements in it, like strength and leadership.

I could go on since there are so many interesting charts and findings in here. But I’ll let you click over and read the report for yourself.

We’ll have to come back …

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While immigration levels have waxed and waned, I think it’s fair to say that immigration has been a common dynamic in our society for much of its history.

You don’t have to believe that America is a nation of immigrants or that America is just an idea to recognize that immigration has long been a part of our society.

America has done a far better job of absorbing immigrants than any other country. Even today, apart from perhaps some other Anglosphere nations, no one else has really cracked the code on it. It’s basically one of our superpowers as a nation.

While immigrants do in fact receive copious public benefits and are often the recipients of major financial transfers, immigrants who come to the US have to work. They just can’t sit around collecting welfare indefinitely like in Europe. And overwhelmingly they do want to work and are working.

Immigrants are disproportionately entrepreneurial risk takers. Long distance migration itself is an inherently entrepreneurial act. Ross Perot once talked about a “giant sucking sound” of Mexico luring factories south of the border. But as I previously wrote, the real giant sucking sound has been the United States hoovering up the most high agency, entrepreneurial, risk taking people from Mexico and elsewhere. (This essay is in my collection on cities, The Urban State of Mind).

Places do in fact need new blood. Places with low percentages of newcomers - domestic and foreign - tend to be extremely stagnant places with insular, calcified cultures that make change difficult if not impossible. Many Rust Belt cities are demographic cul-de-sacs. Very few people move in or out.

Whether or not ambitious people from other places want to come to your community, or country, and stake their claim on building a better life is a major indicator of civic health.

Most immigrants are also mostly great people. There are officially about 50 million foreign born people in the United States. Whenever you have a group that big, there are going to be more than a few bad apples. Illegal migrants are less desirable because they’ve already showed contempt for our laws. And the there are some more problem-plagued groups like Somalis.

But on the whole, immigrant individuals and families are great. Some of them have really inspiring stories. I honestly don’t understand the excessive negativity about them. People love to trash Indians these days, for example. But I’ve worked and engaged with a lot of Indians over the years - in India, as work visa holders like H-1Bs, immigrants, and second generation - and my experiences have by and large been positive, both personally and professionally. There are 700,000 Indian illegals in the US - the third highest source of illegal migrants and about 13% of the overall US Indian population. You don’t have engage in the hagiography that some do about Indians or immigrants in general to recognize that most of them are basically good people. There are a number of immigrants in my neighborhood, and they are great.

The extreme low openness exemplified by many people on the right about immigrants and diversity today seems very at odds with the historic right as exemplified by, say, the British imperialist. They were very comfortable embedded in other cultures, often admired them and studied them more deeply than the natives themselves had, but without forgetting who they were.

This idea of wanting to live in a shire-like community of people just like you, who’ve lived there for generations, and where things are still basically the same as they were back in the day is the mentality of a European peasant or villager. You’ve mostly only found this in America in places that have stagnated or which failed to achieve the dreams their boosters set for them.

As a general disposition, I’m a more the more the merrier kind of person on immigration, consistent with our country continuing to be intact and as great or greater as it has been.

Unfortunately, we are well past that point. Mass immigration has become a significant negative for the United States, and immigration needs to be significantly reduced until such time as these problems are resolved.

There are a long list of reasons why immigration has become a negative for our country, but I will highlight four.

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Leaving America

I’ve noted many times that one indicator to watch to see if America is really in trouble is expatriation. If we ever start to see a significant number of native born Americans leaving the country, that would be a warning signal not to ignore.

To date, most of what I’ve read on this suggests expatriation on only a small scale, often for what seem like (likely temporary) lifestyle reasons. For example, there’s been articles talking about the growing number of Americans that have moved to Mexico City.

But a recent article in the Wall Street Journal suggests the volume has been picking up, saying that Americans are leaving the US in record numbers (gift link).

In its 250th year, is America, land of immigration, becoming a country of emigration?

Last year the U.S. experienced something that hasn’t definitively occurred since the Great Depression: More people moved out than moved in. The Trump administration has hailed the exodus—negative net migration—as the fulfillment of its promise to ramp up deportations and restrict new visas. Beneath the stormy optics of that immigration crackdown, however, lies a less-noticed reversal: America’s own citizens are leaving in record numbers, replanting themselves and their families in lands they find more affordable and safe…The new American dream, for some of its citizens, is to no longer live there.

In the cobblestoned streets of Lisbon, so many Americans are snapping up apartments that the newest arrivals complain they mostly hear their own language—not Portuguese. One of every 15 residents in Dublin’s trendy Grand Canal Dock district was born in the U.S., according to realtors, higher than the percentage of Americans born in Ireland during the 19th-century influx following the Potato Famine. In Bali, Colombia and Thailand, the strains of housing American remote workers paid in dollars have inspired locals to mount protests against a wave of gentrification.

…

On a conference call last month hosted by Expatsi, a relocation company, almost 400 Americans signed up to learn how to move to Albania. The former Stalinist state offers a special visa allowing U.S. citizens to live and work there, with no tax on foreign income for a year, no questions asked.

“Previously, the Americans leaving were super-adventurous and well-credentialed,” said Expatsi founder Jen Barnett, a 54-year-old Alabama native who moved to Yucatán, Mexico, in 2024.

“Now they’re ordinary people, like me,” she said as she ticked through growth numbers. In 2024 the company organized three group scouting trips for clients; this year it will be 57, she said: “Our goal is to move one million Americans.”

…

In nearly all of the European Union’s 27 member states, the number of Americans arriving to live and work is at a record and rising. The total living in Portugal has jumped more than 500% since the Covid pandemic and grew by 36% in 2024 alone, official data there showed. In the past 10 years, the number of American residents has nearly doubled in Spain and the Netherlands, and more than doubled in the Czech Republic.

Last year, more Americans moved to Germany than Germans moved to America. The same was true in Ireland, which welcomed 10,000 people from the U.S. in 2025, about double those who came in 2024.

…

Or do these émigrés personify a loss of faith in America’s future and way of life? Across dozens of interviews, U.S. expats described their motivations as a tangle of economic incentives, lifestyle preferences and disenchantment with the trajectory of America, citing violent crime, cost of living and turbulent politics. Trump’s re-election was a factor for many—although others voted for him. But the structural and societal shift runs much deeper. When Gallup asked Americans during the 2008 recession how many wanted to leave the U.S., the answer was one in 10. Last year: One in five.

…

In his rallies, Trump has mused about attracting Norwegian immigrants. But the number of Norwegians living in the U.S. has fallen over the past 10 years, and in 2024, it crossed a symbolic milestone: There are now more natural-born Americans living in Norway than Norwegian-born residents in the U.S.

Click over to read the whole thing.

We shouldn’t read too much into this. As the article notes, there isn’t necessarily good data available. Also, many of these Americans may be immigrants or their children returning to their homeland. The growth in foreign passports is part of a general trend of people looking to collect multiple passports. Americans are richer now, so more of them can afford to live the expat life. Life in a lower cost country has appealed for a while to some retirees, and we have a lot of Boomer retirees right now. There are only about 100,000 annual moves by Americans to OECD (developed) countries.

Still, we’d do well to pay attention. The online zeitgeist has a lot of narratives about the desirability of leaving the country (e.g., “passport bros”).

One country that’s had a lot of out-migration is New Zealand. This just made a round of headlines as the country’s former prime minister just moved to Australia. Moving away is a longstanding trend for this small island country, but levels seem to be climing. The Financial Times recently ran a story on this. 200,000 people have left the country in the last three years, a big chunk to Australia. With 670,000 New Zealanders living there, that’s 12% of the entire population that’s moved to Australia alone. To put that in perspective, the official total foreign born population share of the US is 16%.

The country’s weak economy and high costs are cited as factors. But Australia isn’t exactly cheap. And New Zealand has been a poster child for “YIMBY” policies, as making it easier to build homes there was supposed to have brought housing costs down. Yet the exodus has accelerated.

The FT notes that New Zealand’s population is still growing due to in-migration by foreigners from places like Fiji, India and the Philippines. Undoubtedly these population shifts are going to change the skill structure of the economy, and maybe in ways that actually structurally reduce its economic potential, depending on the mix and education/skill structure of the newcomers.

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Any Lifestyle You Want, As Long as It’s Not Normal

I always like to say that the media love to rep every lifestyle choice except normal. Of course, these pieces also tend to be good for clicks. New York magazine is one of the publications that has figured that out, and had a number of recent pieces that went viral online.

One was about women who regret having children. It’s profiles of a handful of women talking about how they wished they hadn’t had kids. Here’s one sample:

It’s been a year. Genuinely, if there is a hell, I’ve been living in it since I gave birth. My son has a low tolerance for frustration and doesn’t communicate other than whining, screaming, crying, throwing things, and pulling my hair. I’ve tried so hard to do the things early intervention advised us to: I read the books, play the music, dance around, and nothing works. Every day, things get worse and worse. I wake up and count down the hours until my husband comes home. At some point, I thought, I can’t keep living like this, and neither can my son.

I noticed that every one of the mothers featured here were married when they had a baby. But if you want to be a single mother by choice, New York is happy to tell you all about it and how to find support. A sample:

Kelly always loved kids. Growing up in a rural part of Texas in a conservative, Christian environment, she worked as the camp counselor during vacation Bible school and volunteered to teach classes at her church. She knew she’d be a mother one day, she just had no idea how she would get there — especially once she understood she was queer. When, at 28, she eventually married a trans man, they got as far as making embryos together, but those embryos are set to be destroyed once their divorce is finalized this spring. Now living in Houston and working for an education nonprofit, she pondered how she might pursue her goal on her own. Kelly doesn’t use much social media, but she does use Reddit. About a year ago, she stumbled on a sub-Reddit dedicated to becoming a solo mother by choice and began poring over other would-be parents’ stories.

And if you want polyamory, they are happy tell you about the possibilities in their recent piece “Could Opening Your Marriage Lighten Your Mental Load? For some moms, non-monogamy is a way to reclaim more than just their sex drive.”

These days, it’s no longer shocking to hear parents negotiate who will handle homework and bedtime while the other meets a crush for drinks. Even momfluencers in Utah are posting about their throuples. The most obvious perk of an open marriage is getting to hook up with other people. But the more poly parents I meet, the more I hear ENM framed as a co-parenting hack. These moms aren’t venting about being stuck at home with the kids while their husbands woo other women. They don’t seem to be stuck keeping score of who handles the grocery shopping and takes the most days off when the kids are sick. And they don’t feel guilty about taking time for themselves. For these moms, non-monogamy seems to offer more than just a way to reclaim their libido. Could it also be the secret to raising kids without completely resenting one’s husband?

Of course, like every article about polyamory, they are forced to admit that it appears to come with problems in many cases.

Best of the Web

RIP: John Perkins - Perkins was a civil rights leader who was a pioneer in the evangelical racial reconciliation movement. I didn’t learn about him until 2014 when someone suggested I attend the Christian Community Development Association conference. I heard him talk there and was blown away by it. He was a very impressive man. And while I think it’s fair to say the CCDA approach never achieved what Perkins hoped it would, I respect it a lot as an attempt at a genuinely Christian attempt to address racial disparities and divides.

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour: The Post-Christian Condition - More sentiment, more spectacle, more fillers, and more AI slop

Patrick Brown: Marriage Got Better—So Why Is It Disappearing? This article isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete. Brown treats falling marriage rates as a matter of male deficiency, such as working class men not measuring up to the expectation of women. But it fails to mention female deficiencies. A significant share of working class women are themselves not viable marriage prospects to the kinds of men they would want to marry. How many men who have themselves put together are looking to marry a “dinergoth”?

McKinsey: At 250, sustaining America’s competitive edge - An interesting, readable report about the economic future of America. Not at negative as many takes, while acknowledging that there’s much work to be done.

Vanity Fair: The Founder of Anthropic Says He Wants to Protect Humanity From AI. Just Don’t Ask How.

New Content and Media Mentions

Someone wrote a letter to the editor about my recent Washington Post op-ed. I also got a mention in Touchstone magazine.

New this week:

• The Garden, the Tower, the Temple and the City - Leadership in a change of age - a guest essay by John Seel

• My podcast this week was with T. C. Schmidt on his Josephus scholarship.

• This month’s Member (more info) only podcast is about the Christian nationalist vision for America as expressed by its proponents.

Cover image: Jacinda Ardern by WEF, CC BY 2.0

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We are living through a leadership crisis, but not for the reasons most commentators suggest.

The problem is not simply political polarization, institutional distrust, technological disruption, or economic uncertainty—though all are real. The deeper problem is that we are trying to solve twenty-first century civilizational problems with late twentieth-century leadership assumptions. Our models of leadership were built for a world of institutional stability, shared moral assumptions, and predictable change. That world is disappearing.

Across education, technology, family formation, religion, and civic life, the underlying assumptions that once gave coherence to society are weakening. Artificial intelligence is reshaping knowledge. Social media is reshaping identity. Institutions that once formed character now struggle merely to maintain trust. Anxiety rises even as material prosperity remains historically high.

These are not isolated disruptions. They are indicators of something deeper: we are not merely living through a season of change. We are living through a change of age.

Every such transition forces a deeper question beneath the practical leadership questions:

What kind of civilization are we now leading within?

One of the most illuminating ways to answer that question comes from an unexpected source—a civilizational pattern embedded within the biblical narrative itself. Not myth in the modern sense of fiction, but myth in the classical sense of sacred narrative that reveals ultimate meaning. It is a pattern that describes not only spiritual history, but the developmental arc of civilizations.

It is the movement from garden to tower to temple to city.

And it may be the simplest way to understand why leadership models that worked only a generation ago now feel increasingly inadequate.

Because we are no longer living in the same chapter of the story.

The Garden: When Meaning Is Received

The biblical story begins not in a city but in a garden. This is not accidental.

A garden represents ordered nature. It is neither wilderness nor machine. It is cultivated life within a structure that is received rather than invented.

In the garden, human beings do not create meaning. They discover it. They do not construct identity. They receive it. They do not invent purpose. They live within it.

The garden represents a world where reality itself is understood as gift.

Historically, most societies have operated within some version of this framework. Meaning came from tradition. Identity came from family. Moral structure came from religion. Social order rested upon shared assumptions about reality itself.

Sociologist Peter Berger famously described this as a sacred canopy—a shared framework of meaning that made life feel coherent and intelligible.

Leadership in such a world is primarily custodial.

Leaders preserve what exists. They transmit what has been inherited. Their responsibility is stewardship of a functioning order.

This explains why leadership literature produced during stable periods tends to focus on management, efficiency, and incremental improvement. These approaches assume something rarely stated but absolutely essential: that the underlying system itself is sound.

Garden eras produce managers because the world appears manageable.

Yet gardens contain a hidden fragility. They depend upon trust—trust in institutions, trust in moral order, trust in shared meaning. When that trust erodes, the garden cannot sustain itself.

This is when civilizations begin to build towers.

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The Tower: When Meaning Is Constructed

If the garden represents meaning received, the tower represents meaning constructed.

The Tower of Babel is one of the most psychologically revealing passages in Scripture. It is not primarily about architecture. It is about anthropology. Its defining declaration reveals everything: “Let us make a name for ourselves.”

Here we see the emergence of the autonomous self.

Meaning is no longer discovered. It is manufactured. Identity is no longer received. It is assembled. Community is no longer inherited. It is negotiated.

Control begins to replace trust. Technique replaces wisdom. Systems replace tradition.

This is the foundation of what we now call modernity.

Tower civilizations are extraordinarily productive. They produce science, engineering, markets, bureaucracies, and technological innovation. They scale. They optimize. They expand human capacity in remarkable ways.

But they also begin to thin meaning.

Because while systems can organize life, they cannot explain why life matters.

Cultural historian Philip Rieff warned that when cultures abandon sacred order, they do not become neutral. They become therapeutic. They begin organizing themselves around psychological comfort rather than moral formation.

Today we describe this condition as expressive individualism—the belief that identity is something we construct through self-expression rather than something we discover through formation.

This is the dominant anthropology of our time.

Leadership during tower periods becomes increasingly technical. Leaders become specialists. Expertise begins to outweigh wisdom. Competence begins to overshadow character.

The central leadership question shifts subtly but profoundly—from What is right? to What works?

For a time, this produces remarkable success.

But towers contain a hidden danger. They scale faster than wisdom develops. When scale outruns meaning, something inevitably begins to fracture.

And when enough fractures accumulate, towers give way to Babylon.

Babylon: When Meaning Collapses

If Babel represents the ambition of civilization, Babylon represents its exhaustion.

Babylon is civilization at peak sophistication and peak confusion. It is what happens when systems become powerful but purposeless, when technology becomes impressive but disorienting, when institutions become large but distrusted.

Babylon is not primitive chaos. It is sophisticated disorder.

It is what happens when a society knows how to do almost everything but no longer knows why it should do anything.

This is why late-stage civilizations consistently display similar symptoms:

Rising anxiety.
Deepening loneliness.
Falling birthrates.
Institutional distrust.
Identity confusion.
Loss of shared reality

Loss of reality itself.

These are not random social problems. They are meaning problems.

This is why our moment cannot be understood merely through economics or politics. At its core, it is anthropological. It concerns what it means to be human.

I have elsewhere described this condition as algorithmic nihilism—a society increasingly organized by powerful systems that cannot answer the most basic human question:

What is life for?

This is also why leadership feels unusually difficult today.

Most leadership models assume stability. They assume shared assumptions. They assume functioning institutions. They assume that improvement is primarily technical.

Babylon offers none of these conditions.

Instead, it produces what anthropologists call a liminal environment—an in-between space where the old order no longer functions but the new order has not yet fully emerged.

This is precisely the environment that produces the need for liminal leadership.

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Liminal Leaders: Interpreters of Reality

Liminal periods remove the maps people once trusted. This tends to produce two kinds of leaders.

The first kind of leader attempts to preserve outdated maps. They double down on familiar models. They attempt to manage decline rather than understand change.

The second kind of leader recognizes that the terrain itself has shifted. They become interpreters of reality rather than defenders of systems.

Liminal moments emerge when the garden no longer holds, the tower no longer convinces, and Babylon no longer satisfies. This creates a vacuum in which a different kind of leadership becomes necessary.

The primary work of liminal leaders is not control. It is clarity.

They help people understand what time it is. They give language to what others sense but cannot yet articulate. They rebuild coherence where fragmentation has taken hold.

They become what every transitional age requires: architects of meaning.

This is why liminal leadership differs fundamentally from managerial leadership. Managers optimize systems. Liminal leaders rebuild foundations. They understand something essential that stable eras often forget:

Civilizational renewal never begins with policy. It begins with formation. Always. Because every durable society ultimately rests upon formed people.

The Temple: When Meaning Becomes Embodied

Alongside Babel, Scripture presents another building project: the Tabernacle and later the Temple.

Unlike Babel, nothing about the Temple is accidental. Every dimension, every material, every practice reflects intentional design. It is a place of sacrifice, reconciliation, encounter, and presence.

The Temple represents meaning not merely believed but embodied.

It reminds us that civilizations cannot survive on systems alone. They require institutions and practices that reconnect people to transcendent reality.

Yet the Temple also carries a warning.

When the structure becomes more important than the presence it was meant to house, meaning begins to drain away. Jesus confronted this danger directly when He declared: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.”

His warning remains relevant today. Institutions that lose their formative purpose eventually become performative rather than transformative.

This applies equally to churches, universities, corporations, and civic organizations. When institutions prioritize preservation over formation, they may continue to exist structurally while losing their civilizational purpose.

The City: When Meaning Is Rightly Ordered

The biblical story does not end with a return to a garden alone. Nor does it end with the abandonment of civilization. It ends with a city.

This is a profound insight.

The answer to Babel is not primitivism. It is rightly ordered complexity.

The New Jerusalem represents civilization brought back under moral order. Technology is not rejected. It is rightly ordered. Culture is not abandoned. It is redeemed. Power is not eliminated. It is stewarded.

This represents the final stage of mature leadership: stewardship.

The steward understands what the controller does not: We do not own reality. We are responsible for it.

The steward asks not, How do I control this? but How do I order this toward flourishing?

This is the leadership posture the next era will require. Not domination. Not withdrawal. But stewardship.

What Time Is It?

Every leadership challenge begins with diagnostic questions:

A garden moment requiring preservation?
A tower moment requiring excellence?
A Babylon moment requiring preservation?
Or a liminal moment requiring reconstruction?

The central mistake of our time is that many leaders are applying garden leadership to Babylon problems. They attempt to manage what must be reframed. They try to optimize what must be reimagined. They attempt to preserve what history has already moved beyond.

History shows something remarkably consistent: When meaning collapses, renewal begins with leaders who see clearly before others do. The future rarely belongs to the loudest leaders. It belongs to the clearest ones.

The Leadership Question of Our Time

Civilizations do not ultimately fail because they lose wealth, technology, or military power. They fail because they lose moral purpose.

Renewal never begins with scale. It begins with recovered clarity about what human beings are for. This is why the deepest leadership question in a change of age is not strategic.

It is anthropological.

What is a human being?
What is life for?
What is worth building?

Until these questions are answered, towers will only grow taller while confusion deepens. But when they are answered, something remarkable begins to happen.

Gardens begin to reappear. Not outside civilization. But inside it.

The Work of Liminal Leaders

This is the calling of liminal leaders:

To plant gardens inside Babylon.
To form people inside systems.
To rebuild meaning inside complexity.
To prepare the foundations of the next city before it is visible to others.

Because every lasting civilization begins the same way: Not with systems.
Not with power. Not even with vision. But with formed people who remember what life is for.

This is why the future will not ultimately belong to the most efficient leaders. Efficiency can scale systems. Only formation can sustain civilizations. The next era will not be led by those who can merely optimize complexity. It will be led by those who can restore meaning within it.

And every great city—every flourishing society, every lasting culture—begins the same way it always has: With leaders who have learned how to cultivate gardens again. For in the end, the future does not belong to those who build the biggest towers, but to those who remember how to grow gardens.

But today I have a positive example of an evangelical Christian doing scholarship at the elite level. He’s T. C. Schmidt, a professor at Fairfield University. Schmidt did his Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Yale and is a scholar of early Christianity.

His relatively new book is Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ (free download). The product of over a decade of research, this academic book makes the case that the Testimonium Flavianum - a passage about Jesus in the work of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus - is original and authentic. The scholarly consensus for 100 years is that it was edited by later Christians.

Schmidt uses a variety of research methods to argue for its authenticity. The research is so compelling that top level Josephus scholars are writing major reviews. And the world’s leading scholar of Josephus believes that Schmidt’s arguments are very strong.

We discuss his book, but also what it takes for evangelicals to do scholarship that makes an impact at the highest levels of their field - and what the broader evangelical ecosystem can do to support this kind of scholarly endeavor.

Be sure to also check out the Institute for Christian Reflection, where Schmidt is a scholar in residence.