Check out these recent articles from around the web:

Listening to young Catholics by Timothy Matovina: “They also taught me that, now more than ever, the outreach of young leaders to their peers is our most effective means as a church to inspire healing and faith among our younger sisters and brothers. If we desire a more vibrant and youthful church, we need to personally invite young people to leadership and prioritize our collective support for them in their formation.”

Why Your Social Life Is Not What It Should Be by David Brooks: “My general view is that the fate of America will be importantly determined by how we treat each other in the smallest acts of daily life. That means being a genius at the close at hand: greeting a stranger, detecting the anxiety in somebody’s voice and asking what’s wrong, knowing how to talk across difference. More lives are diminished by the slow and frigid death of social closedness than by the short and glowing risk of social openness.”

Lost in the college-major-regret story: It’s not about the majors Image without a caption by Christine Emba: “In a democracy whose success depends on the discernment of its members, shouldn’t the goal of higher education be something — well — higher than individual financial success? “To prepare each citizen to choose wisely and to enable him to choose freely are paramount functions of the schools in a democracy,” Franklin D. Roosevelt said years before he signed the GI Bill and essentially reinvented American higher ed. According to that ideal, students ought to be citizens, not just consumers. And while choosing the right major might help define a vocation, part of the process should be understanding that vocation within the context of the broader society.”

Catholic teaching on the human person points a way forward in US politics by MSW: “The bishops need to start with Christian anthropology. They need to say less about individual issues and more about fostering a Christian worldview capable of withstanding the moral relativism of the ambient culture.”

Fetuses smile for carrots but grimace over kale, study suggests by Amarachi Orie: “Fetuses create more of a “laughter-face” in the womb when exposed to the flavor of carrots consumed by their mother and create more of a “cry-face” response when exposed to kale, according to a study published in the journal Psychological Science on Wednesday.”

Oregon’s drug decriminalization effort sends fewer than 1% of people to treatment by the AP: “But Oregon still has among the highest addiction rates in the country. Fatal overdoses have increased almost 20% over the previous year, with over a thousand dead. Over half of addiction treatment programs in the state lack capacity to meet demand because they don’t have enough staffing and funding, according to testimony before lawmakers.”

It Isn’t Journalism’s Job To Hand-Hold People To The Correct Moral Conclusions by Jesse Singal: “One of the silliest ideas to infect mainstream journalism in recent years is the notion that when journalists produce work about a bad person, they must signpost that work, seemingly every moment, with explicit indicators that that person is bad. You need to hold readers’ hands tightly, because they are moral idiots, and the moment your grip slips, they’ll race off and return in a Klansman’s hood or something.”

The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat by Helen Lewis: “Spector’s offer led to a high-profile exhibition at one of New York’s most prominent art institutions, making LaBouvier a trailblazing Black curator in a white-dominated world. It also began a chain of events that, in the summer after George Floyd’s murder, saw Spector cast out of the Guggenheim, branded a racist and a bully, and left unemployed—a phenomenon the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo described to me as a “social death.” All of this happened even though an independent investigation found “no evidence” that Spector had racially discriminated against LaBouvier.”

American Family Policy Is Holding Schools Back by Stephanie Murray: “But less attention has been given to another profound influence on our educational system: our nation’s family policy. My reporting suggests that many of the elements fostering children’s academic success have roots outside of school—and that if America wants to help teachers, it will have to do a better job of supporting parents.”