Check out these recent articles from around the web:

Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All. by Anna Louie Sussman: “The future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a time of spectacular uncertainty. In the United States, job tenures have contracted and income volatility has risen. Life expectancy, once on an inexorable march upward, has fallen for less-educated women and men. Many of the forces our economy is built on — A.I., immigration, global trade — feel distressingly volatile; disruption, once a byword for a disturbance or problem, is the governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy. The rise of prediction markets has turned the world into one large casino. The climate crisis is spiraling, as are the costs of everything that could enable parenthood, whether that’s a roof over one’s head or child care. The past half-century has brought us breathtaking inequality, accompanied by a sharp decline in social mobility. The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the psychological and financial scars of coming of age amid world-scale catastrophes: Older millennials entered the labor market during the Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes. Members of Gen Z, whose lives were upturned by the Covid-19 pandemic, now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even prospective partners. The man running America seems single-mindedly devoted to chaos at home and abroad.”

A Catholic Affirmation of Liberal Democracy by Stephen Schneck: “The Church has condemned specific authoritarian atrocities—Hitler’s death camps, Stalin’s gulags—but has said remarkably little about authoritarianism as such. While the social magisterium eventually found its voice to decry those regimes’ economic systems and violations of human rights, regarding their actual structures of government—the concentration of unaccountable power—the Church had little to say. A new document could fill that gap.”

It Shouldn’t Be This Easy to Get High by German Lopez: “The upshot is a society that can easily get drunk and high. That’s a less healthy society: About 48 million Americans are addicted to some kind of drug, a statistic that includes alcohol. Roughly 70,000 a year die from overdoses. Despite a welcome dip in drinking, about 178,000 die each year from excessive alcohol consumption. It’s a less safe society, too, as intoxication and illegal drug markets so often fester into crime. And it’s a less rational one; most people don’t make their best decisions when stoned or drunk. It’s even a less free society. Addicts often describe dependence on a drug as its own kind of prison.”

There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI by Tyler Austin Harper: “What Christian humanism offers, with its assertion that humans are made in the Imago Dei, is a choice other than Silicon Valley extremism or remainder humanism. If what makes humanity special is not our capabilities—automatable or not—but the notion that we spring from a transcendent source, then what the robots can or cannot do is in some sense irrelevant. ChatGPT was not made in the image of God, no matter how impressive its facsimile becomes. A secular humanism that cannot find a similarly deep line of reasoning is one that may not be adequate to defend human dignity in the AI era.”

My Son’s Hockey Team and the Crisis of American Resentment by Chris Murphy: “Virtually everything in America has become a commodity—even middle-school hockey. Every minute of our life is fodder for profit maximization. And when everything exists primarily for someone else’s gain—even your child’s Saturday-afternoon game—it breeds emptiness and resentment.”

Can Politicians be Saints in Suits? by Nathan Beacom: “The lessons they teach for us today are, first, that it is possible to have men and women who are genuinely attached to public service and the common good in leadership. Second, that personal character is relevant to political character. Third, that Christian religion can positively influence public life in a way that serves diverse societies, without having to impose one single religious worldview.”

Actually, Democracy Dies in H.R. by Amanda Taub: “It turns out that would-be authoritarians don’t need to staff their regimes with ideological true believers, offer extreme enticements or impose draconian punishments in order to make successful power grabs. They just need to figure out how to target their ideal labor pool: the frustrated and mediocre.”

Leaning into Catholic Identity by Heidi Schlumpf: “The Holistic Impact Report study has found for two years in a row that graduates of Catholic institutions report higher rates of meaning and purpose in life, more community engagement, and an increased likelihood to involve morality in decision-making. Graduates were also more likely to report that their college experience provided a sense of community and encouraged faith-based discussions.”

This Is What Happened When Trump Abandoned the World’s Poorest Children by Nicholas Kristof: “Trump’s most lethal policy will almost surely be his 71 percent cut in humanitarian aid from 2024 to 2025. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide in their first year. A recently published study in The Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates the defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030, including 2.5 million children under the age of 5.”

Why people stopped having kids by Shadi Hamid: “Religious communities do something that no government program has been able to replicate: They create the social conditions for family formation. They provide networks of support for parents and, perhaps most importantly, offer a framework in which the sacrifices that children demand are not experienced as mere costs but as expressions of life’s deeper purpose.”

This Is the Formula That Defeated Orban. It Would Defeat Trump, Too. by M. Gessen: “Here is another lesson of Magyar’s victory: His politics are aspirational and inspirational, a tone that is an antidote to the cynicism and vulgarity of autocracy.”