Weekly Top Five Articles

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Here’s what stood out this week. . .

(1) “Finding Our God-Terms: The work of literary critic Mark Edmundson offers a powerful vision for recentering the American university,” By Joshua Hall, LA Review of Books (March 2, 2026)

Hall’s essay examines literary critic Mark Edmundson’s long campaign to recover the spiritual and moral purpose of the American university. Edmundson begins his classes with a provocative question: How do you imagine God? The inquiry functions less as theology than as a diagnostic tool, exposing the degree to which contemporary students inhabit a consumerist imagination. Hall argues that the modern campus, saturated with technology, careerism, and institutional branding, conditions students to approach education as a transaction rather than a search for meaning.

Edmundson’s critique targets the cultural psychology produced by this environment. Students raised within digital abundance struggle with uncertainty, solitude, and sustained attention. Their nervous systems, trained by constant stimulation, resist the slow interior work that serious reading requires. In this context the humanities lose their formative power, and college becomes an extension of the marketplace. Students pursue credentials, status, and future income while remaining largely unexamined persons.

Against this backdrop Edmundson proposes the recovery of “god terms,” words or ideas that organize a person’s deepest commitments. Through encounters with writers such as Emerson, Whitman, or Malcolm X, students may discover the narratives that shape their moral horizons. Language becomes a vehicle for self knowledge and ethical formation, a way to confront inherited values and decide which ones deserve loyalty.

Yet the project carries tensions. Edmundson’s secular spirituality relies on literary authority to supply the moral gravity once provided by religion. The approach assumes that aesthetic experience can sustain the weight of existential longing. Hall presents this hope sympathetically, though the essay reveals the deeper problem. A generation trained to consume images rather than wrestle with texts may lack the discipline required for such a vocation. Edmundson’s classroom thus appears as a fragile sanctuary within a culture that rewards distraction and treats the soul as a market opportunity.

(2) Adam Phillips Is No One’s Guru, By Hermione Lee, Interview Magazine (March 3, 2026)

Lee’s conversation with psychoanalyst Adam Phillips presents a thinker who resists the cultural desire for intellectual authorities. Phillips occupies an unusual place in contemporary psychoanalysis. He is widely read, culturally influential, and surrounded by an audience eager for guidance, yet he consistently refuses the role of expert. The interview frames his latest book, The Life You Want, as a meditation on human desire and the uneasy tension between psychological determinism and human agency.

Phillips contrasts the Freudian inheritance of psychoanalysis with a pragmatic orientation toward choice. Freud emphasized the grip of childhood, trauma, and instinct, suggesting that individuals are largely bound by forces they scarcely understand. Phillips admires the imaginative power of this framework but views it as constricting. A pragmatic sensibility asks a simpler question: what does a person want now, and what might enable that life to emerge? The therapeutic task becomes exploratory conversation rather than diagnosis or moral instruction.

Beneath this approach lies a subtle critique of modern psychological culture. Phillips is wary of the widespread habit of explaining adult suffering through childhood narratives. Such explanations may illuminate patterns, yet they also risk transforming biography into destiny. The fixation on regret and lost possibilities can become another form of self punishment. Phillips argues that the past is irredeemable and that dwelling upon hypothetical lives often drains energy from present action.

Lee’s portrait also highlights Phillips’s resistance to guru culture. Audiences often seek definitive answers, yet Phillips insists that psychoanalysis should dismantle authority rather than reinforce it. The analyst’s role is to sustain a conversation in which people discover their own inclinations rather than submit to expert control.

The psychological insight here is quietly radical. Human beings repeatedly search for structures that govern them, whether ideologies, therapeutic theories, or charismatic figures. Phillips suggests that genuine freedom begins when that impulse loosens, allowing curiosity, conversation, and affection to guide a life that remains unfinished.

(3) New psychology research reveals that wisdom acts as a moral compass for creative thinking, by Eric W. Dolan, PsyPost (March 6, 2026)

This study shows a long standing problem in psychology: the moral neutrality of cognitive ability. Intelligence and creativity are often celebrated as markers of human advancement, yet both capacities can serve destructive purposes as easily as constructive ones. Researchers from Peking University propose that wisdom functions as a moral regulator, shaping whether creative ability becomes socially beneficial or ethically corrosive.

In other words, “new research” shows what the book of Proverbs has always demonstrated. And, yes, people get tenured faculty jobs for publishing stuff like this!

Across two studies, the researchers examined how wisdom interacts with creativity and prosocial behavior. In the first study, participants responded to interpersonal dilemmas designed to measure wise reasoning. They also described moments of personal creativity and answered questions about their willingness to help others in hypothetical emergencies. The results revealed a striking pattern. Among individuals with low levels of wise thinking, higher creativity predicted a reduced willingness to help a stranger in distress. Creativity, absent moral orientation, appeared capable of amplifying self interest.

The second study, involving more than eight hundred participants, assessed enduring traits rather than situational responses. Here the researchers measured integrative wisdom, social intelligence, and general creativity alongside a measure of social mindfulness. Among participants high in wisdom, creativity was positively associated with everyday prosocial consideration. In contrast, those with lower wisdom displayed no such relationship, suggesting that creative capacity alone does not reliably produce moral behavior.

The deeper implication concerns the fragmentation of contemporary psychological development. Highly wise individuals exhibited tightly integrated networks linking cognitive ability with moral virtues such as fairness and temperance. Those with lower wisdom displayed disjointed psychological structures in which cognitive skill and moral concern operated independently.

The findings challenge the modern tendency to cultivate creativity as a value in itself. Creative capacity expands the range of possible actions. Wisdom determines which possibilities deserve pursuit and which should be restrained for the sake of others.

(4) American issue polarization surged after 2008 as the left moved further left, by Karina Petrova, PsyPost (March 5, 2026)

This study examines the rise of political polarization in the United States through a new analytical lens. Using machine learning rather than traditional party identification measures, researchers analyzed decades of survey data to determine how Americans cluster around policy beliefs. The results show a sharp increase in issue polarization beginning around 2008, with divisions continuing through 2020. The most striking feature of the data lies in the asymmetry of ideological movement. While both political camps grew further apart, the left shifted substantially more progressive across many issues, while the right moved only modestly toward greater conservatism.

The researchers sought to overcome a common problem in polarization research known as “sorting.” Many Americans now align their party identity more consistently with their policy preferences. When analysts measure polarization only through partisan labels, they may mistake improved ideological alignment for genuine changes in opinion. By clustering individuals according to their policy views rather than their party affiliation, the researchers attempted to isolate the underlying structure of political disagreement.

Their findings reveal a profound reorganization of ideological belief systems. In earlier decades Americans often held mixed policy views. A voter might support government welfare programs while maintaining conservative views on cultural issues. That pattern has become increasingly rare. Opinions on topics such as abortion, traditional family norms, health care, and racial inequality now travel together as coherent ideological packages.

The broader global comparison offers a revealing contrast. Across fifty seven countries, the researchers found no comparable surge in polarization. While cultural disputes divide societies worldwide, the United States stands apart because its opposing opinion clusters are both large and internally cohesive. This structural balance produces a uniquely intense political atmosphere, where two rival moral visions compete for dominance within a single national community.

(5) “Problematic TikTok use correlates with social anxiety and daily cognitive errors,” by Karina Petrova, PsyPost (March 1, 2026)

Get your kids off of TikTok!

This study explores the psychological dynamics linking social anxiety, excessive TikTok use, and everyday cognitive errors. Drawing on survey data from more than seven hundred adult users, researchers examined whether the fear of missing out drives compulsive engagement with the short video platform and whether this behavior spills into daily mental functioning. The results suggest that problematic TikTok use mediates the relationship between social anxiety and routine cognitive lapses such as forgetting appointments, losing focus, or misplacing objects.

The study distinguishes between two forms of the fear of missing out. One reflects a stable personality trait characterized by chronic worry about being excluded from meaningful experiences. The other represents a temporary state triggered by specific social cues or notifications. Participants who reported higher levels of this anxiety also reported more frequent mental errors in everyday life. Excessive TikTok use served as the psychological bridge connecting these tendencies.

This pattern reflects a deeper feature of contemporary digital culture. TikTok’s design relies on an endless stream of algorithmically curated videos that capture attention with remarkable efficiency. The platform does not merely respond to social interaction, as older networks often did. Instead, it continually feeds users content tailored to their preferences, producing a cycle of intermittent reward that encourages repeated checking. Over time, this pattern fragments attention and gradually erodes the cognitive resources required for sustained concentration.

The researchers also observed that TikTok addiction correlated more strongly with the stable trait form of social anxiety than with situational triggers. This finding suggests that the platform may resonate with deeper psychological vulnerabilities rather than merely reacting to momentary curiosity.

The broader implication concerns the architecture of modern digital environments. Platforms designed to maximize engagement can exploit existing emotional insecurities, transforming ordinary anxiety into patterns of compulsive attention that subtly undermine everyday cognitive functioning.