Weekly Top Five Articles

With solutions for parents and churches

Photo by Cristian Castillo on Unsplash

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!!

Here’s what stood out this week . . .

(1) “The Claims of Close Reading: Literary studies have been starved by austerity, but their core methodology remains radical,” by Johanna Winant, Boston Review (November 26, 2025)

Winant describes a university starved by austerity but still animated by the radical practice at the heart of the humanities: close reading. During her nine years at West Virginia University, she watched buildings empty, budgets shrink, and entire programs disappear. Yet in her classrooms she found something that refused to be hollowed out. Students arrived from every imaginable background, many from deep rural poverty, and together they created a space where analytic thinking, long attention, and mutual trust still flourished.

Winant argues that close reading remains the most democratic tool in literary studies because it trains students to notice, to claim authority over their own ideas, and to build arguments from the ground up. She describes the moment when students move from reporting themes to pointing at a single word or punctuation mark. That shift, she says, is not an academic trick. It is a discovery of agency. Students learn that they can make meaning, that they can reason, that their observations matter.

The tragedy, in her telling, is that the institutional scaffolding required to cultivate this skill has been stripped away. WVU’s crisis in 2023 led to mass firings, program closures, and untenable teaching loads. She recalls crying on the drive home, feeling morally injured, and watching the university’s Board of Governors approve cuts despite hours of brave testimony from students and faculty. Yet she draws a direct line from the way students learn to argue about poems to the way they argued for their university. The evidence and stakes changed, but the intellectual habits were the same.

Winant insists that close reading is not magical. It is rigorous, careful, rational work that begins with an act of good faith: assuming that texts contain meaning and that readers are capable of finding it. This practice, she argues, lays claim to a kind of power that is both vulnerable and transformative. But it requires time, small classes, and stable faculty. Those resources are increasingly concentrated in private institutions while public universities are left diminished.

Her conclusion is quiet but forceful. Close reading is teachable, portable, and profoundly human. What is at risk is not the method but the public commitment needed to sustain it.

(2) Nothing Better Than a Whole Lot of Books: In Praise of Bibliomania, by Ed Simon, Literary Hub (November 24, 2025)

Just in time for Christmas shopping, Simon’s essay is a love letter to the strange, joyful, and occasionally unhinged obsession that is book collecting. He begins with Erasmus in Venice, reveling in the chaos of Aldus Manutius’s legendary print shop, a place where scholarship mixed with ink, noise, and craft. It was here that Erasmus dreamed of building a library that stretched as wide as the world. Simon uses that image to explore a lineage of bibliomaniacs who found their truest selves in the company of books. From the Aldine Press to Umberto Eco’s discovery of a battered copy of Aristotle’s Poetics for seventy cents, he traces how certain minds are called not only to read but to possess the physical object itself.

Simon makes a clear distinction between readers and collectors. The library card loyalist is one thing; the person who stacks books in closets, car trunks, and hallways is another. He draws from Eco’s idea of the “anti-library,” the vast collection of unread books that serves as a reminder of human finitude. A true personal library is not a display of consumption. It is a biography. A record of what we have loved, hoped to learn, or feared we would forget.

He situates himself within this tradition. Simon confesses to owning roughly 3,000 books, arranged across every surface of his home, reshuffled constantly according to an ever-changing internal syllabus. His library lacks the illuminated manuscripts of Morgan or the multimillion dollar rarities of Gates. Yet he suggests that the private collection reveals something deeper than wealth. It reveals character, desire, and a sense of stewardship.

Throughout the essay, Simon returns to the materiality of books. Their weight, smell, and capacity to bear wounds make them more than commodities. They are bodies that carry meaning across time. He argues that this physical presence explains why print endures even as digital formats dominate other media. A book remains readable without electricity, without platforms, without the good will of tech companies.

In the end, Simon locates the logic of bibliomania not in extravagance but in devotion. A personal library becomes an archive of relationships, memories, and intellectual longing. To collect books is to guard something fragile yet necessary: the belief that these paper bodies carry wisdom worth keeping, and that our task is to care for them while they are ours.

(3) New research highlights a shortage of male mentors for boys and young men by Eric W. Dolan, PsyPost (November 26, 2025)

This is heartbreaking. A new RAND report surfaces a quiet but consequential reality in the lives of American boys: most have adults they can turn to, but far fewer have men they can rely on. The data reveals a mentorship landscape in which boys receive substantial guidance, yet overwhelmingly from women. For a generation of young males already struggling in school, in work, and in mental health, the shortage of male mentors is a structural gap hiding in plain sight.

The disparities begin early. Boys today earn lower grades, read less fluently, and face disciplinary actions at rates far above their female peers. These early setbacks echo into adulthood, where young men are more likely to be disengaged from education or work, more likely to live at home, and far more likely to die by suicide. Between 2010 and 2023, suicide among males ages 15 to 24 rose by 26 percent. Men in this age range now take their own lives at four times the rate of women. RAND’s researchers argue that increasing the presence of engaged male adults could be one part of a broader intervention.

The survey, drawn from a nationally representative sample of 1,083 boys and young men ages 12 to 21, asked who they turned to for help with schoolwork, relationships, and future planning. Nearly all respondents had at least one adult they trusted. But the gender breakdown tells a different story. For academics, 78 percent had a female mentor while only 62 percent had a male one. With friendships and relationships, 78 percent leaned on a woman while just 57 percent could turn to a man. More than one third of boys lacked any adult male help with schoolwork, and nearly half lacked male support with relationship challenges.

Household income deepens the divide. Only 41 percent of boys in families earning under $50,000 had a male academic mentor, compared to 72 percent in households earning $100,000 or more. Similar gaps appear across relationships and long-term planning. Boys in low-income and female-headed households are the least likely to have male guidance at all.

Boys benefit when men step forward. Fathers, uncles, teachers, coaches, and community volunteers can each play a stabilizing role. The challenge is not proving the value of male mentorship. The challenge is finding enough men willing to offer it.

(4) “One in eight US adolescents and young adults use AI chatbots for mental health advice, by Eric W. Dolan, PsyPost (November 26, 2025)

A new national survey published in JAMA Network Open reveals a striking development in the emotional lives of American adolescents and young adults: more than five million of them have turned to artificial intelligence chatbots for mental health advice. What began as a technological novelty has quietly become a coping tool for a generation facing historic levels of psychological distress.

The survey, drawn from a representative sample of more than one thousand youths ages 12 to 21, asked a straightforward question: have you used programs like ChatGPT or Google Gemini when feeling sad, angry, or nervous. Thirteen percent said yes. Among young adults 18 to 21, the number jumped to more than twenty-two percent. And this is not a one-off experiment. Nearly two thirds of those who sought AI support reported using it monthly or more.

Their reasons are clear. One in five adolescents has experienced a major depressive episode in the last year, and millions face significant barriers to care. Therapy is expensive, providers are scarce, and stigma remains powerful. Chatbots are free, instant, private, and available in the late hours when emotions often crest. Ninety-two percent of users said the advice felt helpful.

Why wait on a two-week appointment when you can just ask AI from your bedroom?

The findings come as the nation grapples with the reliability and safety of AI. There are no clinical standards governing chatbot advice. There is little transparency about how models are trained or how they might behave under stress. Legal challenges against OpenAI have underscored the stakes. Adolescents are treating these systems as therapeutic companions long before policymakers or health professionals have set guardrails.

A generation underserved by traditional mental health care is constructing its own support network in the digital shadows. The technology is evolving faster than the public conversation around it, and the emotional well-being of millions of young people now sits at that intersection.

(5) Women prefer partners with strong personal growth motivation for long-term relationships by Mane Kara-Yakoubian, PsyPost (November 21, 2025)

A new study in Evolutionary Psychological Science offers a window into how women evaluate long-term partners, and the findings point to something deeper than charm or ambition. Women, the researchers report, place significant value on men who demonstrate strong personal growth motivation. Not simply career drive or external achievement, but the desire to develop wisdom, broaden perspective, and pursue meaningful experiences. In other words, men who are actively becoming better versions of themselves.

Drawing on humanistic psychology, the researchers distinguish between two forms of growth. Experiential growth involves pursuing happiness and fulfillment through rich and meaningful experiences. Reflective growth centers on cultivating wisdom through introspection, self-examination, and emotional maturity. Both forms signal a long-term orientation toward personal development, and both appear to matter to women when assessing partner quality.

The study involved more than five hundred heterosexual undergraduates who evaluated written profiles of opposite-sex individuals. Each vignette described someone who showed either high or low levels of experiential or reflective growth motivation. Participants then rated each profile for desirability in short-term and long-term romantic contexts, and also judged how likely the person was to be unfaithful.

The results were striking. Women overwhelmingly preferred high-growth men for long-term relationships. Experiential growth produced the strongest effect, but reflective growth was also highly valued. Even in short-term scenarios, women showed a slight preference for reflective high-growth men, though the effect was modest. Men, by contrast, showed little differentiation. They rated high-growth and low-growth women similarly across both romantic contexts.

The study also revealed that perceptions of fidelity are tied to personal growth. Both men and women believed that individuals low in growth motivation were more likely to cheat. This association was especially strong when low growth was paired with poor reflective capacity. Participants seemed to intuit that someone uninterested in developing themselves may also be less committed to the relational work a stable partnership demands.

In a dating culture saturated with superficial metrics, this research suggests that women still gravitate toward men who show maturity, depth, and a commitment to becoming wiser human beings. Growth, in this sense, is not merely self-help language. It is a relational signal, and a powerful one.

Practical Solutions for Parents and Churches

The research is clear: boys today lack male mentors, are turning to artificial intelligence for emotional support, and are entering adulthood unprepared for the kind of maturity women actually want in long-term partners. Families cannot fix this alone, and youth group cannot fix it at all. What follows is a covenant-theology-shaped plan for parents and churches rooted in the psychological insights of Karen Horney and the masculine-formation framework of John Eldredge. Here are some solutions. . .