Weekly Top Five Articles
The Pill Rewires Womens' Brains, Obesity Before Pregnancy Leads to Autistic Behavior, and more. . .
Here’s what stood out this week. . .
(1) “James Baldwin’s Apotheosis,” by Brooke Allan, The Hudson Review (August 2025)
Allen revisits James Baldwin’s rise, fall, and canonization, arguing that today’s “secular saint” treatment obscures a far more uneven literary arc. Baldwin’s peak, she maintains, came early: the blistering essays through The Fire Next Time (1963) and the power of Go Tell It on the Mountain. After that, both fiction and nonfiction waned in craft and clarity. By the 1970s–80s, Baldwin—once a Time cover—was viewed as passé, more celebrity than craftsman.
So why the renaissance? Allen points to Ferguson, George Floyd, and the ascendance of Black Lives Matter. Baldwin’s angriest maxims were rediscovered, amplified by Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, and pressed into service as slogans. Yet that retrieval often trims away what made Baldwin singular: his anti-ideological bent, his suspicion of labels, and his insistence on the pronoun “we.” Baldwin rejected identity essentialism (what we’d now call intersectional sorting) because he believed art must penetrate categories to reach the human. Hence Giovanni’s Room with its white protagonist, and Baldwin’s defense of William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner: imaginative freedom is the writer’s duty.
Allen contrasts serious critics (Hilton Als, Magdalena Zaborowska, Douglas Field) who illuminate Baldwin’s charisma, contradictions, and showmanship, with derivative treatments that flatten him into contemporary pieties. Als captures Baldwin’s exhibitionist eloquence without worship; Teju Cole situates him within a broader flowering of Black cultural achievement, reminding us that Baldwin’s stature endures alongside a vast canon.
The tension Allen surfaces matters beyond literary housekeeping. A culture that canonizes Baldwin on merch while cherry-picking his anger risks missing his harder teaching: victims are not necessarily virtuous, causes can be bloodthirsty, and art belongs to all of us, including our foes. If Baldwin’s “moment” is to last, we must honor his universalism and craft, not conscript him as a mascot. The test isn’t how loudly we venerate him, but whether we can still say “we” and mean it.
(2) “The Pleasure of Patterns in Art,” by Samuel Jay Keyser )Peter de Florez Emeritus Professor of the Linguistics and Philosophy faculty, and former Associate Provost at MIT), MIT Press Reader (August 19, 2025)
Keyser argues that what delights us in art isn’t just subject matter but structure—specifically the mind’s pleasure in patterned “repetition with a difference.” From Warhol’s soup cans to Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day, he traces how visual “rhyme” (what he calls “same/except”) rewards a brain wired to detect faces, places, and bodies: and, crucially, the recurring forms that organize them.
Keyser asks us to step past content-driven criticism and look at form. In Rainy Day, triangles proliferate (umbrellas, building lines, figures) inviting the viewer to “complete” shapes the way we complete the Kanizsa triangle illusion. That recursive, nearly musical repetition is inherently pleasurable (drawing on Elizabeth Margulis’s work on repetition). Even the painting’s much-debated lamppost, often treated as peripheral ornament (a “parergon”), is essential: Caillebotte inserted a now-absent streetlamp to split the canvas and deepen perspective. Form explains the painting’s power better than narrative description.
The same perceptual game animates modern photography. In Lee Friedlander’s Albuquerque, New Mexico (1972), a lone black dog is echoed by its pale shadow—two halves of a rhyme created by the street sign’s silhouette. Viewers who first fixate on the darkest region (the real dog) are primed to “see” the second, shadow dog; order of attention changes what we perceive. Roni Horn’s paired portraits and even a Calvin Klein mirror-image ad exploit this same/except puzzle to keep our eyes toggling. Ormond Gigli’s Girls in the Windows (1960) scales the device up: forty identical frames, forty subtly different poses: the soup cans transposed to human choreography.
Keyser’s through-line is bracingly simple and widely applicable: across mediums, we take aesthetic joy in discerning structure amid variation. Content still matters, but the deeper hook is cognitive: our innate drive to resolve patterns, to detect rhyme in the visual field. Art moves us when it lets the mind do what it loves: recognize, compare, and complete.
(3) “Birth control pills reduce the brain’s functional individuality,” by Eric W. Dolan, PsyPost (August 21, 2025)
The pill rewires the brain. Dolan reports on a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover study in Human Brain Mapping that asks a sobering question: do oral contraceptives reshape how the brain coordinates itself? A team led by Gino Haase of Cambridge and Nicole Petersen of UCLA studied 26 women ages 20 to 33 who had previously reported mood changes on hormonal contraception. Across two three-week arms (30 μg ethinyl estradiol plus 0.15 mg levonorgestrel vs. placebo), participants completed resting-state fMRI scans and daily mood logs using the DRSP. Blood tests confirmed hormonal suppression during the pill phase.
Attempts to replicate earlier, region-specific findings such as amygdala to vmPFC connectivity mostly failed. The signal emerged when the team examined whole-brain patterns with functional connectome fingerprinting. During pill use, participants’ connectivity profiles grew more similar to one another. The distinctiveness of each person’s functional network architecture, or “functional individuality,” declined. The effect was most evident in executive-control, somatomotor, salience, and default-mode networks.
Mood moved with these changes. Participants reported more negative affect on the pill, and the study identified 13 connections that covaried with mood, involving the frontal pole, superior frontal gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex, and precuneus. The pattern suggests a distributed, hormone-sensitive circuitry that resembles what many women report during hormonal transitions such as menstruation, the postpartum period, or contraceptive use.
The takeaway is prudence, not panic. A widely used medication can nudge brainwide coordination in measurable ways. Informed consent should address not only reproductive effects but potential neural and emotional ones.
(4) “Obesity before pregnancy linked to autism-like behavior in male offspring, study finds,” by Eric W. Dolan, PsyPost (August 19, 2025)
Dolan reports on a study in Cells that shifts attention from pregnancy to the months before it. Using in vitro fertilization and surrogate dams, researchers at the University of Hawaii isolated maternal health before conception from conditions during gestation. Eggs from high-fat-diet females were fertilized with healthy sperm, then implanted into healthy surrogates and fostered by healthy mothers. The design allowed a clean test of timing.
Male offspring of obese egg donors showed autism-relevant behaviors. As pups, their vocalizations changed. As adolescents, they engaged less in social interaction and more in repetitive self-grooming. These effects did not appear when only the surrogate was obese, and they did not appear in female offspring. Anxiety-like behavior did not differ, which supports specificity to autism-related domains rather than general distress.
The team then looked under the hood. In cortex, gene expression shifted in pathways tied to synapses. Two signals stood out. Homer1, particularly the short isoform Homer1a, was elevated in affected males, and Zswim6 appeared among the altered genes, both with prior human links to autism biology. In hippocampus, the promoter region that governs Homer1a was less methylated, which is consistent with higher expression. The picture that emerges is neuroepigenetic: preconception obesity appears able to reprogram which gene isoforms the developing brain prefers to use.
Important limits apply. This is a mouse model. Molecular analyses were small and used bulk tissue. Only male offspring were analyzed for the brain work, since females did not show strong behavioral effects. The study stops at early adolescence, and causality among methylation, isoform choice, and behavior remains to be proven.
The practical note is not blame, but prudence. Maternal health before conception looks like a sensitive window with downstream effects for sons. That suggests a public health focus on preconception nutrition, metabolic care, and equitable access to preventive resources.
(5) Education Gap Is Speeding Up Aging in Millions of People, Neuroscience News, (August 21, 2025)
The study summarized by Elizabeth Newcomb shows a hard fact that should resonate with libertarians. Americans with more education are aging more slowly on the inside than those with less, and the gap has widened over three decades. Using NHANES data on adults ages 50 to 79, the team compared 1988–1994 with 2015–2018. Everyone improved, but college-educated Americans gained the most. The biological age gap between those with 0–11 years of schooling and those with 16 or more grew from about one year to almost two. Changes in smoking, obesity, and medication use did not explain the divergence.
Key Facts
Biological Aging vs. Chronological Age: Biological age reflects the body’s health status beyond the number of years lived.
Growing Gap: The difference in biological aging between the least and most educated nearly doubled over 30 years.
Public Health Concern: Education strongly influences long-term health, making inequality in aging a social issue with lasting consequences.
If education routes people into safer jobs, higher earnings, better neighborhoods, and better care, then freedom in education is a health issue. When the state runs near monopolies in K–12 and overregulates postsecondary pathways, the costs show up as years of life lost for those who cannot escape. The data point toward a simple principle. Expand choice and competition where it matters most.
The policy implications are straightforward. Let dollars follow students across public, charter, private, and home settings. Remove caps on high-performing charters. Open the pipeline to work by cutting occupational licensing that locks low-education workers out of higher wages. Supercharge apprenticeships and short-cycle credentials that stack into degrees. Encourage employer-funded learning and portable education savings without tax penalties. Invite civil society and philanthropy to build on-ramps rather than defaulting to new federal mandates.
This is not a morality tale about individuals. It is a systems story about how coercive bottlenecks punish the least advantaged. If we care about closing health gaps, we should widen educational freedom and let bottom-up solutions compete. The return will be measured in longer, healthier lives, not just in test scores.
Book Notice
1999: The Year Low Culture Conquered America and Kickstarted Our Bizarre Times
by Ross Benes · Series: Politics and Popular Culture
University Press of Kansas
Publication date: April 2025 | 296 pp.
Formats: Hardcover $32.99 (ISBN 9780700638574), eBook $14.99 (ISBN 9780700638581)
Ross Benes argues that 1999 was not only a peak year for prestige film, it was also the moment low culture went fully mainstream and rewired American life. The book tracks a single year packed with phenomena that still echo today: WWE and WCW pulling 35 million weekly viewers, Jerry Springer topping daytime TV and popping up in scripted shows, Insane Clown Posse breaking into the charts, Dance Dance Revolution arriving in North America, Grand Theft Auto becoming a franchise, and Beanie Babies and Pokémon inflating speculative bubbles that look a lot like today’s NFT mania.
Benes connects the dots between wrestling’s kayfabe and modern political theater, between fan loyalty and partisan identity, and between moral panics over video games and today’s culture-war scapegoats. The result reads less like nostalgia and more like a field guide to our present, where entertainment logic shapes news, politics, and markets.
Why it matters for readers here
If you follow the intersection of culture, commerce, and public morality, this is useful intellectual scaffolding. It helps explain how late-1990s “trash TV,” collectible frenzies, and boundary-pushing games set the stage for today’s influencer politics, meme markets, and outrage cycles. I would love to hear what examples from 1999 you think most clearly prefigured our current moment, and I may feature your notes in a future reader round-up.
Book Update
My latest book, God at Work: Loving God and Neighbor Through the Book of Exodus is now on sale. It’s the result of years of study, teaching, and reflection on how the story of Exodus speaks to our struggles with fear, calling, identity, and freedom today and, to my surprise, watching the book of Exodus awaken faith in the lives of college students. Pick up a copy today!