Weekly Top Five Articles
Here’s what stood out this are we bring in the new year. . .
(1) “Capitalism by Sven Beckert review – an extraordinary history of the economic system that controls our lives,” by Dorian Lynskey, The Guardian (December 23, 2025)
Lynskey’s review of Capitalism: A Global History presents Sven Beckert’s work as an intellectual feat of rare scale and ambition. Across roughly a thousand years, Beckert reconstructs capitalism as a global process rather than a European morality tale, tracing its rise through silver mines, sugar plantations, ports, empires, and states. The book opens with Potosí, the Bolivian silver city whose staggering wealth underwrote global trade while consuming indigenous lives at a brutal rate. That pattern of abundance tied to coercion becomes the governing logic of the narrative.
Beckert defines capitalism as the relentless accumulation of privately controlled capital and rejects the comforting story that it naturally emerged from free markets, Protestant virtue, or Enlightenment reason. Instead, he foregrounds violence, state power, colonial conquest, and slavery as essential conditions. Early trading hubs such as Aden functioned as islands of capital long before the word “capitalism” existed, yet they lacked the political backing that later allowed accumulation to scale. That backing arrived during the age of imperial expansion, when war financed trade and trade financed war.
From Barbados to Manchester, Beckert documents how forced labor, expropriation, and discipline shaped industrial modernity. He dismantles the myth of the free market, showing how markets were constructed and enforced by law, guns, and ideology. Capitalism emerges as dynamic and crisis-prone, repeatedly declared doomed yet endlessly adaptive.
Lynskey credits the book’s breathtaking research and moral seriousness while noting a lingering imbalance. Beckert powerfully catalogs capitalism’s so-called harms, from racial hierarchy to ecological devastation, yet gives less attention to the material gains that made it so resilient. The result reads less like a balanced ledger than a cautionary epic, a history of a system that reshaped the world while steadily devouring it.
This book is wrong, by the way, but I’ll leave that to an economist or an historian to explain.
(2) “The Renaissance book that heralded growth, by Virginia Postrel, Works In Progress (December 23, 2025)
Postrel’s essay traces the quiet birth of a modern imagination, one that learned to see its own time as creative and forward-looking rather than decadent and derivative. Long before Galileo’s telescope or Newton’s laws, late sixteenth-century Europeans began to sense that they were living in an age of discovery. The clearest expression of this shift appears in Nova Reperta, a 1588 collection of engravings celebrating technologies and practices unknown to classical antiquity.
Created by the artist Johannes Stradanus with the intellectual guidance of Luigi Alamanni, the book argues for progress through images rather than theory. Printing presses, windmills, clocks, oil refineries, and workshops fill its pages. The title engraving stages a visual philosophy of history, placing the present between a departing past and an expectant future, framed by tools of navigation, production, and war. Even discoveries borrowed from other cultures appear as part of a living, cumulative world.
Postrel shows how these scenes depict what later economists would recognize as market-driven growth. Work is social, specialized, and intelligible. Labor is visible. Innovation unfolds over time through combinations of ideas, tools, and skills. The images invite curiosity and delight, rewarding close attention to faces, gestures, and small human details. Progress appears as a shared cultural achievement.
The essay gains force through contrast. Postrel compares Stradanus’s exuberant vision with a 1999 art book that borrowed the same title while stripping away people, joy, and productive energy. That later work reflects a late twentieth-century sensibility shaped by suspicion toward growth, technology, and human presence itself. Where the Renaissance celebrated discovery, the modern reinterpretation fixates on alienation and environmental guilt.
Postrel’s conclusion is restrained yet pointed. Stradanus still feels fresh because he captured a civilization learning to value invention and cooperation. The culture of growth began as an act of imagination. Once lost, it proves far harder to recover.
(3) “Gen Z reports highest anxiety levels as screen time increases,” by Stephen Neely and Kaila Witkowski, PsyPost (January 1, 2026)
One of the biggest fallacies about smart phones and social is that screen time and nefarious content is what kids need to be protected from. It’s more complication
Neely and Witkowski add empirical weight to a growing unease about the psychological costs of digital life. Drawing on a statewide survey of Florida adults conducted in May 2025, their analysis confirms what clinicians, parents, and educators increasingly suspect. Anxiety is widespread, concentrated among the young, and closely associated with time spent on social media.
Roughly one in five Floridians report symptoms consistent with moderate to severe generalized anxiety, a figure that mirrors national estimates from the National Institutes of Health. The generational gradient is striking. Members of Gen Z report the highest anxiety scores by a wide margin, followed by millennials, Gen X, and baby boomers. The youngest cohort averages just below the clinical threshold for moderate anxiety, a level far higher than their parents and grandparents at comparable ages.
The study relies on the GAD-7, a widely used clinical screening tool, and pairs it with detailed questions about social media use. The pattern is consistent and difficult to ignore. Anxiety scores rise steadily as weekly screen time increases. Those who avoid social media altogether report the lowest anxiety. Those spending ten or more hours a week report the highest. The relationship holds even when the analysis is limited to Gen Z and millennials, suggesting that age alone does not explain the effect.
Motivation matters as much as duration. Using social media to stay connected with family and friends is associated with lower anxiety. Using it to track trends, appearance norms, or lifestyle content correlates with markedly higher distress. Feelings of social comparison and fear of missing out intensify the effect.
The findings echo arguments advanced by social psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt, who link adolescent mental health trends to the architecture of digital platforms. Neely and Witkowski stop short of claiming causation. Still, their data point toward a plausible public health response. Reducing exposure, setting firm limits, and restoring offline rhythms may offer young adults a measurable reduction in anxiety rather than a moral lecture about willpower.
(4) “Marriages are happier when partners find each other without intermediaries, study suggests,” by Vladimir Hedrih, PsyPost (December 31, 2025)
This study offers a quiet but revealing window into how modern intimacy is formed and how it is experienced. Drawing on a decade of data from the China Family Panel Studies, the research finds that people who meet their spouses on their own report higher marital satisfaction than those who rely on intermediaries. Autonomy at the beginning of a relationship appears to echo through the life of a marriage.
The analysis, published in Critical Humanistic Social Theory, examines responses from nearly 13,000 adults across 25 Chinese provinces between 2010 and 2020. Participants were asked how they met their spouse and how satisfied they were with their current marriage or cohabiting relationship. The author, Xueshen Ding, distinguishes between self-initiated relationships that emerge from everyday interaction in schools, workplaces, or non-marriage-oriented online spaces, and non-self-initiated relationships formed through family introductions, friends, or formal matchmaking platforms.
The pattern is consistent. Self-initiated partnerships are associated with higher reported satisfaction. Among introduced couples, those brought together by family members report lower satisfaction than those introduced by friends. Relationships formed through online platforms oriented toward matching also score lower than relationships that developed organically offline.
The findings arrive against a long historical backdrop. For centuries, marriage served economic and social purposes, with kin networks exerting decisive influence. Industrialization and urbanization expanded individual choice, shifting expectations toward emotional compatibility and personal fulfillment. Contemporary dating technologies further extend that autonomy while also reintroducing forms of mediation.
How partners meet likely reflects deeper dispositions toward agency, trust, and relational engagement. The results suggest that the experience of choosing one another freely may shape how couples interpret conflict, commitment, and satisfaction over time. In an age crowded with algorithms and arrangements, the data quietly affirm the enduring power of self-directed human encounter.
(5) “The dark side of ‘T maxxing’: why young men are risking their fertility for muscles,” by Samuel Cornell, Luke Cox, and Timothy Piatkowski, PsyPost December 25, 2025
This essay examines a familiar modern pathology dressed up as biological optimization. Under hashtags like #testosteronemaxxing, young men are encouraged to push their testosterone levels ever higher in pursuit of strength, status, and masculine credibility. What begins as interest in health and fitness quickly slides into risk taking that carries real medical consequences.
Cornell, Cox, and Piatkowski explain the physiology with care. Testosterone is a powerful hormone with broad effects on muscle, bone density, mood, libido, and fertility. It surges during puberty, peaks in early adulthood, and declines gradually with age. For a small minority of men with clinically diagnosed hypogonadism, testosterone replacement therapy can be life improving and even lifesaving. For healthy teenage boys and young adults, however, artificially raising testosterone offers no proven benefit and introduces serious dangers.
The authors situate the trend within a wider ecosystem of online self-optimization culture. Influential voices such as Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman frequently discuss testosterone in ways that blur the line between education and endorsement. Social media then amplifies a manufactured panic about “low T,” reframing ordinary developmental variation as pathology and selling aggressive solutions through private clinics, supplements, and black market drugs.
The medical risks are substantial. Non prescribed testosterone can shut down the body’s own hormone production, suppress sperm count, and compromise fertility, sometimes permanently. Side effects range from acne and hair loss to cardiovascular events. Illicit products add further hazards through contamination and incorrect dosing.
The authors argue that harm reduction, not mockery, is essential. Many young men drawn to T maxxing are responding to anxiety about identity, status, and belonging. The antidote is neither shame nor chemical shortcuts. It is accurate information, medical supervision when warranted, and a recovery of the truth that masculine development cannot be engineered through hormone manipulation without cost.
Solutions and Recommendations
Based on the psychological principles of fostering the “real self” and mitigating “basic anxiety,” the following are recommendations and solutions for parents and churches to address the identified issues. These strategies focus on moving away from an “idealized” image (where someone lives for the approval of others) and toward genuine self-realization.
