Weekly Top Five Articles

Five essays that caught my attention this week on masculinity, consciousness, moral beauty, depression, and why young adults are questioning religion.

Photo by Blake Connally on Unsplash

Here’s what stood this week. . .

(1) “8 Rules for Being a Good Man: Atoxic masculinity and the eight rules for being a good man,” by Sebastian Ocklenburg, Psychology Today (February 8, 2026)

This first one was report on Psychology Today’s X feed and it seems rather silly to me. What on earth is “atoxic masculinity.”

The article summarizes a recent psychological study that attempts to define “toxic masculinity” through measurable personality traits and social attitudes. The researchers conclude that only a small minority of men display the toxic profile, yet the study still identifies eight characteristics associated with it. The article then reverses those traits to propose guidelines for what the author calls an “atoxic man.” The eight recommendations are presented as behavioral and attitudinal norms meant to reduce harmful expressions of masculinity.

1. Do not make masculinity central to your identity. A man should avoid tying his sense of self too strongly to being male.

2. Reject prejudice based on sexual orientation. A healthy man does not judge or discriminate against others because of their sexual orientation.

3. Practice agreeableness. Instead of hostility or antagonism, men should strive to be cooperative, respectful, and pleasant toward others.

4. Avoid narcissism. The study associates toxic masculinity with inflated self-importance, so humility and restraint are recommended.

5. Reject hostile sexism. Men should avoid overtly negative attitudes toward women.

6. Question benevolent sexism. Even seemingly positive stereotypes about women, such as assuming they need protection or assistance, should be reconsidered.

7. Support domestic violence prevention initiatives. The study finds that men who oppose such initiatives are more likely to score higher on toxic masculinity measures.

8. Promote social equality rather than dominance hierarchies. The recommended model of masculinity favors egalitarian relationships rather than power-based hierarchies.

Together these eight principles outline a psychological model of masculinity defined by humility, social equality, emotional restraint, and respect toward others.

Please notice that being a “real mean” means subscribing to a particular ideology at the end. This seems to be both feminizing and feminist. Most men aren’t agreeable, which is great!

(2) Who Is Thinking?: The quest to discover the answer to an age-old question, By T. M. Luhrmann, American Scholar (March 2, 2026)

T. M. Luhrmann’s review of Michael Pollan’s A World Appears examines the enduring puzzle of consciousness through the intellectual drama surrounding David Chalmers’s famous wager that science would fail to explain how brain activity produces subjective awareness. Twenty five years later the bet was settled in Chalmers’s favor, a quiet admission that the “hard problem” remains unresolved.

Pollan approaches the mystery as a curious interlocutor, staging conversations with philosophers, neuroscientists, and biologists who attempt to stretch the meaning of sentience. Plant scientists propose that roots make decisions and recognize opportunities. Developmental biologists construct strange cellular organisms whose behavior suggests rudimentary intention. Computational theorists argue that life itself requires systems capable of sensing and predicting their environment. Within this widening frame, something resembling awareness appears everywhere, from plants to synthetic organisms.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth advances the most provocative claim. The brain, he argues, operates as a prediction machine. Perception arises from expectations constantly adjusted by sensory input. What humans experience as reality becomes a controlled hallucination. Even the sense of self may be an elaborate inference produced by the brain’s attempt to stabilize its internal model of the world.

Luhrmann observes that beneath these theories lies an unspoken psychological drama. Scientists pursue consciousness with the fervor of seekers who have lost confidence in traditional religion yet still hunger for a universe that feels alive. Conferences on consciousness gather both empirical researchers and spiritual aspirants. Pollan ultimately turns toward poetry and meditation, suggesting that the scientific method alone cannot satisfy the deeper human longing to understand who, or what, is doing the thinking.

(3) Middlemarch and Moral beauty, by George Scialabba (April 2026 Issue)

George Scialabba’s meditation on Middlemarch explores what earlier Christian thinkers called moral beauty, the radiance of goodness perceived not merely in deeds but in the character from which they flow. The essay begins with Jonathan Edwards’s vision of holiness as a form of beauty rooted in humility, compassion, and love. Scialabba suggests that modern culture, saturated with commercial language and rhetorical thinness, has lost the capacity to recognize such beauty. George Eliot’s Middlemarch, he argues, preserves this moral imagination in literary form.

Eliot’s narrative voice offers readers a subtle education in moral perception. Her characters inhabit a world shaped less by villainy than by ordinary selfishness, wounded ambition, and constrained opportunity. Dorothea Brooke, the novel’s moral center, embodies ardent idealism. Her misguided marriage to the pedantic Edward Casaubon reveals how sincere longing for spiritual significance can collide with the smallness of human ego. Casaubon appears less monstrous than pitiable, a man imprisoned within a narrow and anxious self.

Other figures extend Eliot’s moral inquiry. The physician Tertius Lydgate arrives with intellectual ambition yet succumbs to the quiet tyranny of Rosamond Vincy’s vanity and manipulation. Rosamond represents a form of moral blindness in which the pursuit of status eclipses sympathy. Eliot treats these failures with unsparing clarity but also with mercy, recognizing that circumstance often distorts human vision.

Against this landscape of compromised motives stands Caleb Garth, a craftsman devoted to honest work and practical service. His integrity reflects a secular sanctity grounded in fidelity to ordinary tasks. Middlemarch ultimately proposes that the moral beauty of a life rarely appears in heroic gestures. It emerges through hidden acts of faithfulness that quietly sustain the fragile fabric of human community.

(4) New study links the fatigue of depression to overworked cellular power plant by by Karina Petrova (March 12, 2026)

A recent study reported in Translational Psychiatry offers a revealing biological portrait of the fatigue that so often shadows depression. Researchers examining young adults with major depressive disorder found an unexpected metabolic pattern in both brain tissue and circulating immune cells. The cellular systems responsible for generating energy appear to run at unusually high levels during rest while simultaneously lacking the capacity to increase output when stress demands greater effort.

The research centers on adenosine triphosphate, the molecule that fuels nearly every biological function. The brain consumes extraordinary amounts of energy even in quiet states, relying on mitochondria to produce the ATP necessary for neural signaling and cognitive activity. Using advanced seven Tesla magnetic resonance imaging, investigators measured ATP production in the visual cortex while also examining immune cells extracted from blood samples.

Contrary to prevailing assumptions about depletion, depressed participants displayed elevated ATP production at baseline. Their immune cells also contained higher resting energy levels. Yet when researchers chemically stressed those cells in laboratory tests, the pattern reversed. Healthy participants showed flexible metabolic reserves, increasing oxygen consumption and energy output. Cells from depressed individuals struggled to meet the challenge. Their mitochondria appeared already pushed near their limits.

This paradox suggests a system trapped in compensatory overdrive. Cells expend extraordinary effort simply to maintain ordinary functioning, leaving little reserve for additional demands. Such metabolic strain mirrors the psychological experience of depression itself, in which effort feels constant yet progress elusive. The findings hint that depression may involve not only emotional disturbance but a deeper disorder of energy regulation, one that reshapes how the body sustains motivation, cognition, and vitality.

(5) Hypocrisy and intolerance drive religious doubt among college students by Karina Petrova (March 8, 2026)

A recent study in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality examines the rising pattern of religious doubt among American college students and reveals that the causes are often social rather than theological. Surveying nearly four thousand undergraduates across secular and Christian institutions, researchers found that students most frequently questioned religion because of perceived hypocrisy among believers and intolerance toward gay and lesbian people. Other grievances included hostility toward other faiths and pressure placed on outsiders to conform.

These findings suggest that religious credibility is increasingly judged through lived behavior rather than doctrinal coherence. Students appear less troubled by philosophical puzzles about God than by the moral failures of religious communities. When the character of a community contradicts its moral claims, young adults experience a rupture in the meaning systems that once organized their identity.

Psychologically, this rupture generates tension. Religious belief often functions as a central interpretive framework that gives coherence to suffering, morality, and belonging. When doubt enters that structure, emotional distress frequently follows. Students who remained strongly religious reported the greatest anxiety, anger, and depressive symptoms when confronting doubts, since questioning threatened a foundation that anchored their sense of self.

Yet the study also uncovers a more hopeful dimension. Students who wrestled with religious doubt showed higher levels of intellectual humility and a stronger orientation toward existential searching. Many adopted a posture of inquiry that values complexity, self criticism, and openness to revision. Doubt, in this sense, became a developmental crucible rather than a simple loss of belief.

The results illuminate a deeper cultural moment. Young adults are not abandoning the search for meaning. They are responding to a perceived dissonance between moral aspiration and institutional practice within contemporary religious life.