Weekly Top Five Articles
Anxious people vote Left, sports betting increases crime, a word on science fiction and more. . .
Here’s what stood out this week. . .
(1) Among the Prophets: Science fiction and the art of prediction, by Nicholas Russell, The Baffler, January 2, 2026
Russell’s essay examines science fiction as a moral technology for thinking about the future amid informational decay. He opens with the internet’s fading reliability, where attribution dissolves and repetition replaces knowledge, exposing a culture both dependent on prediction and careless with truth. A digression on misattributed aphorisms becomes a diagnosis of media illiteracy and a psychological need for borrowed authority. Against political anxiety and technological spectacle, readers hunt prophetic accuracy in older novels, mistaking emotional resonance for foresight. Russell argues that science fiction rarely predicts events; it stages feelings. Its value lies in allegory that renders the present legible when reality grows absurd.
The essay’s center of gravity is Stephen King’s The Running Man, published under the Richard Bachman pseudonym. Russell reads the novel as a bleak socioeconomic fable about entertainment, surveillance, and poverty, where violence is monetized and rage becomes a civic resource. King’s imagined media ecology anticipates disinformation, participatory policing, and cruelty as leisure, not through clairvoyance but through an unsparing account of incentives. The book’s despair, Russell suggests, feels contemporary because structures endure even as technologies change.
Film adaptations clarify the ethical stakes. The 1987 version softens politics into heroic spectacle, while the recent remake substitutes topical gestures for conviction, offering comfort without risk. In both cases, mass culture neutralizes critique, selling catharsis in place of judgment. Russell contrasts this with the novel’s terminal refusal of redemption, where resistance fails and violence resolves nothing.
Throughout, the essay challenges the lazy claim that the future is unknowable. Prediction persists through pattern recognition and moral imagination, not timelines. Science fiction matters when it trains readers to perceive recurring dynamics of power, fear, and desire. Its prophetic force lies in clarifying how tomorrow will feel because today already teaches the lesson. Such clarity resists cynicism, disciplines hope, and exposes responsibility.
(2) “One Hundred Years of GossipThe Bruderhof’s first rule was written in 1925. After a century, does it still work?” By Chris Zimmerman, Plough (December 27, 2025)
Zimmerman’s essay reflects on a century old experiment in moral formation through the Bruderhof’s “First Law,” a strict prohibition of gossip grounded in Christian love and direct speech. He treats the rule not as quaint idealism but as a hard won social technology, forged to protect fragile communal bonds from the corrosive effects of suspicion, resentment, and performative righteousness. Gossip, Zimmerman suggests, is never merely casual speech. It is a psychological release that quietly redistributes power, soothes ego, and corrodes trust, often while masquerading as concern or realism.
The article is honest about failure. Human nature resists silence, and even principled alternatives such as “speaking the truth in love” can become weapons when pride eclipses charity. Body language, insinuation, and selective storytelling provide endless loopholes. Yet Zimmerman argues that the rule’s persistence matters precisely because it is repeatedly broken. Each failure re exposes the damage gossip does to communities, whether religious, professional, or digital, where rumor metastasizes into anxiety, factionalism, and moral posturing.
Zimmerman engages psychological defenses of gossip as stress relief or a safety valve in asymmetric power relationships, acknowledging their partial truth while warning that intention rarely remains pure. Speech about others easily slides from problem solving into self justification and status seeking. Administrators, pastors, and professionals are not exempt; institutionalized whisper networks weaken the very communities they claim to protect.
Biblical imagery anchors the essay’s moral seriousness. Words are sparks, feathers, seeds. Once released, they cannot be retrieved. The Bruderhof’s rule endures because it demands personal humility before communal reform. Change begins with self restraint, joy in others, and the courage to address conflict face to face. Zimmerman’s quiet claim is that in an age addicted to commentary and outrage, disciplined speech remains one of the last defenses against social decay. Such discipline resists entropy restores trust.
(3) Can entrepreneurship be taught? Here’s the neuroscience, by Victor Perez, PsyPost (January 8, 2026)
Perez argues that entrepreneurship education has stalled because it teaches procedures rather than cultivating the mental capacities that allow people to act under uncertainty. Despite decades of programmes, entrepreneurial intention remains flat, suggesting that motivation and resilience cannot be transmitted through case studies alone. His proposal reframes entrepreneurship as a brain based practice, shifting attention from external skills to internal cognitive and emotional regulation.
The essay situates this move within a historical arc, from economic and psychological models to managerial checklists, before proposing a “brain driven” era grounded in neuroscience. Perez highlights electroencephalography as a tool that bypasses self report and observes attention, workload, and emotional processing directly. Studies using emotionally primed risk tasks suggest that individuals with higher entrepreneurial intention show distinctive neural responses even when behaviour appears unchanged. Decision making, the article implies, is shaped beneath consciousness long before outcomes are visible.
From this premise, Perez advocates brain aligned training. Exercises that strengthen sustained attention, reflection, and flexibility are presented as foundational, whether through design challenges, attentional drills, or guided self awareness. He extends this logic to experimental domains such as music engineered to sustain focus and motivation, and to proprietary frameworks that blend narrative, sound, and cognitive sequencing.
The promise is expansive. Neuroscience offers a way to democratise entrepreneurial capacity by training the conditions for agency itself. Yet the argument also raises ethical and social questions. Cognitive optimisation risks reducing entrepreneurship to neurological efficiency, neglecting moral judgment, social responsibility, and structural barriers. Moreover, techniques that shape attention and emotion blur the line between education and behavioural engineering.
Perez’s vision is compelling because it recognises that entrepreneurship is existential before it is technical. Still, brains do not act in isolation. Without a parallel formation of character and purpose, brain driven entrepreneurship may sharpen capacity without clarifying ends alone.
(4) People with anxious tendencies are more likely to support left-wing economic policy by Eric W. Dolan, PsyPost (January 6, 2026)
New research summarized by Dolan reframes the psychology of economic ideology by locating redistribution in vulnerability rather than resentment. Drawing on survey data from nearly eighteen thousand respondents across the United States and the Netherlands, the study finds that people with anxious dispositions are more likely to support left wing economic policies, especially when they feel socially excluded. This challenges older theories that cast conservatism as anxiety’s natural refuge, a view rooted in mid twentieth century efforts to explain authoritarianism through fear and repression.
The authors advance a social support hypothesis grounded in evolutionary psychology. For ancestral humans, exclusion from the group signaled mortal danger. Contemporary welfare states, the argument goes, are cognitively interpreted as surrogate tribes, promising care when personal networks fail. Anxiety, distinct from emotional volatility, sensitizes individuals to such threats. Accordingly, anxious respondents consistently favored taxation, welfare spending, and job guarantees, even when income, education, and employment were held constant. Anxiety predicted redistribution about as strongly as income itself, a finding that unsettles purely material accounts of political preference.
Experimental evidence strengthens the claim. When anxious participants were briefly subjected to simulated social rejection online, their support for economic intervention increased, despite the interaction’s obvious artificiality. The brain’s alarm systems responded as if genuine provisioning were at stake. Inclusion neutralized the effect, underscoring that ideology here operates as a compensatory response to perceived isolation.
Yet the implications are double edged. Interpreting left wing economics as a psychological salve risks reducing moral and philosophical commitments to affect regulation. At the same time, the findings expose how thin social bonds and digital loneliness can politicize anxiety, channeling private fragility into public demands. The study does not claim that anxiety explains all ideology, nor does it extend neatly to social issues. Its deeper provocation is ethical: societies that erode community.
(5) Legalized sports betting linked to a rise in violent crimes and property theft, by Eric W. Dolan, PsyPost (January 2, 2026)
Dolan reports on research linking legalized sports betting to measurable increases in violence and property crime, reframing gambling expansion as a social policy experiment with underappreciated costs. Using FBI crime data surrounding professional sporting events, the study finds that states permitting sports betting experience higher rates of assault and theft during and after games, with effects intensifying when favored home teams lose unexpectedly. The analysis situates these outcomes within the post 2018 gambling landscape, where revenue promises eclipsed careful moral and psychological scrutiny.
Methodologically, the study is rigorous. A difference in differences design compares crime rates across states and time periods, isolating the effect of legalization. The results suggest that betting does more than heighten fan engagement. It converts ordinary emotional investment into financial exposure, amplifying frustration, impulsivity, and aggression. Losses in predictable games produced especially sharp spikes in violence, implicating the shock of failed certainty rather than mere disappointment. Over time, as betting markets matured, heightened stress and arousal surrounding close games also fueled crime, even absent clear financial loss.
The findings challenge the popular framing of sports betting as harmless entertainment. Gambling reshapes the emotional ecology of fandom, fusing identity, money, and volatility. It turns collective rituals into stress tests for self control, particularly among populations already primed by alcohol, rivalry, and crowd dynamics. Spillover effects in border counties further underscore that legalized betting exports harm beyond its regulatory boundaries.
Ethically, the study raises questions about state complicity. When governments profit from wagering while externalizing its social costs, they tacitly sanction environments where aggression becomes statistically predictable. The research does not claim that bettors are uniquely immoral, but that policy structures magnify ordinary weaknesses. Legalization lowers friction, increases exposure, and normalizes risk taking in emotionally charged contexts.
The deeper warning is cultural. A society that monetizes suspense without cultivating restraint should not be surprised when entertainment bleeds into violence. Betting transforms loss into grievance, and grievance into action. Public policy must reckon with that causal chain, rather than treating crime as an unrelated downstream anomaly.
Bonus Articles: Profiles of Gen Alpha (2010-2025), which marriages are happier, and why believers have more mixed emotions than non-believers.
