Weekly Top Five Articles
Why white male Trump supporters believe they are losing, teen cannabis use associated young adult anxiety disorders, sexting norms for teens, and more...
Here’s what stood out this week. . .
(1) “Philanthropy for Radicals,” Prof. Claire Dunning, Dissent Magazine (February 12, 2026)
In 1922, two reluctant petitioners, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and A. Philip Randolph, sought funds from the American Fund for Public Service to defend anarchists and sustain Black socialist journalism. They appealed to Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, who despite his suspicion of elite philanthropy agreed to steward the inheritance of Charles Garland, a young millionaire uneasy with wealth rooted in finance capitalism. John Fabian Witt’s The Radical Fund recounts how this unlikely alliance transformed a private bequest into a laboratory for democratic insurgency.
The Garland Fund, modest in size and radical in ambition, financed what Witt calls nearly every controversial cause of the interwar years. It backed W.E.B. Du Bois’s research on segregated schools, Clarence Darrow’s defenses of John Scopes and Ossian Sweet, legal aid for Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scottsboro Boys, labor colleges, union drives, and the NAACP’s early litigation strategy that would culminate decades later in Brown v. Board of Education. Witt argues that the fund did not single-handedly refashion American democracy, yet its grants seeded institutions and ideas poised to act when crisis arrived.
Dunning’s review praises this account while pressing on philanthropy’s unresolved tensions. The Garland board, though ideologically adventurous, retained decisive power over grantees. Its fraught relationship with the NAACP illustrates how trimmed grants, matching requirements, and strategic directives could constrain autonomy even while advancing racial justice. Process mattered as much as outcome.
Published amid renewed assaults on liberal foundations, Witt’s history invites readers to abandon fantasies of philanthropic neutrality. The Garland experiment suggests that private wealth, candidly political and strategically deployed, can fortify democratic movements during periods of repression, even as it remains entangled with the inequalities it seeks to redress.
(2) “The Humanities Are About to Be Automated: AI can now write convincing academic papers. There’s no more room for denial,” by Yascha Mounk (Feb 16, 2026).
Yascha Mounk argues that the humanities stand on the brink of automation, and that denial among scholars is no longer tenable. While many in technical fields recognize the accelerating capacities of large language models, including their facility with complex reasoning, coding, and even scientific discovery, humanists often retreat to the claim that AI cannot produce genuine intelligence or creativity. Mounk dismisses this as a semantic refuge, sustained by circular definitions that reserve those terms for human output by fiat.
To test the matter, he asked a state of the art model to generate a publishable paper in political theory, his own field of training. Drawing on Tocqueville and Mill, the model produced an argument about “epistemic domination,” the power of technology firms to shape the cognitive conditions of democratic life. With minimal guidance, and in under two hours, the system generated a draft that Mounk believes could clear peer review with only minor revisions. The result was not a parody or an exercise in empty jargon. It resembled competent graduate level scholarship, structurally sound and literate in the conventions of the discipline.
The episode is not a cheap hoax aimed at exposing intellectual decadence. Mounk insists that political theory remains a serious field. The deeper point is institutional. For decades, academic incentives have privileged narrow, technically proficient journal articles read by a small circle of specialists. If machines can now produce such work at scale, the traditional justification for the humanities cannot survive unchanged.
Paradoxically, Mounk contends, AI may increase the existential importance of humanistic inquiry even as it renders many of its professional rituals obsolete. Questions about meaning, agency, and human distinctiveness grow sharper as machines acquire capacities once thought uniquely ours. What must change, he concludes, is not the humanities’ subject matter but their structure and self understanding in an age when intellectual production itself can be automated.
(3) “Teen Cannabis Use Doubles Psychosis and Bipolar Risk,” Neuroscience News (February 20, 2026)
A sweeping longitudinal study of 463,396 adolescents delivers a bracing conclusion: teenage cannabis use, even at seemingly casual levels, is associated with a doubling of risk for psychotic and bipolar disorders by young adulthood. Published in JAMA Health Forum, the research follows participants from ages 13 to 17 through age 26, drawing on electronic health records collected during routine pediatric visits between 2016 and 2023. Across demographic groups and prior mental health histories, the pattern held. Cannabis exposure typically preceded psychiatric diagnosis by roughly two years.
The scale and design of the study matter. Unlike earlier research focused on heavy use or diagnosed cannabis use disorder, this analysis examined any self reported past year use. Adolescents who acknowledged using cannabis at all were about twice as likely to develop psychotic or bipolar conditions, and also faced elevated risks of depression and anxiety. Researchers adjusted for socioeconomic status, other substance use, and pre existing psychiatric vulnerabilities. The association remained robust.
The timing is unsettling. THC potency has climbed dramatically in the era of commercialization. Cannabis flower now commonly exceeds 20 percent THC, and concentrates can approach 95 percent. The neurodevelopmental window of adolescence, marked by ongoing maturation of emotional regulation and executive function, may be particularly susceptible to such exposure. The study does not claim mechanistic proof, yet its longitudinal structure strengthens the inference that cannabis use functions as a risk factor rather than merely a correlate of emerging illness.
The public health implications are acute. Cannabis remains the most widely used illicit substance among American teens, with prevalence rising sharply by grade level. Use is more common in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, raising concerns that expanding markets could deepen mental health disparities. In a cultural moment inclined to treat adolescent cannabis experimentation as benign, this evidence complicates the narrative. The data suggest that early exposure, in a high potency landscape, may carry consequences measured not in weeks but in diagnoses that alter the arc of a young life.
(4) “Study Links Sugary Drinks to Adolescent Anxiety,” Neuroscience News (February 16, 2026)
Parents, sugar drinks include juices so don’t think of this as only soda. A new systematic review and meta analysis suggests that the adolescent mental health crisis may be entwined with a far more prosaic habit: sugary drinks. Researchers led by scholars at the University of Bournemouth examined nine studies published between 2000 and 2025, assessing the relationship between sugar sweetened beverage consumption and anxiety disorders among teenagers. The conclusion was consistent if cautious. Higher intake of sodas, energy drinks, sweetened coffees, flavored milks, and sugary juices was associated with elevated symptoms of anxiety.
The quantitative signal, while modest, was statistically meaningful. In pooled analyses limited to studies measuring anxiety disorders as a binary outcome, adolescents with higher sugary drink consumption showed 34 percent greater odds of anxiety. Seven of the nine studies reviewed reported a significant positive association. Two longitudinal studies found small but persistent links over a one year period. Most of the evidence remains observational, relying on survey data and self reported consumption, which limits causal claims. Yet the pattern is difficult to dismiss.
Public health discourse has long centered the physical consequences of excessive sugar, from obesity to type 2 diabetes. The new analysis broadens the frame, suggesting that energy dense, nutrient poor beverages may also shape emotional well being. Anxiety disorders now affect roughly one in five young people, and researchers argue that dietary habits deserve scrutiny alongside social media use, sleep disruption, and academic stress.
The causal direction remains uncertain. It is plausible that high sugar intake influences neurobiological pathways related to mood regulation. It is equally plausible that anxious adolescents gravitate toward sweetened drinks as a form of self soothing. Shared environmental factors such as family stress or poor sleep may drive both behaviors. Even so, the study identifies a modifiable lifestyle variable within a complex ecosystem of risk. In an era searching for levers to arrest the rise of adolescent distress, reducing sugary beverage consumption appears to be one place to begin.
(5) Moderate Cannabis Use May Protect the Aging Brain, Neuroscience News (February 16, 2026)
For a generation, the dominant scientific narrative around cannabis has been one of adolescent vulnerability. Early and heavy use, researchers have warned, is associated with impaired cognition and altered neurodevelopment. A large scale analysis of more than 26,000 adults drawn from the UK Biobank complicates that storyline. Among participants between 40 and 77 years old, lifetime cannabis use was linked to larger volumes in several brain regions and stronger performance across multiple cognitive measures.
Investigators concentrated on areas rich in CB1 cannabinoid receptors, including the hippocampus, caudate, putamen, and amygdala. These structures are essential to memory, learning, and executive control, and they typically show age related atrophy. In this cohort, greater lifetime exposure to cannabis correlated with preserved regional brain volume and higher scores on tests of processing speed, short term memory, attention, and executive functioning. The most consistent advantages appeared among moderate users, suggesting a dose dependent pattern in which restraint may matter as much as exposure.
The findings resist triumphalism. Heavier use was associated with lower volume in the posterior cingulate, a region implicated in memory and emotion, underscoring that cannabis does not operate uniformly across neural systems. The study also relied on retrospective self reports and lacked detailed information about product potency, THC to CBD ratios, or patterns of use. Many participants likely consumed cannabis decades ago, in formulations far less concentrated than those now widely available.
Even so, the results invite a more differentiated account of cannabis across the lifespan. The endocannabinoid system evolves with age, and the same compound that may disrupt a developing brain could interact differently with one confronting inflammation and neurodegeneration. As older adults increasingly use cannabis for sleep or chronic pain, public health discourse must adapt to a demographic shift. The study does not warrant clinical endorsement, but it unsettles the assumption that cannabis is uniformly corrosive to cognitive health.
Bonus: the bonus articles below present research on Trump-supporting White men who believe they are now at the bottom of the racial hierarchy in America, how teens engage in sexting, and how the connection between romance, marriage, and the ability to adjust one’s thinking predicts marital success.
