Back in 2014, a solution to this problem occurred to Whitney Wolfe Herd. So she created the app Bumble with a simple rule: Women message first. This contravened traditional dating norms, in which men make the first move, and was designed to mitigate harassment, give women more agency, and lower traditional sources of dating anxiety.

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What’s a parent to do? Go on Facebook, of course.

Using the app, we were able to track down the profile of one of his Marine friends partying in Vegas, and in fewer than five minutes, we were direct-messaging him our son’s whereabouts. Once reunited, the band of brothers hunted down the pants-stealing miscreant and administered justice. And before long, our son was safely back on base.

I recounted that story recently after a speech I gave about the problems that overuse of social media can cause for families. An audience member had asked me whether I saw any ways that parents could use these applications to make their children’s lives better—and whether I had done so myself. Well, it turns out that audience member was not looking for my Kafkaesque short story about stolen pants. She was sending her first child off to college and simply wondering how I felt about online parents’ groups, which are generally hosted on Facebook. She wanted to know: Should she join one?

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As an expatriate in Barcelona during my mid-20s, I found many parts of life hard to understand—from eating supper at 11 p.m. to finding all the stores closed for three hours in the middle of every afternoon. But what baffled me the most was Spaniards’ sheer excellence at taking their vacation. Most of them abandoned any productive activity for the entire month of August, venturing off to the seaside or the mountains, and doing. . . well, nothing. And after this annual month of indolence, they returned victorious, radiating a deep peace. They were idleness grand masters, boredom virtuosos.

A very few years later, I would marry a Spaniard, learn both Spanish and Catalan, and adjust to the dietary routines and opening hours of my adopted country. But I never quite mastered the August vacation. Year after year, I tried to join with my wife either lounging on a Balearic beach or gazing at the mountains in a Pyrenean village. Inevitably, after about the first week, I wound up begging my wife to cut our monthlong vacation short—so that, for the love of God, I could do something.

Decades later, now living back in the U.S., I begrudgingly take brief annual vacations, but I assiduously avoid August trips to the Iberian vacation nothing-box. Lest you think I am weird (as she does), please note that I simply resemble most Americans, 55 percent of whom choose not even to use all their vacation days.

What explains this transatlantic cultural difference—both in general and in my marriage specifically? And who has the vacation thing right? Naturally, in answering those questions, I will seek to offer a completely impartial judgment.

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As a behavioral scientist, I am frequently asked a simple question: Why?

One explanation for the American left’s populist surge is that this is the inevitable future of American politics. Capitalism has run its course, the argument goes, producing the world’s first trillionaire while millions struggle to pay rent and buy groceries. Economic inequality and social injustice can only deepen without radical change. Democratic socialism is the natural and logical terminus, and the only long-term solution.

Here’s another explanation, which—setting aside my own political views—I find more likely: Democratic socialism, as we see it today, is a fad. Although it might wreak some havoc in the near future, it will collapse, to be remembered merely as a passing political fancy.

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Everyone knows there is a gender double standard when it comes to physical appearance. And to this, I say, “Thank God.”

When my wife and I got married, 35 years ago, she said that embracing me—I was 6′2″ and 142 pounds at the time—was like hugging a coatrack. (Today, she says that cuddling up to my 60-something gym-rat body is more like spooning with a leather sack of ropes.)

But, of course, she still married me. And sure enough, while women’s physical attractiveness plays a significant role in men’s mate preferences—particularly at the beginning—behavioral science shows that for men it confers only a modest advantage in permanent pair-bond mating (what you civilians call “marriage”). Other factors, such as dependability, hard work, and character, are much more predictive of mating success.

In other words, at least I am a leather sack of ropes with good character.

Some observers claim this double standard is changing. If you’re following new trends on social media, you can’t avoid hearing the word “looksmaxxing,” a practice based on the idea that, because fleeting first impressions are everything, a man’s physical attractiveness is his most important attribute if he ever wants to get a mate. The trend has “soft” variants that involve skin and hair care, teeth whitening, and muscle building, and an alarming “hard” type that encourages cosmetic surgery, fillers, steroids, and even “bonesmashing” to get a better facial structure.

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These are the words of Ryan Bingham, the road warrior character played brilliantly by George Clooney in the 2009 film Up in the Air (which was adapted from Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel of the same name). It’s my favorite movie.

Bingham is a human-resources professional and part-time motivational speaker who travels continuously from city to city. An expert in airlines and business hotels, he is obsessed with the goal of attaining 10 million frequent-flier miles on American Airlines. The movie is a romantic comedy, but for me, the love interest is an annoying distraction from the profound psychological portrait of a man who travels to find himself and escape himself at the same time, while simultaneously dispensing advice on human flourishing.

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One hunger she admired, however, was Americans’ desire for self-improvement. Bestseller lists, she noticed, always contained titles like Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. People in the U.S. always seemed to have a personal project to correct or upgrade something about themself.

She was hardly the first to notice this about America. In his great 1835 survey, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that “the first thing which strikes a traveler in the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to throw off their original condition.” Most Americans weren’t trying to be powerful or famous, but they wanted a better life, and weren’t willing to wait around for some bureaucrat or noble to make it so.

American history can practically be charted by self-improvement classics, from Benjamin Franklin’s annual Poor Richard’s Almanack in the mid-18th century and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” in the 19th, to 20th-century bestsellers such as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). In the modern era, journalists such as Malcolm Gladwell and distinguished academics like Adam Grant have joined the tradition, upgrading the genre to have an increased reliance on scholarly studies and academic research translated into terms that regular people can understand, and using that data to suggest habits they can adopt.

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Young Americans are drinking a lot less than they used to. That bodes ill for America.

Let me explain. A new report making headlines from the research organization Monitoring the Future reveals that the percentage of teenage Americans who had tried alcohol in 2025 was lower than at any time since the data had been collected. In the mid-1970s, 92 percent of 12th graders had tried at least a sip of alcohol; by 2025, that proportion had fallen almost by half, to 47 percent.

On the one hand, this is good news, given the many problems created by underage drinking—and I include those of my own besotted youth. But the new finding also indicates a trend that is distinctly less cheery: an unwillingness to take risks associated with adult behaviors. This is a point persuasively made by the psychologist Jean Twenge, who has shown that among adolescents and young adults, all manner of risk-taking—from having sex to driving a car—has tanked in recent years.

For example: Now that Gen Z is firmly in the workforce, financial researchers have begun to look at these young adults’ investing habits. The conventional wisdom is that young people are piling into crypto and meme stocks—and some certainly are. But on average, members of Gen Z prefer safer, liquid assets and avoid high-risk investments, compared with older cohorts.

Lest you think this is simply evidence of prudential wisdom about finances, Gen Z is even more resistant to high-stakes investments in other people. In 1980, 90 percent of 35-year-old men were married; today, the rate is 60 percent and falling fast. In 1993, 83 percent of 12th-grade girls said they hoped to marry at some point; by 2023, only 61 percent said the same.

Some of this stems from a lack of self-confidence: The percentage of 12th-grade girls who believe they would make a “very good spouse” fell by 11 percentage points from 2012 to 2022. (The decrease for boys was 8 points.) But the data generally point to the fact that rising rates of anxiety—which creates risk aversion—are a big reason why members of Gen Z are avoiding real-life relationships. For example, higher anxiety among young people predicts a preference for digital messaging over face-to-face interaction. And according to recent data analysis by the University of Washington’s Ryan Burge, this anxiety extends far beyond a preference for texting. Nearly three-quarters of Gen Z say “you can’t be too careful” in dealing with people—far and away the highest of any age cohort. Depressingly, only 13 percent of Gen Zers say that most people can be trusted. The result is that in pursuit of avoiding risk, Gen Z is avoiding people.

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Heavy, man. A few seconds later, however, he followed with this: “At least the Knicks are crushing it.”

As we all know, the Knicks went on to win their first NBA finals since 1973 on Saturday night, making my friend even happier alongside millions of New Yorkers. From Brooklyn to Queens to the West Village to the Upper East Side, fans of all ages, races, and religions streamed onto the streets, hugging and high-fiving each other at random. Fire trucks honked along with chants; taxi cabs blasted “New York State of Mind”; and walkers whooped as they passed each other, for no other reason than the exhilarating experience they had just enjoyed together.

As a happiness specialist, one thing I have seen in the studies and data over the past decade is that sports fandom is one of life’s unalloyed sources of joy. In Fans Have More Friends, the sports writers Ben Valenta and David Sikorjak show that professed sports fans who have favorite teams are twice as likely to be “very happy” compared with nonfans, are far more likely to feel known, and are more grateful about life.

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Moral attitudes in the United States have shifted enormously over the past few decades, and on a whole range of issues: from same-sex marriage to abortion. But Americans have remained foursquare against adultery. A solid 90 percent of adults said in a survey last year that marital infidelity is morally wrong, whereas just 2 percent said it is morally acceptable. (The rest believed it is not a moral issue.)

This overwhelming condemnation transcends age, gender, religion, and political ideology. Given that 20 percent of married men and 13 percent of married women admitted in 2022 to having had an affair (and many more don’t fess up to it), this condemnatory consensus even includes a good many cheaters themselves.

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Papal encyclicals aren’t typically known for provoking controversy. But Pope Leo’s decision to grapple with one of the most powerful and least understood technologies of our age has inspired intense debate. Matthew Walther, editor of Catholic literary journal The Lamp, called it “disappointingly measured and cautious.” AI safety researcher and blogger Zvi Mowshowitz criticized the pope’s assertion that AI cannot truly think. Others, including critics, developers, and religious leaders, praised the encyclical for the breadth and seriousness of its approach.

These subjects aren’t relevant to Catholics alone; indeed, we wrestle with them every day here at The Free Press. So we were thrilled to learn that Free Press columnist Arthur Brooks was invited to write the foreword for the English edition of the encyclical, published by Ascension Press. Today, we’re sharing an adapted version of the foreword, in which Arthur reflects on the pope’s lessons during a moment of profound technological change. For more, tune in to Arthur’s live conversation with Father Mike Schmitz Wednesday, 8 p.m. ET, about artificial intelligence, human dignity, meaning, and the future of humanity. —The Editors

There’s an expression that artificial intelligence developers in California use to refer to their work: “Building God.” In fact, one of them, Avital Balwit, the chief of staff to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, just did so in a May 22 essay for The Free Press. The use of the phrase, she wrote, is intended as a form of sardonic humor, acknowledging the awesome power and potential consequences of AI.

But is it a joke, really? The timing of Balwit’s piece was serendipitous, for only three days after it was published, Pope Leo XIV made headlines around the world for writing about artificial intelligence. On Monday, he issued his first encyclical—a major papal declaration on contemporary issues that is intended to guide the Catholic Church—titled Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

AI, Leo writes, isn’t the first time people have tried to build something godlike. Indeed, he opens his encyclical with the biblical story from Genesis of the Tower of Babel, which was a human attempt to reach “to the heavens.” What was the builders’ motivation? By their own account, “so that we may make a name for ourselves.”

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True, a few commencement speeches have been memorable, such as David Foster Wallace’s “This Is Water” at Kenyon College in 2005; Steve Jobs’s “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish” that same year at Stanford University; and Admiral William H. McRaven’s “Make Your Bed” at the University of Texas at Austin in 2014.

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That has reversed in the past decade. Now, I see a greater edge in the American students—more cynicism, less laughter. Today, it is the Asian and South American students who smile more easily. Even the jaded, cosmopolitan Europeans seem happier than my young compatriots. The only ones who seem to be able to give us a run for our gloom are the Brits and the Canadians.

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Years ago, early in my life as a public writer, and soon after comment sections became common in online publications, I published a very earnest article about the importance of loving one’s ideological foes. By that, I did not mean to tolerate our enemies or coexist with them in a bumper-sticker way; rather, as Jesus taught, to love them, no matter how their views make us feel. I genuinely believed the essay would be helpful, provocative in a constructive way, and I eagerly anticipated the response.

As soon as it was published, like a newborn lamb wandering into a den of hyenas, I clicked on the feedback section.

The first comment? “Arthur Brooks can eat a plate of hot trash.” It went downhill from there.

Welcome to the world of hate-posters; the trolls who have infected all social media platforms and the comment sections of most publications. These are people who—usually anonymously—post inflammatory, insulting content on the internet that aims to upset others and disrupt conversations. You have no doubt encountered them in Instagram comments and Facebook groups. According to the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of Americans in 2020 said they were victims of some form of online harassment. The Cyberbullying Research Center reports that the percentage of adolescents who have experienced cyberbullying rose from 17 to 33 percent over the past decade.

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Like so many ideas propagated as fact on social media and the internet, this belief gives a wildly distorted picture of the desires and needs of the vast majority of both women and men today. The best data on what young adults are actually looking for comes from data collected by think tanks such as the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute, which together have recently published a report titled “State of Our Unions 2026: The Dating Recession.”

It is true that, according to the report’s survey, only 21 percent of single young adults today are satisfied with their dating options. But contrary to the idea that young women are solely after good times and resources, the researchers find that 83 percent strongly endorse a dating culture focused on forming serious relationships and creating emotional connections. And lest you think that young males simply seek short-term hookups, the corresponding numbers for men are 74 percent (relationships) and 76 percent (connections).

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So said a self-critical report published this month by Yale University, bemoaning the lack of intellectual diversity at their own college and most of the nation’s other leading campuses. Well, duh, readers of The Free Press might respond. To you, this report, which also cited problems in higher education including ballooning tuition fees, opaque and unfair admissions criteria, and grade inflation—may sound like a master class in the obvious.

But to many in academia, this is not obvious. Despite decades slipping into an ideological monoculture, many academics still don’t see a problem. Amid increasingly widespread scrutiny, they don’t understand why so many elite colleges have squandered public trust.

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No one worries about that today. And not just because Donald Trump is not Catholic; rather, because he goes out of his way to criticize the pope as if the pontiff were just another political opponent. Most recently, after Pope Leo XIV condemned the war in Iran, President Trump responded on social media that the Vicar of Christ is “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” The administration went on to pull millions in aid from Catholic Charities, which supports migrant children. It justified the decision by claiming that the number of children in need is “significantly lower” than it was under the Biden administration.

In an era of rank partisanship and binary ideological choices in America, this might seem to put traditional Catholics—like me—in a bind. Am I Team USA or Team Vatican?

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Last week, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University was scheduled to vote on a proposal to cap A grades, subjecting them to a limit of 20 percent plus four students per class. The proposal also included a plan to link academic honors not to grades, but to a percentile-ranking metric. This came after a long period of grade inflation at the university, to the point that in the academic year 2024–25, 66 percent of students were awarded As, and 84 percent received either As or A-minuses.

Alarm over this trend has been rising for years. In the words of Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education, “Our current grading practices are not only undermining the functions of grading; they are also damaging the academic culture of the college.”

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This was the actor Rainn Wilson’s response to my question about why he’d always made jokes as a kid. He explains that when you are in a lot of pain but figure out that you are naturally funny, you start making jokes to distract yourself and others from your misery. It’s a kind of “emotional substitution,” he said.

Wilson’s childhood was completely unstable. The family’s economic situation was precarious at best. His mother abandoned the family when Rainn was 2 years old; he didn’t see her again until he was 14. Desperate and despondent, his father quickly entered into a tense, loveless second marriage and converted the family to the Baha’i faith. Wilson’s upbringing was, in his own words, characterized by “confusion, anxiety, and alienation.”

At 18, Wilson escaped to college in New York City and studied acting, resolving to be finished forever with his dysfunctional family and their weird religion. He could not outrun his demons, however. Depression, loneliness, and anxiety hunted him relentlessly. He drank heavily and used drugs throughout his 20s and 30s, a form of self-medication that led, inevitably, to addiction.

At 40, his luck seemed to change when he scored the role of Dwight Schrute in the television comedy The Office. Almost overnight, Wilson became internationally famous. You might think that having people shout “I love you” from passing cars would fix his depression and give him an incentive to kick his habits, right?

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This sounds like a line from the campy 1978 sci-fi horror flick Invasion of the Body Snatchers, about aliens from a dying planet that come to Earth and replace humans with clones that are devoid of their old personality.

But it’s not.

It’s actually a quote from a recent study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships about the QAnon conspiracy theory, which alleges that the governing elite is dominated by a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping, cannibalistic, deep-state pedophiles. Participants in the study described watching the theory take hold of their friends and family members, transforming them beyond recognition.

Perhaps this scenario sounds familiar. You too may know someone who started “doing his own research” on politics, science, or the economy—and then went down an internet rabbit hole of posts claiming that some event or phenomenon was plotted by a clandestine group of powerful people or organizations, usually with sinister or malevolent intentions. Before you know it, he seems like a different person. His new beliefs dominate conversations and ruin relationships.

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