Dear Intelligent American,
Seems like them Big Cities are hollowing out, at least when it comes to Little Ones. We all know of America’s demographic slide—what we might not know is how pronounced it is in our major metros. The Economic Innovation Group recently published a study whose title says it all: “Young families have continued leaving big cities post-pandemic.”
Maybe not “it all.” Warning—you are about to be bullet-pointed with serious takeaways and key findings:
- Large urban counties have suffered severe declines in their population of young children. While overall population growth in such counties resumed in 2023 (mainly due to immigration) for the first time since the pandemic, the population of young kids continued to decline.
- The country’s very largest cities have experienced shocking declines in their population of young children. The under-five population has fallen by 18 percent in New York City, 15 percent in Cook County, Illinois (Chicago), and 14 percent in Los Angeles County since 2020.
- Birth rates in large urban counties have declined twice as fast as in rural counties over the last decade.
- More than 800,000 people moved out of large urban counties last year, twice the pre-pandemic rate.
- The number of young children in most counties across the country is on the decline. The number of children under five fell in 58 percent of all counties last year and has fallen in two-thirds of all counties since 2020.
Gone with the Wind’s Prissy may be no role model to the Young American Woman of the 2020s. And to be fair, her claim to knowing nothin’ about birthin’ babies is more about midwifery than it is about reproductive processes or fertility rates. Still, she may have a lot more in common with a certain youthful slice of demography than its members would otherwise think.
Now, This Illustrious Missive having birthed some excerpts, please do get to know them.
Some Triplets, Some Twins, and That Gets Us to 14
1. The great David Bahnsen takes to World Magazine to explain the biblical meaning of work—is it a curse, or is it a reflection of the Divine? From the essay:
I realize I risk rubbing people the wrong way. Who could not find value in the transactional benefits of work? It is the means by which we provide for ourselves and our families. The compensation we receive from our jobs becomes the treasure we share with our churches and other nonprofit organizations we choose to support. Work does contain transactional benefits. However, defining and discussing work strictly in this context leads to the inescapable conclusion that work is like eating spinach—something you don’t really want to do but know that it will provide benefits if you suck it up and do it.
The Bible, though, does not start with “if anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10). It starts in the Garden of Eden, with God making mankind very good, and tasking him to . . . well, work. God made us to be co-creators with Him. He tasked mankind with the special purpose of filling the earth, cultivating it, multiplying, and caring for His garden. The stewardship, rule, cultivation, and creativity mandated in Genesis 1 are rooted to the most important principle in all of Christian anthropology—imago Dei. We are made in the image of God, and God Himself was a creator, producer, and innovator.
Here’s where some people get off the bus. Yes, yes, they say: Some people are creative and innovative. The rest of us just put in our hours and look forward to the weekend.
But that’s not what Scripture says. . . .
2. At Forbes, with students returning to the classroom, eduguru Bruno Manno tells the good and bad news. From the piece:
The devastating effects of pandemic K-12 public school closings continue to haunt America’s students. As around 50 million students and more than 3 million teachers go back to school, it is time for a temperature check on learning loss recovery.
There is also a big and pressing reason for this checkup: the federal government provided $190 billion to states and communities for learning loss recovery, and the legal deadline to commit funds for specific use is September 30, 2024. After the largest ever one-time federal investment in K-12 schools dubbed ESSER (for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief), we need to know what difference—if any—those dollars are making in the recovery effort.
The good news: some students are recovering from learning loss, and federal relief funds have had a positive effect on helping students catch up.
The bad news: many students, especially low-income and minority students, are not recovering from learning loss, and we also do not know what new district and school programs helped students catch up.
3. At Tablet Magazine, David Mikics explains how the once-revered, fact-check-addicted New Yorker has become a purveyor of performative anti-Zionism. From the analysis:
It may come as a surprise that the biggest star among the Jews-are-Nazis crowd works at The New Yorker, a magazine once synonymous with editorial excellence and still synonymous with the art of dressing up Jews in WASP clothing for the consumption of recent Ivy League graduates looking for a guide to normative urban thought and behavior via its famous cartoons. In a moment in which the mid-20th-century marriage between Jews and WASPs has clearly come apart, The New Yorker is undergoing an identity crisis—in which the magazine is “too white” and “too Zionist” for WASP progressives and the Jews who crave their acceptance, yet at the same time clearly unwilling to defend its distinctive if dated American literary voice against the schizophrenic demands of its own class, which includes both its audience and its Upper West Side editors. As the product of a failing cross-cultural marriage, The New Yorker is probably fated to wind up in rehab regardless. But the speed at which it does so is a choice.
Enter Masha Gessen, once a brilliant author, whose early books are classics. The memoir about Gessen’s grandmothers, Ester and Ruzya, and the books about Vladimir Putin and Pussy Riot are distinguished works of journalism, of the type that would no doubt have earned Gessen many warm welcomes at progressive synagogues throughout America in the early 2010s. Over the past decade, however, Gessen has become a purveyor of unhinged conspiracy theories about everything from Butlerian understandings of gender as a vast, malign cultural conspiracy to the malign influence and actions of the State of Israel—which as the ur-conspiracy theory of Western civilization, is inevitably where both Gessen and The New Yorker have wound up.
4. At Capital Research Center’s Green Watch, Ken Braun reports on how Oakland, besides being a crime-ridden dystopian city, is also a hub for a slew of leftist nonprofits. From the article:
Another of the Oakland nonprofits, New Energy Nexus, promotes expanded deployment of those weather-dependent, land-gobbling wind and solar energy systems.
PSE Healthy Energy has launched a crusade against natural gas. Burning natural gas for electricity rather than coal reduces carbon emissions by 43 to 51 percent (depending on type of coal). Over the past 15 years the United States has become the world’s largest producer of natural gas, and the lower resulting prices have caused power companies to switch from coal to gas, a major contribution toward a 17 percent decline in total American carbon emissions since 2007.
While natural gas has been healthy for both consumers and cutting carbon emissions, opposing it appears to have been healthy for PSE Healthy Energy. In 2011, the early days of the natural gas boom, PSE reported total revenue of just $132,410. For 2022, total revenue annual revenue was more than $6.2 million and at least three PSE employees were paid more than $100,000.
While it isn’t fair to blame Oakland’s stridently left-wing advocacy colony for the town’s crime and energy chaos, it is fair to credit them with surrendering to it.
5. At The American Conservative, Peter Tonguette puts his two cents about tips into the tip jar. From the article:
The increasingly insistent demands for tips is a reflection of a culture more and more at home with asking for handouts. Take crowdfunding platforms. I don’t deny that such websites have a utility and can meet real needs or emergencies, but the act of otherwise solvent people requesting money from strangers is bizarre. But it’s no more bizarre than employed people, or those who employ them, demanding funds above and beyond their paychecks—that is to say, tips.
Indeed, tipping itself may work to stifle career ambition and advancement. Part of the reason why people strive to find better jobs is that their present pay is not all that great. Bad tips, a lack of tips, and tips that are unfairly taxed may provide the necessary incentive for workers to pound the pavement for a different and better-paying line of work.
Even so, maybe my discomfort with tipping, and my lack of enthusiasm for terminating taxes on tips, is just a matter of resentment: In all my years as a critic and journalist, I’ve never gotten a tip for a perfect turn of phrase. Then again, I’ve never asked for one, either.
6. At The European Conservative, Sebastian Morello observes that the euthanasia-crazed modern West may be the first civilization that fails to revere the elderly. From the piece:
As happens in every instance of modernity’s break with nature and tradition, we haven’t actually got rid of that from which we have sought to emancipate ourselves, but only replaced it with a degraded version of the same thing. We got rid of indissoluble marriage, as it was understood by our ancestors, and we have since created a whole industry of soulmate-finding. We got rid of childhood innocence, and now we’ve created an entire entertainment industry based on perpetuating childish fantasies. We destroyed concrete and local communities and now we seek to join an ever-growing number of ‘online communities.’ We threw out liturgical religion and have since largely created the modern world by way of pseudo-liturgical ideologies. Modernity is characterised by the tragic and desperate attempt to emancipate ourselves from that for which we immediately make a rubbish counterfeit.
This pattern of replacing what we had with a poor version of the same thing is clearly observable in the cultural killing of our elders, for our societies are now full of therapists and counsellors. Thus, we moved from treasuring an internal community of people with experiential knowledge and a love for those who seek their counsel, to contracting professionals with technical knowledge who do not want to ‘bring their work home with them.’ We went from a people who will seek a solution for the problems that arise, for love of the community that they helped to build, to a people in whose financial interest it is to perpetuate the problems encountered. The very stupid assumption behind this shift from the elder to the therapist—an assumption so typical of modern man—is that in some way it is possible to bypass experience and the accumulation of practical wisdom by the accrual of qualifications. And hence, despite experience, people irrationally place their emotional development and their life’s future in the hands of a stranger for no other reason beyond a thoughtless prejudice in favour of so-called ‘experts.’
7. At The Wall Street Journal, Adam Kirsch explains that the driving forces behind America’s campus protests are about more than Israel Hate. From the piece:
For the academic discipline of settler colonial studies, the goal of learning about settler colonialism in America and elsewhere is not simply to understand it, as a historian would, but to dismantle it. That process is known as decolonization, and the increasing currency of this term is an index of the rising influence of what might seem a merely academic idea. The command to “decolonize” has become almost faddish; guides have been written on how to decolonize your diet, your bookshelf, your backyard, your corporate board, and much more.
As with any sin, the first step in earning absolution for being a settler is to confess it, and practitioners of settler colonial studies often formally identify themselves as settlers. This practice is spreading outside the academy as well, especially in Canada. Shawn Cuthand, a Canadian Cree/Mohawk writer, observed in a 2021 article for CBC News that it had become fashionable for “people [to] introduce themselves as ‘settlers.’ Friends I have talked to refer to it as the fancy way of calling themselves white.”
The collective equivalent of introducing oneself as a settler is the land acknowledgment, which also began in Canada before becoming rapidly institutionalized in the U.S. These are statements, read aloud on public occasions or displayed in permanent signage, in which an institution names the Native American peoples that once inhabited their site. For instance, Northwestern University’s land acknowledgment states: “The Northwestern campus sits on the traditional homelands of the people of the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa as well as the Menominee, Miami and Ho-Chunk nations.”
8. Fraternities Beware: At The Free Press, Francesca Block exposes the double standard college administrators apply to alleged trouble-making students. From the report:
It wasn’t until March 13, when four fraternities filed a civil rights lawsuit against Maryland—arguing that the university had violated due process and the free speech rights of students—that the college revealed what they had actually been accused of. Sorority Kappa Alpha Theta filed a similar suit on April 4. The social moratorium was lifted for most houses, except for a few that remained under investigation. Days later, in a March 22 TV interview, Maryland’s vice president for student affairs, Patty Perillo, said she was not only proud of the university’s response to the allegations—she hoped it would become a “model” for schools across the country.
But by the end of the school year in June, 35 Greek organizations out of the 37 on campus were cleared of all wrongdoing—and just two were given a year of disciplinary probation for allowing underage drinking, multiple sources told me. That was it. None of the serious allegations, sources said, were proved to be true.
The Maryland case, sources told me, reveals a double standard on American campuses today: students who openly break the law—including trespassing, breaking and entering, and harassing their fellow students—are given a pass when they’re committing crimes in the name of activism, while students suspected of behaving badly in their social lives are treated like villains.
9. At First Things, Rusty Reno is on the rocks, and that’s not bad. From the reflection:
Rock climbing encourages this kind of friendship. We share a common objective: Get to the top, and then safely down. At the summit, it’s our triumph, not mine or his. When difficulties are too great and risks too grave, we turn back together.
There’s a deeper dimension to partnership in climbing. Trust is a kind of letting go. At its most intense, trust involves giving responsibility for something precious and essential to the other. When I’m climbing, I’m usually confident I will not fall. But I might, and I have. In a very real sense, every time I’m on the rock wall, I’m entrusting my life to my partner. The effect is freedom. He is managing the rope, my lifeline, liberating me to think only of my task—to make the moves.
Being good at rock climbing is not a moral virtue. But it does require training. You must attune your body to the activity. More importantly, you must discipline your mind. We have a natural fear of heights and a healthy aversion to mortal peril. These instincts are not to be repressed or denied; rather, the climber must use his reason and experience to put them in their proper place.
10. At Church Life Journal, Helen De Cruz catches Wonder and Philosophy in a full embrace. From the beginning of the essay:
Philosophers like to see themselves as dispassionate critical thinkers. Yet, they can and do get carried away, becoming intensely focused to the point of obsession on a philosophical idea or work. Take Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715), who at the age of twenty-six happened to pick up René Descartes’s posthumously published Traité de l’homme (Treatise on Man, an account of human physiology) in a Paris bookstall. Malebranche, who disliked the Aristotelian scholasticism he had been taught, found Descartes exhilarating. So head-over-heels was he that “the joy of learning such a great number of new discoveries caused palpitations of the heart that were so severe, that he had to stop reading regularly in order to breathe more easily.”
Philosophy is born in wonder, but philosophical theories can also themselves become a source of wonder. They do so by helping us see the world and what we believed we knew with different eyes. They give us a sense of firstness: namely, of seeing the familiar as wondrous or strange, as if we were encountering it for the first time. We get this sense of firstness in mundane situations, such as when a common word suddenly sounds bizarre, or a common sight suddenly appears alien. Some philosophers cultivate this firstness by encouraging us to consider the weirdness of situations we rarely pause to reflect on. Take David Hume’s case of the billiard balls. When you see a ball roll in a straight path toward another, you assume that it will strike that ball, and you infer that the first ball causes the other one to roll. But without having experienced similar collisions, you would not be able to predict this outcome. Hume’s example suggests that causation is not something you transparently observe. Rather, all you see is a ball strike another ball, followed by movement of the struck ball. You infer, through experience, that one is the cause and the other the effect.
11. At TomKlingenstein.com, Joshua Mitchell explains what lies ahead as we find ourselves at both the beginning and end of Postmodern America. From the essay:
Second, let me say a few words about how Tocqueville’s ideas figure into our question about whether America is on the precipice. No careful reader of Democracy in America can ignore his apprehensions about the impending gentle tyranny he describes in Vol. IV of that magisterial work. Most social scientists dismiss Tocqueville because his ideas cannot be operationalized and rendered in terms of dependent and independent variables, of “testable hypotheses.” It is not surprising, then, that the “America-is-okay” thesis about which Ellmers and Richards bristle arises within the social sciences, whose practitioners are good at predicting past events with their data, but who cannot point to a single non-trivial prediction that has come to pass in the hundred years since the enterprise got underway. The sum total of the wisdom of the social sciences after 100 years of toil in infertile ground is this: if people have done something, and they like it, they will probably do it again.
Tocqueville’s contention, which social science cannot test, is that there is a “secret hidden longing” in the democratic soul that guides America toward a new form of tyranny that is yet without a name. We should note that this observation emerges at least 50 years before Progressive ideas begin to take hold of the American imagination. The central problem faced by democratic America—the gentle drift into tyranny—emerges out of democratic social conditions, and cannot be attributed to the importation of German ideas from abroad. Foreign ideas may have accelerated the fire, but they did not cause it. In Democracy in America, there are at least twenty reasons given for why America may succumb to the gentle tyranny about which Tocqueville worried—and most of those reasons pertain to “habits of mind,” as Tocqueville calls them, rather than to variables that can unambiguously be measured.
12. Martian, Martian, Martian: At The Spectator, Adam Frank contemplates how life might take place on another planet. From the piece:
Terrestrial worlds and giants. That’s it for our solar system. There’s no planet orbiting our Sun with a mass between that of terrestrial Earth and ice giant Uranus (which is fourteen times the mass of Earth). In the wider universe, however, the most common type of planet lies in that empty space between these two forms. These worlds are known as Super-Earths and Sub-Neptunes.
With billions of these planets strewn across the galaxy, their ability to host life becomes an urgent question. Are Super-Earths just scaled-up versions of our world requiring scaled-up versions of Earth life? Or are they something else entirely?
Answering this has put scientists under pressure. That’s not a figure of speech—understanding Super-Earths and Sub-Neptunes means understanding pressure. A planet’s gravitational pull increases with depth. At the Earth’s core, the gravity squeeze reaches a million times that at the surface. Those high pressures deep in our planet’s interior aren’t inconsequential. They set the conditions for life at the surface, including the presence of tectonic plates, which shaped evolution, and magnetic fields, which shield us from dangerous solar radiation. What happens below shapes what’s possible above. All the extra mass inside Super-Earths and Sub-Neptunes means their interior squeeze is driven to extremes that scientists don’t understand.
Lucky 13. At The Russellville News-Democrat & Leader, Denise Shoulders reports on a Kentucky high-school band turning a car show into a successful fundraiser. From the story:
The Russellville High School Panther Band, in partnership with Newton Chevrolet, kicked off the school year with a resounding success. Their inaugural Back to School Car Show fundraiser on Saturday drew over 100 vehicles, transforming the high school parking lot into a vibrant showcase of automobiles, trucks, motorcycles, and jeeps.
Enthusiasts from across southern Kentucky and Tennessee gathered to admire the impressive lineup. Spectators enjoyed live music from The Lawrence Brothers Band and special performances by Panther Band members Karson Pitts, Ashton Parish, Patrick Thomason, and Marshall DeWeese.
To keep everyone entertained, the event featured door prize giveaways every 30 minutes, along with face painting, a photo booth, and bounce houses courtesy of Here Comes the Bounce of Lewisburg.
“The weather was beautiful, and it was a great day for all involved,” said Sara Pitts, booster president. “RHS Band Boosters would like to say a big thank you to everyone who made the day possible, and we look forward to making this an annual event for the community!”
Bonus. As the conventions are wrapped up, National Review’s Neal Freeman—like Johnny Cash, he’s been everywhere, man—remembers how he covered the 1964 GOP convention, with the great novelist, John Dos Passos, serving as his side kick. From the article:
My role was to put out a daily newspaper. Why? For the reason anybody puts out a daily newspaper. To persuade his community to see the world the way he does. My friend Jim McFadden, NR’s associate publisher, probably had the tougher job. Mac had to print the newspaper in a strange city and deliver it within a few hours to the 5,000 people we wanted to see the world as we did.
I had two editorial assistants, both hired from congenial organizations in northern California. They washed out in the first 36 hours. No shame on them. Eighteen-hour workdays at peasant wages is not for everybody. But in addition to Mac, who signed on immediately as a writer-editor, I had a freelance reporter hired by Bill. (A clarification, perhaps already overdue: Bill Buckley was known as “Bill.” Bill Rusher was known as “Rusher.”) I saw the man’s name on the manifest—John Dos Passos—and assumed that it would be the great man’s grandson. Nope. It was the great man himself.
Begin sidebar: When I got to Yale in 1958, John Dos Passos was still esteemed as one of the great American novelists of the 20th century, right up there with Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and the rest. By the time I left Yale in 1962, Dos Passos was well on his way to being regarded as a wannabe who couldn’t write a lick. He had been a fellow travelling pro-Communist in the Thirties—probably never much of an activist—but he inched rightward after each Soviet atrocity and, by the Fifties, he had become openly anti-Communist. Yale’s world-renowned Department of English then committed a literary mugging. (And the appalling episode became a seismic event on my own long road from muddled moderate Republicanism to the anti-Communist right.) End Sidebar.
For the Good of the Order
Uno. Central to a nonprofit’s successful development program is having “major gifts” clicking on all cylinders, or even some. Crazy, no, that this is an area of fundraising where many organizations flub. To quote the great Alfred E. Neuman: “What, me worry?” Maybe you should. But maybe you can do something more—something constructive—than worrying. The good news: There’s wisdom to be had, and courses to be corrected, and fixing and u-turning and up-buffing will happen September 4–6 in Washington, D.C., when the Center For Civil Society will host its acclaimed, intensive, in-person “Major Gifts Training Seminar,” where a quartet of AmPhil experts will teach participants how to set goals, find major donors, secure visits, and so much more (including a planning-giving primer). Time’s running out. So are spaces. Get complete information right here.
Due. At Philanthropy Daily, Rachel Morgan does right by Jeremy Beer’s important new book, The Quest for Belonging: How the Most Effective Fundraisers Understand the Psychology of Giving. Read the review here.
(And buy the book here.)
Tre. Attention, all Givers, Doers, and Thinkers: C4CS will host a consequential conference on K to Campus: How the Education Reform Movement Can Reshape Higher Ed. It takes place at Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA, from October 23 to 24, and just about every bit of info you want/need to know can be found here. Fun fact: The kick-off event will be Yours Truly interviewing the great Victor Davis Hanson. Come, and prepare to be inspired.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What happened nine months after the two cannonballs got married?
A: They had BBs.
A Dios
Neal Freeman’s aforementioned National Review piece got Your Humble Correspondent motivated to do that long-put-off thing and order John Dos Passos’s massive U.S.A. trilogy. There’s buying, and then there’s reading. It’s only 1,166 pages . . . here goes!
May We Be Led to Restful Waters,
Jack Fowler, whose spirit droops at jfowler@amphil.com.
