Religious Schools & Chronic Pain

Featured Articles

How Religious Schools Became a Billion-Dollar Drain on Public Education

The New Yorker • 13 Jan 2025 • ~6500 words

A nationwide movement has funnelled taxpayer money to private institutions, eroding the separation between church and state.

The letters reveal a strategy to start with targeted programs that placed needy kids in parochial schools, then fight to expand the benefits to far richer families—a decades-long effort by a network of politicians, church officials, and activists, all united by a conviction that the separation of church and state is illegitimate. As one of the movement’s progenitors put it, “Government does a lousy job of substituting for religion.”

Chronic Pain Is a Hidden Epidemic. It’s Time for a Revolution.

New York Times • 12 Jan 2025 • ~6350 words

As many as two billion people suffer from it — including me. Can science finally bring us relief?

For a long time, I assumed that what happened to me was just bad luck. Everyone else seemed so hearty: going for jogs, typing away for hours in cafes. But what I discovered over the next year was that chronic pain is everywhere. There was the colleague who developed an autoimmunelike disease after being bitten by a virus-carrying mosquito. A friend, John, who had a bad reaction to an antibiotic and ended up with disabling full-body nerve pain that lasted for years. A former student who dislocated her shoulder in a crash and now has chronic neck pain and tension headaches. Another friend’s cousin who developed terrible pain after abdominal surgery — pain that left him incapacitated for months until, bizarrely, another, unrelated surgery caused it to disappear.

Recommended Articles

Moral Resillience

Aeon • 13 Jan 2025 • ~6850 words

Nurses experience deep suffering when they can’t act according to their moral compass. Our research shows a way forward.

. . . moral resilience presumes that humans are already resilient, that they strive toward integrity, and that there are ways to repair our moral fabric when it is torn or fractured. It begins with the understanding that we can do hard things. We’ve made difficult decisions in the past and likely will be called to do so in the future. Knowing that, we can walk toward moral adversity with compassion, understanding and self-respect.

Kartlis Deda’s sword

Inside Story • 13 Jan 2025 • ~3100 words

The Georgian government’s overreach has galvanised opponents of its authoritarian turn.

On the one hand, thus, Georgian Dream cannot simply be characterised as “pro-Russian.” Its rhetoric mirrors current EU debates about alternative models of European integration that don’t require the wholesale adoption of liberal social policies. On the other hand, a country like Hungary has the luxury of promoting traditional values from inside the EU–NATO club. Georgia’s geopolitical vulnerability to Russia means it can’t afford to alienate Western partners whose strategic interest in Georgia rests almost solely on its ability to keep to its democratic path. In the hands of Georgian Dream, the European “traditional values” card is thus fundamentally ironic: it risks undermining the very independence from Russia that Georgia’s Orthodox Church has historically fought to protect.

My Survey of 16 Classic Works of New Journalism

The Honest Broker • 12 Jan 2025 • ~3079 words

A reading list of 16 influential works of New Journalism from Ted Gioia.

The New Journalists took risks—and I’m not just using a metaphor. When Hunter Thompson wrote about the Hells Angels, he ended up in the hospital.

Gregor Mendel's Vanishing Act

Asimov Press • 12 Jan 2025 • ~6600 words

After his death in 1884, thousands of Gregor Mendel’s letters and notes — filled with scientific data and figures — were destroyed. What did the friar discover, and what have we forgotten?

Unfortunately, relatively few details survive of Mendel’s life. The only direct sources we have consist of 14 research papers, ten letters to a botanist in Munich (with an eleventh that is known to be missing), and a brief autobiography that Mendel wrote as a 28-year-old. There are also some surviving school and parish records. Despite the dearth of sources, we do know that Mendel’s pea experiments — and subsequent fame — were only possible because of misfortune.

A Century of Visions for Syria

New Lines Magazine • 10 Jan 2025 • ~6150 words

With the country at a crossroads and a new constitution in the offing, a look back reveals how its people have worked to birth a modern Syrian state since Ottoman times.

Although it seems like a very different historical moment, the context surrounding these ideals is not actually too dissimilar from today’s. Now, like then, there is internal tension between Islamists and secularists, foreign powers vying for influence and ongoing threats to the country’s geographical integrity, in the form of separatist movements and incursions from Turkey and Israel. And in the details of what unfolded a century ago during Syria’s relentless struggle for independence over many years, one finds parallels with the uprising of 2011 that finally rid the country of Bashar al-Assad’s regime just one month ago.

Phone books

Internal exile • 9 Jan 2025 • ~1600 words

Rob Horning muses on phone books

All week the news I see has been dominated by despair over the fires in Los Angeles and accounts of various billionaires’ grotesque and unliateral control over much of the social infrastructure that was supposed to replace things like the phone book. Bill Gates famously declared the phone book obsolete in 2007, but it wasn’t as apparent then that such artifacts were obstacles not for society but for the ambitions of the tech barons who have assiduously worked to eliminate what much of what phone books, for better or worse, symbolized.

Chrishona Hodges’s Life Sentence

Chicago Magazine • 7 Jan 2025 • ~7200 words

At a crossroads when Chicago profiled him nine years ago, Jerryon Stevens is now in jail, awaiting trial on a murder charge. At home, his mother reckons with her son’s path — and tries to hold her fractured family together.

When Malani was younger, Chrishona used to tell her that Jerryon was away at school. But when Malani turned 4, Chrishona told her the truth. Or rather, she confirmed her granddaughter’s suspicions after getting a text from the girl’s mother with a string of crying emojis and a report that Malani had taken her seat belt off and stood up in the back seat of the car. Trying to get her to sit down, the mother told her daughter she’d end up in jail if she continued to misbehave. Malani’s response? “I want to go to jail because I want to be with my best friend, my daddy.”

Power Failure: On Landscape and Abandonment

Switchyard • 21 Dec 2024 • ~4550 words

Mya Frazier writes about new power lines being built in Ohio to support new datacenter - without much consideration of their impacts on local communities.

It’s unlike anything that has come before. For seven decades, the balance between economic growth and the power requirements to sustain that growth followed divergent trend lines. We had steady growth while our power needs remained mostly flat. In the 2010s, for example, the US economy expanded by a cumulative 24 percent, but electricity demand remained unchanged, according to energy research firm Wood Mackenzie. That balance is now being radically upended. And the unprecedented energy demands of artificial intelligence represent a potentially calamitous divergence. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has said the electricity usage of data centers worldwide might double in just four years. US electricity demand alone could jump 20 percent by 2030, driven mostly by AI, according to a Wells Fargo analysis.