Driven by a recent increase, young men in the U.S. have now surpassed young women in saying religion is “very important” in their lives. Gallup’s latest data, from 2024-2025, show 42% of young men saying religion is very important to them, up sharply from 28% in 2022-2023. By contrast, during this period, young women’s attachment to religion has held steady at about 30%.

Although young men had previously tied young women on this key marker of religiosity, young men now lead by a statistically significant margin. The recent increase among young men also contrasts with minimal changes since 2022-2023 among older men and women.

With the recent surge in their attachment to religion, young men have returned to the high point of their expressed religiosity of the past 25 years, roughly tying the 43% found in 2000-2001. By contrast, women of all age groups and older men are at or near their historical lows.

These findings are based on biennial aggregates of Gallup’s religion data from 2000-2001 through 2024-2025, allowing for stable estimates across age and gender groups.

Read it all.

Skeptics claimed that the supposed religious revival among young men wasn’t showing up in the polling. Gallup says otherwise. A shift is here, and it’s massive. https://t.co/ItPM1mWc7h

— Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead) April 16, 2026

Young men are entering adulthood later, redefining what it means to be a man and facing mounting economic and social challenges that shape how they see their future, according to a new survey released on Monday.

The report, conducted by Institute for Family Studies, paints a complex picture: Many young men in the United States feel uncertain or discouraged about their progress in life — yet remain hopeful about work, family and personal growth.

Traditional milestones like marriage and parenthood no longer dominate young men’s ideas about becoming adults, the report found. Instead, they increasingly emphasize psychological traits like responsibility, independence and personal decision-making.

In 2002, about 65% of young men said completing education was extremely important to becoming an adult. By 2025, that number had dropped to 31%. Only 9% today say marriage is an essential milestone — down slightly from 13% in 2002.

Instead, the 74-page report said, many define adulthood in more internal terms: More than half say accepting responsibility and making independent decisions are key signs of maturity.

Read it all.

In our new YouGov survey of young men, ages 18-29, we find that young men view college with a great deal of ambivalence, especially young men who are not attending college but also young men who are currently attending college or have a degree.

Read more: https://t.co/vjXfWJNMAc pic.twitter.com/2LGpKPBmzr

— The Institute for Family Studies (@FamStudies) March 16, 2026

A sprawling betting scheme to rig NCAA and Chinese Basketball Association games ensnared 26 people, including more than a dozen college basketball players who tried to fix games as recently as last season, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

The scheme generally revolved around fixers recruiting players with the promise of a big payment in exchange for purposefully underperforming during a game, prosecutors said. The fixers would then place big bets against the players’ teams in those games, defrauding sportsbooks and other bettors, authorities said.

Concerns about gambling and college sports have grown since 2018, when the US Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on the practice, leading some states to legalize it to varying degrees. The NCAA does not allow athletes or staff to bet on college games, but it briefly allowed student-athletes to bet on professional sports last year before rescinding that decision in November.

According to the indictment unsealed Thursday, fixers started with two games in the Chinese Basketball Association in 2023 and, successful there, moved on to rigging NCAA games as recently as January 2025.

Read it all.

Sports bettors worked with dozens of players across NCAA men’s basketball to rig at least 29 games, federal prosecutors alleged in an indictment Thursday⁰
The athletes played for schools
including Tulane, St. Louis University, DePaul, Fordham and more https://t.co/7h0C3cl174

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) January 15, 2026

At Pennsylvania State University, which has 64,000 undergraduate students, Stephanie Stama, an assistant director at the student psychological services centre, reports that “it is increasingly common for us to hear that students have lost a significant amount of money” in sports betting and that it “is interfering with basic needs like eating and sleeping”. An 18-year-old student at URI, who declined to be named, confesses that he can no longer feel enjoyment from watching sports without the high from betting.

Timothy Fong, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles sees a similar pattern. Every one of his clients as of late has been an 18- to 24-year-old man seeking help for a sports-betting or cryptocurrency addiction. The financial wreckage can be severe, too. John Simonian, a personal-bankruptcy attorney in Rhode Island, says he never used to see young men filing for bankruptcy, “but now it’s not surprising”. Sports betting, he notices in young clients’ bank statements, is often one part of the equation.

Institutions have had an uneven and clunky response. Between 2021 and 2023 a handful of universities partnered with sports-betting firms directly, receiving cash for sponsorship and naming rights. Most have since ended the agreements. But in America there is the added complication that many campuses are filled with both bettors and those being bet on. March Madness, the annual basketball tournament played by college athletes, is by some accounts the most-bet-on event in the country, with more than twice as much wagered on it as the Super Bowl.

Read it all.

Student-athletes now face a torrent of abuse from losing gamblers. Last year the governing body of American college sport recorded 740 instances of harassment directly attributed to sports gambling https://t.co/X73pIEgdBm

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) December 8, 2025

For most of human history, coupling up was not merely a norm; it was a necessity. Before reliable contraception, women could not control their fertility, and most were far too poor to raise children alone. Hence the centuries-old convention that, whereas a tragic play or saga ends in death, a happy one ends in marriage.

So the speed with which the norm of marriage—indeed, of relationships of any sort—is being abandoned is startling. Throughout the rich world, singlehood is on the rise. Among Americans aged 25-34, the proportion living without a spouse or partner has doubled in five decades, to 50% for men and 41% for women. Since 2010, the share of people living alone has risen in 26 out of 30 rich countries. By The Economist’s calculation, the world has at least 100m more single people today than if coupling rates were still as high as in 2017. A great relationship recession is under way.

For some, this is evidence of social and moral decay. As we report, many in the “pro-natalist” movement believe that the failure of the young to settle down and procreate threatens to end Western civilisation. For others, it is evidence of admirable self-reliance. Vogue, a fashion magazine, recently suggested that for cool, ambitious young women, having a boyfriend is not merely unnecessary but “embarrassing”.

In fact, the rise of singlehood is neither straightforwardly good nor bad. 

Read it all.

A future with far more singletons is fast approaching. That will reshape the world in ways good and bad. Everyone, from construction firms to the taxman, had better prepare https://t.co/VnDr8O2MYV pic.twitter.com/l6mVxmWgBH

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) November 6, 2025

In the United States, 12% of married couples with at least one spouse in their 30s or 40s have two incomes and no kids, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of federal data.

This group, often referred to as “DINKs,” has grown slightly over the past decade. In 2013, 8% of married couples in the same age range were DINKs.

The share of dual-income couples with kids has also inched up slightly since 2013, while the share of single-income couples with kids has decreased from 34% to 27%.

Read it all.

Dual income, no kids: What we know about ‘DINKs’ in the U.S. https://t.co/4X1NRQ8vqE

— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) November 3, 2025

Nearly every student clutches a phone in one hand as they traverse the University of Central Florida campus, even while walking in groups. Laptops and tablets are lunchtime companions, and earbuds and headphones are routine accessories. While waiting for class to start, many students sit in silence, drawn into their devices.

It is a familiar and exasperating scene for Seán Killingsworth, 22, a former U.C.F. student. “What is this life I’m signing up for?” he asked himself during his sophomore year. “It was just like, I’m talking to a bunch of zombies.”

Mr. Killingsworth craved a space where he could chat with his peers without feeling as though he was intruding. When he was in high school, he ran into similar conundrums, so he would organize phone-free hangouts with friends.

Why not in college too?

In 2023, he helped bring the idea of no-phone social time to two different Florida campuses — U.C.F. and Rollins College. He called it the Reconnect Movement: During meetings, everyone was required to hand over their phone and socialize without devices, a concept that has become a big draw for like-minded students. Reconnect has now spread to six schools in four states. And in September it broadened its reach beyond students, hosting a phone-free event in New York — soon to be followed by Orlando and Tampa — that anyone could attend.

Read it all.

Can College Students Stand to Ditch Their Phones for an Hour or So? https://t.co/i64o5O5tUJ

— Rajiv Prabhakar (@rajivprab) October 1, 2025

The research is sprawling and interdisciplinary, but it is beginning to align around a provocative hypothesis: Shifts in everyday exposures may be accelerating biological aging, priming the body for disease earlier than expected.

“We’ve changed what we’re exposed to considerably in the past few decades,” said Patti, a professor of chemistry, genetics and medicine at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The sheer complexity of modern life makes it difficult to pinpoint specific culprits. But advances in rapid, high-volume chemical screening, machine learning, and vast population datasets have made it possible to look with unparalleled depth and detail into the human body and the world around it. These methods test thousands of variables at once, revealing some never-before-seen patterns.

Last year, researchers released findings from a 150,000-person study at the annual American Association for Cancer Research meeting that took the cancer community by surprise. They found that millennials — born between 1981 and 1996 — appear to be aging biologically faster than previous generations, based on biomarkers in blood that indicate the health of various organs. That acceleration was associated with a significantly increased risk — up to 42 percent — for certain cancers, especially those of the lung, gastrointestinal tract and uterus.

Read it all.

NEW: The rates of cancer among millennials are rising, and researchers now think it can't be explained by genetics and lifestyle choices alone. Check out the latest in our young cancer series, by @arianaeunjung @alvarovalino and @dtkeating https://t.co/YUosFbFpgq

— Juliet Eilperin (@eilperin) September 23, 2025

Sean Wittmeyer would seem to be highly employable. He has more than a decade of experience in architecture and product design, impressive coding chops and two master’s degrees. His skills make him an asset in two industries, technology and construction, which helped power the economy’s growth over the last 15 years.

But construction activity has faltered since 2023, after the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates, and many tech companies began layoffs around the same time.

That helps explain why Mr. Wittmeyer, 37, has been unemployed for a year and a half, since he lost his job in business development for a company that makes software to help with real estate projects. He has been so eager to earn income that he has applied for positions befitting an intern, only to be told he was overqualified. “I can’t even work at the little board game store down the street,” he said.

When the federal government released its August employment numbers on Sept. 5, the overall unemployment rate was still relatively low, at just over 4 percent. But underneath was a concerning statistic: The portion of unemployed people who have been out of work for more than six months, which is considered “long-term,” rose to its highest share in over three years — to nearly 26 percent.

Read it all.

A decade ago about 20% of the long-term unemployed were college grads. Today it's about 1/3. And the long-term unemployment rate for college grads has been rising pretty quickly the last two years. https://t.co/PDZfBhUB73 pic.twitter.com/cLFXsQrUpb

— Noam Scheiber (@noamscheiber) September 15, 2025

A major new initiative that will see the Good News of Jesus blaze across the hearts of children and young people in Lancashire launched this week.

The Ignite Project is part of the Diocese of Blackburn’s ambitious vision to see Jesus made known amongst the younger generation in the County. Funding for the project follows a generous grant from the national church.

The Diocese knows that employing a youth or children’s minister is the biggest common factor to seeing sustainable growth of ministry to those age groups. So we are strategically placing 30 youth and children’s leaders in parishes across Lancashire to enable greater engagement with local young people.

Read it all.

(Lancashire Post) Ignite Project aims to fire up county's young people for Jesus https://t.co/vMi9aOgLvW 'The Diocese knows that employing a youth or children’s minister is the biggest common factor to seeing sustainable growth of ministry to those age groups. So we are…

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) September 3, 2025

espite all the drama about the weakening jobs numbers, the US labor market is actually doing OK. There is one major exception, however: if you happen to be a young man.

While the overall unemployment rate was still a respectable 4.2% in July, for young men aged 20 to 24, it was 8.3%, which is near recession levels — and for recent college graduates, the annual rate is 5.3%. Both of these numbers are about double the comparable figures for young women. During the pandemic, the economy was so bad for working women that it inspired the term “she-cession.” Could the US now be headed for a “he-cession”?

Men have dominated the labor market for most of the modern era, and still earn more than women, but the jobs market has not been kind to men for the last few decades. Many men, even in the prime of their lives, aren’t working. And going to college is no longer an automatic way to improve your job prospects.

Read it all.

The US jobs market is showing signs of a ‘he-cession’https://t.co/vpJRNkKuLv

— Economic Times (@EconomicTimes) August 5, 2025

Who (or what) has shaped your faith the most?” 

As a campus minister, I have asked this question to many college students over the years. Lately, I have noticed a shift in their answers. 

Last fall, I sat across from a freshman at Vanderbilt University. We were chatting over tacos when I posed the question. I watched the gears spin in his head. Would it be a church from back home? A great book? An older mentor who discipled him? Maybe his parents? 

He leaned back. 

“YouTube.” 

I stared blankly, trying my best not to show my surprise. 

It hit me: What we were doing—eating lunch alongside one another—discipler and disciplee—might be an entirely new experience for him. In the digital age, disembodied social interactions have become the norm.

Read it all.

A subsequent Jigsaw study in the summer of 2023, following the release of the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT, explored how members of Gen Z in India and the United States use AI chatbots. The study found that young people were quick to consult the chatbots for medical advice, relationship counseling, and stock tips, since they thought that AI was easy to access, would not judge them, and was responsive to their personal needs—and that, in many of these respects, AI advice was better than advice they received from humans. In another study, the consulting firm Oliver Wyman found a similar pattern: as many as 39 percent of Gen Z employees around the world would prefer to have an AI colleague or manager instead of a human one; for Gen Z workers in the United States, that figure is 36 percent. A quarter of all employees in the United States feel the same way, suggesting that these attitudes are not only the province of the young.

Read it all.

“Increasing human agency should be the goal when thinking about how people interact with AI platforms. Instead of viewing AI as a robotic overlord, developers need to present it more as a superintelligent member of people’s existing online crowds.”https://t.co/87ts23IiTD

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) July 7, 2025

Frustrated with dating apps, singles are shelling out for high-end matchmaking.

“We had our biggest month of sales in the history of the company last month, and we’ve been around for 15 years,” Adam Cohen-Aslatei, CEO of the matchmaking service Three Day Rule says. “Our business is not shrinking.”

And he’s not alone. Demand for personalized dating services is growing, according to companies interviewed by Bloomberg, with clients citing “app fatigue” and a desire for meaningful connection as the motivation for ditching the swipes.

Read it all.

Elite dating services are thriving, stoked by app fatigue and "Materialists" the movie https://t.co/vHzSWU11pP

— Bloomberg (@business) June 24, 2025

The Church is now in a period of growth, with Gen Z leading the charge. The report – titled The Quiet Revival – shows that the most dramatic church growth is among young adults, particularly young men. In 2018, around four per cent of 18-24 year-olds said that they attended church at least monthly. Now this has gone up to 16 per cent, with young men increasing from four per cent to 21 per cent, and young women from 3 to 12 per cent.

They say that change happens slowly then all at once; and this feels to me to ring true when it comes to the seeming ‘vibe shift’ in perceptions and positivity about Christianity in our culture. Before the pandemic, we heard a lot about declining church attendance, then Covid-19 seemed to be the death-knell as congregations dwindled even further. Then after the pandemic recovery came the 2021 Census figures, which showed that the number of those that ticked the Christian box was at its lowest level.

But something seems to have shifted over the past two years, in particular. We hear of young people queuing to enter Catholic mass, we hear of teenagers turning up to church unnanounced, then dragging their parents along, we hear of Bible sales going up, we hear of online meetings run by the Orthodox Church being attended by hundreds, we hear of university mission organisations seeing sparks in interest among students. A drip-drip of change.

The numbers reported in The Quiet Revival will not necessary look like people queuing round the corner to get into local churches; but they may look a little like many churches having a few more congregants. I’ve noticed this in my own church when on Sunday mornings in recent months, I’ve looked around and wondered who these new people are that are joining us, and where they have come from.

Read it all.

The Bible Society have released incredible research about a quiet revival in the UK. Church attendance is up 50% (from 8% to 12%). When looking at 18-24 yr olds it’s up from 4% to 16%! pic.twitter.com/4VXEO5in4A

— Ｐｅｔｅｒ Ｌｙｎａｓ (@peterlynas) April 8, 2025

The Quiet Revival shows that the most dramatic church growth is among young adults, particularly young men. In 2018, just 4 per cent of 18–24-year-olds said that they attended church at least monthly. Today, says The Quiet Revival, this has risen to 16 per cent, with young men increasing from 4 per cent to 21 per cent, and young women from 3 to 12 per cent.  

Key findings from The Quiet Revival 

Co-author of The Quiet Revival Dr Rhiannon McAleer says the report shows that what people believe about Church decline is no longer true. ‘These are striking findings that completely reverse the widely held assumption that the Church in England and Wales is in terminal decline,’ she said. 

‘While some traditional denominations continue to face challenges, we’ve seen significant, broad-based growth among most expressions of Church – particularly in Roman Catholicism and Pentecostalism. There are now over 2 million more people attending church than there were six years ago.’ 

Read it all.

Incredible & hugely encouraging new research out from the @biblesociety today. The Lord is moving powerfully throughout the UK. The ‘Quiet Revival’ research includes some remarkable results as shown below & is available to download in full here https://t.co/7G4ltg91H3 pic.twitter.com/O4RbVAQVdo

— Gavin Calver (@GavCalver) April 8, 2025

It is genuinely difficult to adapt your life to Christian living: to commit to a community full of people whose company you might not have chosen for yourself, in which you must regularly recognise your own flaws and weaknesses and cruelties. Forgiving other people is hard, but so is asking other people to forgive you. The long social dominance of Christianity in Europe has tended to obscure the fundamental oddness and difficulty of Christian observance.

It doesn’t help that well-meaning Christian attempts to appeal to reach out to young people have often been rather inept, often because they lack the confidence to just let the truths of the faith speak for themselves. Most people who grew up in churches will have their own stories of cringeworthy attempts by church leaders to get down with the kids, usually just a decade or two behind the times. Disco cathedrals are a hard no.

There are no easy answers. What works in one place, with one set of kids, may not work in another. Quite likely the much-mocked rainbow guitar straps have appealed to plenty of teenagers in their time. But, ultimately, no Christian congregation can avoid the question.

Read it all.

New research shows that most non-believers say they were raised in the faith.

So why did so many leave? Niall Gooch 👇 https://t.co/VYP2I27Rd1

— UnHerd (@unherd) March 30, 2025

Churches such as Holy Trinity, Brompton (HTB), are better at connecting with younger generations on social media. I would much rather repost HTB’s beautifully curated content, with thought-provoking questions and soothing low-fi beats, than the C of E’s reels about Anglican history or what has been going on as the Synod sits. Recent content has highlighted the goings-on in the House of Laity, which, I think, most of my friends would assume was a new reality-TV show.

Before even getting into debates over the place of liturgy or the finer details of Anglican theology, this is a generation who still struggle with the concept of “sin” and “salvation”. The rhetoric that they remember from religious-studies lessons at school (for many, the only time when they have encountered Christianity) is that of judgement and wrath. In conversations with my friends, church has become synonymous with guilt. It is not seen as a place of community or inclusion, but of ostracism and hypocrisy. As a generation who have come of age during a pandemic and a crippling cost-of-living crisis, we are all too acquainted with the reality of a fallen world. What Gen Z are looking for is a Church that will offer them leaders with integrity and a better plan for the world.

Looking to the Gospels, both Jesus’s leadership and the hope that he offers the world seem very far from the reality of organised Christianity which my generation see in the media. The Church’s reputation in the media is so important because Gen Z church attendance is staggeringly low. They are not sitting in churches or opening the Bible: they are opening Instagram and having their views formed by the snippets of news which they see on their feeds.

Read it all.

Gen Z are open to faith — but not to the Church of England

When it comes to connecting with younger people, the Church has a communication problem, argues Abigail Kinghttps://t.co/Jj0uukXrGQ

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) February 23, 2025

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Appalling.
The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books – The Atlantic https://t.co/xK0Aru2Enm

— Carlton Larson (@carltonfwlarson) October 1, 2024

Under the sponsorship of the YMCA, Wilder spent the following academic year touring college campuses. He told the story of the “Mount Hermon One Hundred” and urged students to pledge themselves to become missionaries. Some 2,000 did so. To avoid allowing the bright light of this new movement to flicker out, in 1888 YMCA leaders organized the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (known simply as the SVM). They placed the recent Cornell graduate, John R. Mott, at its head. The SVM formed organizations on college, university and seminary campuses across the nation. Students signed pledge cards stating their intention to become missionaries and joined weekly meetings to study missions. The watchword of the movement illustrates the boldness and optimism of the Christian youth of that era: “The Evangelization of the World in this Generation.”

The SVM became one of the most successful missionary-recruiting organizations of all time. Prior to its formation, American Protestants supported less than a thousand missionaries throughout the world. Between 1886 and 1920, the SVM recruited 8,742 missionaries in the U.S. Around twice that number were actually sent out as missionaries in this period, many of them influenced by the SVM though never members. SVM leaders also formed college groups around the world in countries where missionaries had established mission colleges during the previous century. Their goal was to create a missionary force large enough to evangelize every nation. They thought in military terms. Missionaries were soldiers in God’s army. The SVM sought to recruit, to support, and to place these soldiers strategically around the world. If done shrewdly, they thought they would surely conquer the world.

Read it all.

“The whole world changed colour when I lost Beth,” Mr Palmer says. “People call it devastation: it’s too small a word. I was completely shattered. It was like being smashed to the ground.

“I was a firefighter [at Manchester Airport]. I’d spent years and years dealing with life-and-death situations. I taught trauma to first responders, and was very often on the other end of a defib. But losing my little girl just destroyed me.”

Feeling suicidal himself, he couldn’t talk to his family and couldn’t work, he says. The only thing that got him out of bed in the early days was his dog, Monty, whom he walked in the middle of the night so that he didn’t have to meet people. “I was in an awful place. But little things started happening.”

He felt compelled to write a journal — something that he had never done before — and discovered this to be an outlet for his anger and despair. He asked for help, and found good people in a counsellor, a local suicide-bereavement service, and the airport chaplain, George Lane.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

After his daughter’s death, Mike Palmer became one of ‘3 dads walking’ to raise awareness of young suicide. He talks to Catherine Larnerhttps://t.co/QVcXmHHCMd

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) April 28, 2024

Kali Gaddie was a college senior when the pandemic abruptly upended her life plans—and made her part of a big and deeply unhappy political force that figures to play a huge role in the 2024 election season.

Her graduation was postponed, she was let go from her college job and her summer internship got canceled. She spent the final months of school taking online classes from her parents’ house. “You would think that there’s a plan B or a safety net,” she said. “But there’s actually not.”

Today, Gaddie, 25, works as an office manager in Atlanta earning less than $35,000 a year. In her spare time, she uploads videos to TikTok, where she’s amassed thousands of followers. Now, that’s at risk of being taken away too. All of this has left her dejected and increasingly skeptical of politicians.

Young adults in Generation Z—those born in 1997 or after—have emerged from the pandemic feeling more disillusioned than any living generation before them, according to long-running surveys and interviews with dozens of young people around the country. They worry they’ll never make enough money to attain the security previous generations have achieved, citing their delayed launch into adulthood, an impenetrable housing market and loads of student debt.

Read it all.

Young adult Gen Z voters are more disillusioned and pessimistic than any before. More here, including charts from *Generations*:https://t.co/bU8xNjCd9j

— Jean Twenge (author of GENERATIONS, iGEN) (@jean_twenge) March 15, 2024

A committee of Canada’s parliament has called for the country’s assisted suicide and euthanasia programme to be extended to “mature minors”.

A report by the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) suggests children whose deaths are “reasonably forseeable” should be eligible.

The report also recommended that parental consent is not always necessary in certain cases where a child is considered eligible for a doctor-assisted death.

Read it all.

As a college educator, I am confronted daily with the results of that conspiracy-without-conspirators. I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.

Since this development very directly affects my ability to do my job as I understand it, I talk about it a lot. And when I talk about it with nonacademics, certain predictable responses inevitably arise, all questioning the reality of the trend I describe. Hasn’t every generation felt that the younger cohort is going to hell in a handbasket? Haven’t professors always complained that educators at earlier levels are not adequately equipping their students? And haven’t students from time immemorial skipped the readings?

The response of my fellow academics, however, reassures me that I’m not simply indulging in intergenerational grousing. Anecdotally, I have literally never met a professor who did not share my experience. Professors are also discussing the issue in academic trade publications, from a variety of perspectives. What we almost all seem to agree on is that we are facing new obstacles in structuring and delivering our courses, requiring us to ratchet down expectations in the face of a ratcheting down of preparation. Yes, there were always students who skipped the readings, but we are in new territory when even highly motivated honors students struggle to grasp the basic argument of a 20-page article. Yes, professors never feel satisfied that high school teachers have done enough, but not every generation of professors has had to deal with the fallout of No Child Left Behind and Common Core. Finally, yes, every generation thinks the younger generation is failing to make the grade—except for the current cohort of professors, who are by and large more invested in their students’ success and mental health and more responsive to student needs than any group of educators in human history. We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them….

Read it all.

I know EXACTLY what he means. Same things have happened to me, and every professor & public school teacher over tge oast 28 years…..

The Loss of Things I Took for Grantedhttps://t.co/ql0ujAsjHx

— Dr. Irving Forbush (@IrvingForbush2) February 11, 2024

Maternity services could close at one of two London hospitals due to fewer births, the NHS said.

NHS North Central London said it needed to cut the number of maternity units in its area due to declining birth rates.

It has launched a public consultation, proposing to close either the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead or Whittington Hospital in Archway.

Concerns have been raised but NHS bosses said “nothing has been pre-decided”.

Read it all.

Fewer births may force London maternity services to close https://t.co/LM6P0G5lMH

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) December 12, 2023

Homeownership has become a pipe dream for more Americans, even those who could afford to buy just a few years ago.

Many would-be buyers were already feeling stretched thin by home prices that shot quickly higher in the pandemic, but at least mortgage rates were low. Now that they are high, many people are just giving up.

It is now less affordable than any time in recent history to buy a home, and the math isn’t changing any time soon. Home prices aren’t expected to go back to prepandemic levels. The Federal Reserve, which started raising rates aggressively early last year to curb inflation, hasn’t shown much interest in cutting them. Mortgage rates slipped to about 7% last week, the lowest in several months, but they are still more than double what they were two years ago.

Typically, high mortgage rates slow down home sales, and home prices should soften as a result. Not this time. Home sales are certainly falling, but prices are still rising—there just aren’t enough homes to go around. The national median existing-home price rose to about $392,000 in October, the highest ever for that month in data that goes back to 1999.

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"It is now less affordable than any time in recent history to buy a home, and the math isn’t changing any time soon."@ginaheeb: https://t.co/8LZYrIAleG pic.twitter.com/LPIdKWGDAU

— Eric Wallerstein (@ericwallerstein) December 12, 2023

Gen Z and millennial adults are having a hard time achieving the same milestones their parents did when they first ventured out into the workforce.

For instance, 55% of young adult respondents find it is “much harder” to purchase a home, 44% said it is harder to find a job and 55% said it is harder to get promoted, according to a Youth & Money in the USA poll by CNBC and Generation Lab.

The survey polled 1,039 people between ages 18 and 34 across the U.S. from Oct. 25 to Oct. 30.

“This is purely a snapshot of what young people perceive their lives to be like compared to their parents,” said Cyrus Beschloss, founder of Generation Lab, an organization that built the largest respondent database of young people in America.

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Gen Z, millennials have a much harder time ‘adulting’ than their parents did, CNBC/Generation Lab survey finds https://t.co/h1T3NEXdZq

— CNBC (@CNBC) November 13, 2023

Barron’s: It is fairly widely acknowledged that the mental health of young Americans has deteriorated. What is significant about your newest research in this area?

David Blanchflower: I have written a lot about despair, distress, and well-being. My work has showed that happiness trends are basically hump-shaped over a lifetime. Distress or despair peaks in midlife. Young people are happy, middle-aged people are less happy, and then older people recover [happiness] in retirement. But what has happened, suddenly, is that the well-being of the young has collapsed, while other generations are the same.

In the latest research, I asked this question: Over the past 30 days, what number of those days [were] bad mental health days? If you said “every day of my life is a bad mental health day,” that’s what I call distress. In 2011, about 5% of women under age 25 reported mental distress. But by 2023, more than 10% said every day of their lives was a bad mental health day.

The same thing is happening with young men. It isn’t just a young woman’s problem. Both young women and young men have seen this uptick, although for women it is worse. So far, we have seen that levels of mental distress vary especially by education—it is worse for the less-educated.

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Young Americans are plagued by an epidemic of #unhappiness, according to anecdotal evidence & social science research.

The origins aren’t clear, although the #Covid pandemic didn’t helphttps://t.co/x0QXX8OfX5 #mentalhealth

— Pacific Journal of Health (@PacificJHealth) October 28, 2023

Nearly half of all young adults are living with their parents — and they’re not ashamed to say it.

Moving out and living on your own is often seen as a marker of adulthood. But dealt an onerous set of cards — including pandemic lockdowns, decades-high inflation, soaring student debt levels and a shaky job market — young people today are increasingly staying put. What’s more, it’s no longer seen as a sign of individual failure.

Almost 90% of surveyed Americans say people shouldn’t be judged for moving back home, according to Harris Poll in an exclusive survey for Bloomberg News. It’s seen as a pragmatic way to get ahead, the survey of 4,106 adults in August showed.

“We’re in an economy where it’s harder to live independently,” said Carol Sigelman, professor of social psychology at George Washington University. “Adults recognize that it’s tough these days.”

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Nearly half of young adults in the US are living with their parents — they're not ashamed to say it https://t.co/V4VNmKsIe1

— Bloomberg (@business) September 20, 2023

The number of marriages in China declined for nine consecutive years, falling by half in less than a decade. Last year, about 6.8 million couples registered for marriage, the lowest since records began in 1986, down from 13.5 million in 2013, according to government data released last month.

Although the numbers have risen so far in 2023 compared with the year before, more marriages are ending, too. In the first quarter of this year, 40,000 more couples married compared with the same period a year earlier, while divorces rose by 127,000.

Surveys have shown that young people are deterred by the toll of putting a child through China’s cutthroat education system. As women in cities achieve new levels of financial independence and education, marriage is less of an economic necessity to them. And men say they cannot afford to get married, citing cultural pressure to own a home and a car before they can even begin dating.

The instability of the last three years has compounded these pressures, reshaping many young people’s expectations about building a family. China has imposed an increasingly tight grip over every aspect of society under its leader, Xi Jinping — with effects that could weigh on the marriage rate.

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It has been brutal for China’s young adults as their unemployment rate soars amid a wave of corporate layoffs. For many people, the recent turmoil is another reason to postpone major life decisions — contributing to a record-low marriage rate.https://t.co/eOaYk6ITgp

— NYT Business (@nytimesbusiness) July 10, 2023