Will the most important pop stars of the future be religious pop stars?
The personally irreligious (last I checked) economist Tyler Cowen has long been fond of proposing that the most important thinkers of the future will be religious thinkers—counter to everything we heard growing up in the age of the New Atheists, and yet, the evidence seems to keep amassing. After the recent release of LUX, the Spanish polymath Rosalía’s fourth studio album, I want to propose a corollary: the most important pop stars of the future may indeed be religious pop stars.
Critics and listeners already seem to agree that LUX represents a titanic accomplishment by the classically-trained, genre-bending singer. Urbane reviewers and YouTube-savvy opera conductors alike have spent the last two weeks obsessively unpacking Rosalía’s 4-movement, 18-track opus, whose symphonic trilingual cathedral piece and Mexican-inflected post-breakup diss track have already charted worldwide. Closer to home, it’s a striking accomplishment to get me to pay serious attention to Top 40 (it helps, of course, to make a hyperpolyglot album with Iberian duende at its core)…
At the beginning of the decade, metamodern types (myself included, in my interview for a PhD position at the Spirituality and Psychology Lab) were given to asking the question: “What can we do to reenchant the world?”
The great stagnation is over. In the age of spiritual machines, enchantment may soon become too cheap to meter. What’s left to ask is: “How are we to make sense of it?” We’ll need artists who can hold the tension—between the earthly and the divine, the ironic and the sincere, the rational and the numinous. Rosalía, to her credit and our great benefit, is already living the question with her full body.
*The Age of Disclosure*
I have now watched the whole movie. The first twenty-eight minutes are truly excellent, the best statement of the case for taking UAPs seriously. It is impressive how they lined up dozens of serious figures, from the military and intelligence services, willing to insist that UAPs are a real phenomenon, supported by multiple sources of evidence. Not sensor errors, not flocks of birds, and not mistakes in interpreting images. This part of the debate now should be considered closed. It is also amazing that Marco Rubio has such a large presence in the film, as of course he is now America’s Secretary of State.
You will note this earlier part of the movie does not insist that UAPs are aliens.
After that point, the film runs a lot of risks. About one-third of what is left is responsible, along the lines of the first twenty-eight minutes. But the other two-thirds or so consists of quite unsupported claims about alien beings, bodies discovered, reverse engineering, quantum bubbles, and so on. You will not find dozens of respected, credentialed, obviously non-crazy sources confirming any of those propositions. The presentation also becomes too conspiratorial. Still, part of the latter part of the movie remains good and responsible.
Overall I can recommend this as an informative and sometimes revelatory compendium of information. It does not have anything fundamentally new, but brings together the evidence in the aggregate better than any other source I know,and it assembles the best and most credible set of testifiers. And then there are the irresponsible bits, which you can either ignore (though still think about), or use as a reason to dismiss the entire film. I will do the former.
Sunday assorted links
Enlightenment ideas and the belief in progress leading up to the Industrial Revolution
Using textual analysis of 173,031 works printed in England between 1500 and 1900, we test whether British culture evolved to manifest a heightened belief in progress associated with science and industry. Our analysis yields three main findings. First, there was a separation in the language of science and religion beginning in the 17th century. Second, scientific volumes became more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment. Third, industrial works—especially those at the science-political economy nexus—were more progress-oriented beginning in the 17th century. It was therefore the more pragmatic, industrial works which reflected the cultural values cited as important for Britain’s takeoff.
That is from a paper by Ali Almelhem, Murat Iyigun, Austin Kennedy, and Jared Rubin. Now forthcoming at the QJE.
Emergent Ventures winners, 49th cohort
David Yang, 14, Vancouver, robotics.
Alex Araki, London, to improve clinical trials.
Ivan Skripnik, Moldova/LA, physics and the nature of space.
Mihai Codreanu, Stanford economics Ph.D, industrial parks and the origins of innovation.
Salvador Duarte, Lisbon/Nebraska, 17, podcast in economics and philosophy.
Aras Zirgulis, Vilnius, short economics videos.
Ava McGurk, 17, Belfast, therapy and other services company and general career support.
Anusha Agarwal, Thomas Jefferson High School, NoVa, space/Orbitum.
Cohen Pert, 16, Sewanee, Georgia, running several businesses.
Jin Wang, University of Arizona, Economics Ph.D, AI and the history of Chinese economic growth.
Janelle Yapp, high school senior, KL Malaysia, general career support.
Justin Kuiper, Bay Area, Progress Studies ideas for video.
Mariia ]Masha] Baidachna, Glasgow/Ukraine, quantum computing.
Beatriz Gietner, Dublin, Substack on econometrics.
Roman Lopatynskyi, Kyiv, romantic piano music.
What is opera?
The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brunnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In reali life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.
In recompense for this lack of psychological complexity, however, music can do what words cannot, present the immediate and simultaneous relation of these states to each other. The crowning glory of opera is the big ensemble.
That is from an excellent W.H. Auden essay “Notes on Music and Opera.”
Saturday assorted links
1. New claims about quantum gravity.
2. Ranking countries by English language proficiency (Ghana should be higher!).
3. Travis Kalanick with some claims about tipping.
4. 32-minute Benedict Evans talk, AI-related.
5. The boring side of Bell Labs.
6. Jobs at Recoding America Fund.
7. FT lunch with Philippe Aghion.
8. More on the Toner-Rodgers story (WSJ).
Big, Fat, Rich Insurance Companies
In my post, Horseshoe Theory: Trump and the Progressive Left, I said:
Trump’s political coalition isn’t policy-driven. It’s built on anger, grievance, and zero-sum thinking. With minor tweaks, there is no reason why such a coalition could not become even more leftist. Consider the grotesque canonization of Luigi Mangione, the (alleged) murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. We already have a proposed CA ballot initiative named the Luigi Mangione Access to Health Care Act, a Luigi Mangione musical and comparisons of Mangione to Jesus. The anger is very Trumpian.
In that light, consider one of Trump’s recent postings:
THE ONLY HEALTHCARE I WILL SUPPORT OR APPROVE IS SENDING THE MONEY DIRECTLY BACK TO THE PEOPLE, WITH NOTHING GOING TO THE BIG, FAT, RICH INSURANCE COMPANIES, WHO HAVE MADE $TRILLIONS, AND RIPPED OFF AMERICA LONG ENOUGH.
I appear on the Odd Lots podcast
Much of it was on AI and also slow take-off, here is the link. Self-recommending…
Best non-fiction books of 2025
The year started off slow, but it ended up being a normally strong time for quality, readable non-fiction. Here is my list, noting that the links lead either to my reviews or to Amazon. These are roughly in the order I read them, not ranked ordinally. Here goes:
Caroline Burt and Richard Partington, Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State.
Tirthankar Roy and K. Ravi Raman, Kerala: 1956 to the Present.
Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life.
Amy Sall, The African Gaze: Photography, Cinema, and Power.
Michael Krielaars, The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin.
David Eltis, Rethinking the Atlantic Slave Trades.
Philip Freeman, In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor.
Daniel Dain, A History of Boston. Short review here.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance.
Ian Leslie, John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs.
Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism
Roger Chickering, The German Empire, 1871-1918.
Donald S. Lopez Jr., Buddhism: A Journey Through History.
Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.
Keach Hagey, The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future.
Joseph Torigian, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping.
Rupert Gavin, Amorous or Loving?: The Highly Peculiar Tale of English and the English.
Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America.
Erik Penman, Eric Satie Three Piece Suite.
Dwarkesh Patel, and others, The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019-2025.
Jeff McMahan, editor, Derek Parfit: His Life and Thought.
Paul McCartney, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run.
William Easterly, Violent Saviors: The West’s Conquest of the Rest.
Nicholas Walton, Orange Sky, Rising Water: The Remarkable Past and Uncertain Future of the Netherlands.
Ken Belson, Every Day is Sunday:
Tom MacTague, Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016.
What else? I will give you an update on anything notable I encounter between now and the end of the year. And here is my earlier post on the best fiction of the year.
Eric Hanushek on the import of schooling quality declines
My recent research at Stanford University translates the achievement declines into implications for future economic impacts. Past evidence shows clearly that people who know more earn more. When accounting for the impact of higher achievement historically on salaries, the lifetime earnings of today’s average student will be an estimated 8 percent lower than that of students in 2013. Because long-term economic growth depends on the quality of a nation’s labor force, the achievement declines translate into an average of 6 percent lower gross domestic product for the remainder of the century. The dollar value of this lower growth is over 15 times the total economic costs of the 2008 recession.
Here is the full Op-Ed, noting that Eric compares this decline to the effects of an eight percent income tax surcharge. I have not read through this work, though I suspect these estimates will prove controversial when it comes to causality. In any case, file this under “big if true,” if only in expected value terms.
Friday assorted links
1. Those semi-new service sector jobs how to get people to leave a cult.
2. What was Alice Munro actually writing about? So often people are writing about themselves.
3. The New Yorker on Paul Collier and Britain.
4. Claims about LLMs and stock returns.
5. Live version of “I Hear a Symphony,” you can skip the thirty second intro.
6. The Harvard endowment’s single biggest public investment is now Bitcoin.
Some second-order effects of unaffordable housing
This is one of the best, most interesting, and most important papers I have seen of late:
Housing affordability has declined sharply in recent decades, leading many younger generations to give up on homeownership. Using a calibrated life-cycle model matched to U.S. data, we project that the cohort born in the 1990s will reach retirement with a homeownership rate roughly 9.6 percentage points lower than that of their parents’ generation. The model also shows that as households’ perceived probability of attaining homeownership falls, they systematically shift their behavior: they consume more relative to their wealth, reduce work effort, and take on riskier investments. We show empirically that renters with relatively low wealth exhibit the same patterns. These responses compound over the life cycle, producing substantially greater wealth dispersion between those who retain hope of homeownership and those who give up. We propose a targeted subsidy that lifts the largest number of young renters above the “giving-up threshold.” This policy yields welfare gains that are 3.2 times those of a uniform transfer and 10.3 times those of a transfer targeted to the bottom 10% of the wealth distribution, while also increasing homeownership rate, raising work effort, and reducing reliance on the social safety net.
That is from Seung Hyeong Lee of Northwestern and Younggeun Yoo of University of Chicago. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Nano Banana Pro does Marginal Revolution
My very fun Conversation with Blake Scholl
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. This was at a live event (the excellent Roots of Progress conference), so it is only about forty minutes, shorter than usual. Here is the episode summary:
Blake Scholl is one of the leading figures working to bring back civilian supersonic flight. As the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, he’s building a new generation of supersonic aircraft and pushing for the policies needed to make commercial supersonic travel viable again. But he’s equally as impressive as someone who thinks systematically about improving dysfunction—whether it’s airport design, traffic congestion, or defense procurement—and sees creative solutions to problems everyone else has learned to accept.
Tyler and Blake discuss why airport terminals should be underground, why every road needs a toll, what’s wrong with how we board planes, the contrasting cultures of Amazon and Groupon, why Concorde and Apollo were impressive tech demos but terrible products, what Ayn Rand understood about supersonic transport in 1957, what’s wrong with aerospace manufacturing, his heuristic when confronting evident stupidity, his technique for mastering new domains, how LLMs are revolutionizing regulatory paperwork, and much more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: There’s plenty about Boom online and in your interviews, so I’d like to take some different tacks here. This general notion of having things move more quickly, I’m a big fan of that. Do you have a plan for how we could make moving through an airport happen more quickly? You’re in charge. You’re the dictator. You don’t have to worry about bureaucratic obstacles. You just do it.
SCHOLL: I think about this in the shower like every day. There is a much better airport design that, as best I can tell, has never been built. Here’s the idea: You should put the terminals underground. Airside is above ground. Terminals are below ground. Imagine a design with two runways. There’s an arrival runway, departure runway. Traffic flows from arrival runway to departure runway. You don’t need tugs. You can delete a whole bunch of airport infrastructure.
Imagine you pull into a gate. The jetway is actually an escalator that comes up from underneath the ground. Then you pull forward, so you can delete a whole bunch of claptrap that is just unnecessary. The terminal underground should have skylights so it can still be incredibly beautiful. If you model fundamentally the thing on a crossbar switch, there are a whole bunch of insights for how to make it radically more efficient. Sorry. This is a blog post I want to write one day. Actually, it’s an airport I want to build.
And;
COWEN: I’m at the United desk. I have some kind of question. There’s only two or three people in front of me, but it takes forever. I notice they’re just talking back and forth to the assistant. They’re discussing the weather or the future prospects for progress, total factor productivity. I don’t know. I’m frustrated. How can we make that process faster? What’s going wrong there?
SCHOLL: The thing I most don’t understand is why it requires so many keystrokes to check into a hotel room. What are they writing?
What are they writing?