Good morning!

This is a short one because I am in Montreal for the Sustainable Finance Summit. Hosted by friends at Finance Montreal, this event has become the premier event on the topic in North America.

I particularly enjoyed the performance of The Assembly by Porte Parole, an interactive documentary play on energy in Canada, easily the most interesting live performance I have seen in many years.

Two things worth your time

The only answer to a dating recession is quantitative easing (of touching grass). A stellar and starting conversation between Sean Illing and Christien Emba daylighted this startling piece of research from the Wheatley Institute on contemporary dating in the United States. As they summarize from a massive study of American young people:

  • Only 1 in 3 American young adults are actively dating - this was despite the fact that 51% (still a shockingly low number to me) of adults expressed interest in dating.
  • Young adults lack confidence in their data skilling, with only 1 in 3 expressing any level faith in their ability to do and say the right things in dating. Only 37% also said they trusted their judgement in choosing a partner.
  • “Dating resilience” is low, with only 28% of surveyed young people reporting that they could stay positive after a bad dating experience, a possible proxy for limited interest in staying engaged.

As Illing and Emba discussed at length, honestly giving me echoes of Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, the only real answer to this is a societal reinvestment in our social connectedness.

While there are a range of reasons (including economic precarity) stopping young people from dating, it’s clear that social media (including dating apps) and the real-world social changes that they have created have enclosed the sense of possibility that young people feel (and I’ll count myself among them) in what’s possible in contemporary dating. A society that no longer believes in the possibility of realizing love is not one I want to live in.

Open-access journals make modern science possible – and they have a money problem. arXiv, one of the world's largest free online repositories of scientific and academic papers, is leaving its longstanding home at Cornell University and becoming a global non-profit. It joins bioRxiv and medRxiv, which have done the same.

This is important as the academic and scientific community struggles with the booming costs of LLM-created articles being submitted (a major cause of arXiv needing to broaden its revenue sources), as well as the eye-watering cost of accessing academic journals generally.

Estee Torok from the Gates Foundation explains:

Journal subscriptions can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars a year for individual access and multiple millions of dollars for institutional access. Fees for publishing outside a paywall, known as article processing charges (APCs), can be as much as US$12,000 for a single article.

Harvard, reportedly, can’t even pay for all of them anymore. The struggle over these exorbitantly-priced journals is a fundamental issue not only for the continued independence of science (and the broader academy), but also for its basic functioning.

For arXiv, the costs of operating what amounts to a very large database are important, especially as it tries to broaden its reach and bring in more authors and readers from the Global South. At the same time, largely unspoken, I read this as a further sign of the times in the American academy, which continues to sag under the weight of a full-scale assault from President Trump. American scientific dominance was essential to its soft and hard power during the twentieth century, and this current trajectory likely bodes ill for it in the future.

One thing I'm still working out

This week, I'm just keeping my head above water – more thoughts in a couple of weeks.

Easy Listening

Export-grade can-con sensation Letterkenny got me hooked on the Toulouse years ago, and I cannot get enough of this fabulous Québécois disco sensation.

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