Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. King Charles and the Green Man

The royal watchers of London fell agog upon seeing the invitation to King Charles’s upcoming coronation. It featured a drawing of a folkloric “green man,” surrounded by leaves and ivy. Whatever could it mean? The Critic, a British magazine, describes the reaction in the Kingdom:

Takes stormed in, with many accounts hysterically accusing the new monarch of paganism and nature-worship. Would white-robed priestesses slaughter cattle on the altar of Westminster Abbey? Would the King be crowned by a druid? Would he announce his new reign by putting on a pair of antlers, mounting a white horse and hunting republicans in the streets of London?

The Critic takes a leafier view:

The popular revival of the Green Man (which now adorns not only gardens and old churches, but pub signs, album covers and ales) is a genuine bit of modern folk culture, one equally tied to a certain English anarchism as it is monarchism. It perfectly suits the spirit of our new sovereign.

2. Dead Careerist Society

Over half of Harvard undergraduates take their first jobs in tech, finance, or consulting. Why? In The Crimson, the university’s undergraduate newspaper, Aden Barton contends that “students increasingly view their degrees as financial investments, attempting to maximize return while limiting downside risk.” He elaborates:

The clearest example of Harvard’s careerist turn is its extracurriculars. Instead of being a way to “chill” or “get away from the academic stressors,” as...clubs used to be, student organizations — such as Harvard College Consulting Group and Harvard Financial Analysts Club — increasingly function as pre-professional outlets. These efforts often come at the expense of classwork, converting even the most poetic student into a utilitarian careerist.

3. Search Me

  If you’re using ChatGPT to search the internet, you’re missing the point, argues Dan Shipper, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. To get better results, you need to create a private, personal database:

People have been saying that data is the new oil for a long time. But I do think, in this case, if you’ve spent a lot of time collecting and curating your own personal set of notes, articles, books, and highlights it’ll be the equivalent of having a topped-off oil drum in your bedroom during an OPEC crisis. Why? It’s expensive and time consuming to find information that’s relevant to the things you think about. ...If, instead, you’ve spent a lifetime gathering and curating information that’s important to you, you can customize your AI experience so it’s more useful to you right off the bat.

Shipper recommends online tools like Rewind, a locally stored record of “everything you see and everything you type” that can hook up to ChatGPT.

4. Dimon on Silicon Valley

The best part of Jamie Dimon’s annual letter to shareholders is his take on the implosion of Silicon Valley Bank. The JPMorgan Chase boss cautions against “knee-jerk, whack-a-mole or politically motivated responses.” According to Dimon, such responses “often result in achieving the opposite of what people intended”:

 Regarding the current disruption in the U.S. banking system, most of the risks were hiding in plain sight. Interest rate exposure, the fair value of held-to-maturity (HTM) portfolios and the amount of SVB’s uninsured deposits were always known — both to regulators and the marketplace. The unknown risk was that SVB’s over 35,000 corporate clients — and activity within them — were controlled by a small number of venture capital companies and moved their deposits in lockstep. It is unlikely that any recent change in regulatory requirements would have made a difference in what followed.

5. Misery Likes Company

For nearly a decade, Jonathan Haidt has argued that social media is ruining a generation of youth. His latest project tasked a young researcher to assess whether Gen Z agrees. The conclusion was super inclusive:

 No survey or study that we could find reported that teenagers had a positive view of their cohort’s mental health or overall well-being. And only four commenters on our document had any reason to doubt that Gen Z was headed down a dangerous path, even though disagreement on that point is what we asked for. The kids do not believe that they’re alright.

6. Green for Green

Bloomberg’s Lara Williams predicts the end of cheap flights in Europe. It’ll be expensive to reduce the cost of carbon:

Over the next three decades, aviation has to transform itself from a polluting industry — planes are responsible for 2.5% of global CO2 emissions — to a net-zero one...[T]he sector won’t be able to absorb these costs itself. The changes to the EU Emissions Trading System alone will slash the operating profit of the continent’s six largest point-to-point airlines (Ryanair Holdings Plc, EasyJet Plc, Wizz Air Holdings Plc, Vueling, Eurowings and Transavia) by an estimated 77%. That means ticket prices will have to be higher, which in turn means that demand destruction is inevitable.

Websites Worth Reading

Pew Facts on India’s Population: India is now the world's most populous country

Pollster Rankings: 538’s Ranking

Snack Stack: The past and future of snacks

Feeds We Follow

@rickberke: Editor of Stat

@cafharvard: Faculty-led forum on free speech at Harvard

@JapanTraCul: Japanese culture