Sorting students by IQ at age 15-17 (or even younger, with testing in third grade) creates a bifurcated system: those identified as 'smart' are accelerated into high achievement, while those identified as 'dumb' check out and become apathetic, losing any pathway to engagement and self-worth.

Resentment follows a pattern: it begins with feeling impotent because one lacks something or has lost social standing, then becomes a transvaluation of values where the resentful person decides what they don't have is not worth having, leading them to dismiss higher human qualities (kindness, generosity, honor) as fake and to assume only lower impulses (selfishness, venality, lust for power) are real.

Playing roles in theater significantly increases emotional awareness because it requires people to put themselves into the mind, heart, and soul of another person, making it a revelatory experience for many young people.

Until a certain point in world history, people's morality was shaped by their social roles (tailor, soldier, teacher, farmer), defining the standards of decency by how well they fulfilled their role. When that structure was removed and morality was privatized—left to each person to come up with their own—most people lacked the capacity to do so, and the loss of shared moral order created moral confusion.

Without words like 'sin,' 'redemption,' and 'grace,' it is very hard to understand your own inner environment and make moral judgments about others, because these terms structure how we think about moral transformation and human dignity.

In the 2028 election, America will hunger not just for a policy opposite of Trump, but for the moral opposite, social opposite, and emotional opposite of Trump—someone who embodies warmth, compassion, positive spirituality, and upbeat optimism rather than resentment and suspicion.

Editorial staffs at major media outlets (Times, Post, Journal, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN) are dominated by graduates of the same 32 elite colleges (55% of employees), creating a ridiculously unrepresentative sample of the country and an echo chamber in elite professions including media, Hollywood, law, and corporations.

Young people intuitively understand the dangers of cognitive offloading through AI and phone use—they don't need expert warnings. Young people understand that not using AI for simple tasks preserves cognitive capacity, and they are supportive of phone bans in schools because they recognize they lose decision-making ability when they don't practice it.

AI will create a cognitive caste system: 20% of humans with high need for cognition will use AI to amplify thinking and become cognitive superstars, while 80% (cognitive misers) will use AI as a substitute for thinking, lose the capacity to think hard, and become cognitively backward, resulting in massive stratification.

Emotion is not opposed to reason; rather, emotions assign value to things, and without emotional processing, people cannot make decisions. Cognitive science shows that people with lesions preventing emotional processing become unable to decide what they like, refuting the Platonic prejudice that reason is reliable and passions are wild horses to suppress.

Emotional granularity—the ability to distinguish between adjacent emotional states like frustration, anxiety, angst, anger, and stress—makes people wiser about how to operate in the world, and learning to read your body is tremendously important.

Exemplars are powerful tools for moral formation: reading about and studying great people (Pericles, Shakespeare, Martin Luther King, Frances Perkins, George Marshall) makes excellence admirable to young people and gives them models of how to be.

Exposure to multiple moral traditions (Stoicism, Epicureanism, Christianity, Confucianism, Buddhism, Rationalism) allows young people to see the range of human moral wisdom and to choose which philosophers and traditions fit them, rather than constructing morality from scratch as a private individual.

Generativity (the desire to leave a legacy, give back, and contribute to society) emerges around age 55 as 'a new form of horniness'—a powerful drive that motivates work on cultural/social problems in ways that personal achievement never did.

Brooks left the New York Times after 22 years (at age 64, with about 10-11 years of full-time work remaining) because he believed changing environments and situations is a good way to change thinking, and he wanted to spend his remaining career on deeper questions about meaning and purpose rather than daily politics.

A schoolmaster's historical motto—'Our job is to turn out graduates who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck'—captures the goal of moral formation: producing people of character who can be relied upon when times are difficult and normal social performance isn't what matters.

George H.W. Bush (elder) refused speechwriters' requests to brag about himself while running for president, saying 'I'm not going to brag about myself,' and his mother called to tell him 'George, you're talking about yourself'—exemplifying the cultural norm that gentlemen do not self-promote.

Jumaane Williams (a New York politician) exemplifies the emotional tone that will be opposite of Trump: he 'smiles when he talks,' 'is having a good time,' and is 'upbeat'—the interviewer would vote against him on policy but has 'warm feelings' because of his emotional tone.

Trump 'rarely smiles unless it's for a fake smile and never laughs because he can't trust himself to have a spontaneous emotion'—showing emotional damage or incapacity at his core.

Social media (especially TikTok) is too addictive for Brooks to use, leading him to minimize social media consumption (no Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok) despite following Twitter for political and AI discourse and some Mets baseball Twitter.