Pathways, February 2026
Each month, we keep track of the different paths that modern life is taking and how writers are keeping up. Here are some routes we recently found in our modern life.
Can you believe it’s already the end of February? That means it’s time for another “Pathways” digest!
This month’s Pathways is a real hodgepodge—including topics like athletics, childhood, masculinity, theories of everything, and more. Let’s dive in.
This February many enjoyed the XXV Winter Olympic Games—for those who know their roman numerals, that means the modern Olympic Games are only about 100 years old. The original Games, which took place in Olympia, Greece, were celebrated from 776 BCE to 394 CE, until the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, a Christian, banned them due to their pagan religious significance. (Turns out the Greeks’ athletic feats were performed as part of their worship of Zeus.)
The Olympic Games were revived in 1896 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin of France under a different ideological rubric. Louis Callebat observes that
The image of Olympia adopted by moderns, however, rather than causing them to embrace the complex reality of the ancient events that took place at Olympia, made them inclined to establish some privileged fragmentary elements of them, such as physical effort, fair competition on a wide scale, and sacred truce.
As de Coubertin wrote in 1894, “There will be no question of wearing pink tunics.... No tripods or incense; these beautiful things are dead, and dead things are never resurrected. Only the idea can live again, adapted to the needs and taste of the age.”
There’s much more to say here, but we can call de Coubertin’s efforts to reconstruct the Olympic Games a prime example of creative genealogical work— the values of Olympism, shorn of “tripods and incense,” but invested with broadly liberal values of fair play and peace, fraternity and equality. What other ancient practices might be reinvigorated with new meanings?
Next, an interview and article by Derek Thompson. Thompson is now best known as co-author with Ezra Klein of Abundance (2025). In his interview with Joe Wiesenthal, the two discuss what Thompson calls the “orality theory of everything.” Building on the work of media theorists like Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan, who famously argued that the technology of the written word is the most significant event in the history of humanity, Thompson and Wiesenthal explore the social and political implications of the decline of “literate culture” in our age of social media—a kind of unwitting return to the oral cultures of the ancient world.
Thompson’s “The Monks in the Casino” is one of the best essays of late last year, and it makes some fascinating historical and genealogical claims in relation to the economic components of the “male loneliness crisis.” After noting that many have argued that capitalism in the US is rapidly transforming into “casino capitalism” through ”the rise of sports betting, online gambling, and financial speculation,” Thompson posits that
The sociologist Max Weber proposed that Christian asceticism gave birth to capitalism. Today it is capitalism that is birthing a wretched asceticism, as the casino economy turns our young people monastic.
In short: The first half of the twentieth century was about mastering the physical world, the first half of the twenty-first has been about escaping it.
Some might object to Thompson’s identification of today’s lonely young men who “spend historic gobs of time by themselves without feeling the internal cue to go be with other people” with medieval monasticism, but the rhetorical reversal is quite powerful.
Next, check out Ted Gioia’s “30 Facts about Childhood Today that Will Terrify You.” Here are a few of the most concerning:
“The average child now plays outside for only 4-7 minutes per day.”
In the last decade, “The time youngsters spend with friends has fallen in half,” from about 12 hours a week, to less than 6.
“70% of children quit organized sports by the age of 13. Participation has been declining steadily since the rise of smartphones.”
Another emerging story Gioia is tracing is the fomenting of a kind of “tech backlash,” which he notes is “so widespread now that even tech companies are joining in.” His evidence? Toy Story 5. (Yes, that’s right—5.) The villain this time: a tablet with AI capabilities named Lilypad. As Gioia notes, the central irony here is that this critique is coming from Pixar, “the studio that unleashed digital tech on cinema audiences with the first Toy Story movie in 1995.”
Next, Jacob Siegel’s “What Went Wrong with the American Man?” (Some of you might know Siegel from his great podcast with novelist Phil Klay, Manifesto!: A Podcast.) Siegel was a soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving both a critic of the war on terror. But his primary concern here isn’t with recounting the missteps of American military power abroad, but rather with the unraveling of the archetypal American man, once confident and self-assured, now an embittered shell of himself, out to find someone to blame for his misfortunes. It’s a stirring and necessary read.
Finally, Nick Pompella of the Dispatch notes that “atheism in the United States appears to have hit its ceiling. According to the Pew Research Center, 2 percent of the country was actively, openly nonreligious in 2011. That number rose to 4 percent by 2021—but has remained constant since.” And so it appears that the “New Atheism” of the 2000s and 2010s—heralded by its “Four Horsemen”: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett—is waning. As Zachary Davis argues, on the rise is a “New Theism” brought on by a new set of “Horsemen”— or better, Evangelists: Ross Douthat, David Bentley Hart, Rod Dreher, and Paul Kingsnorth. Is there a religious revival afoot in America? If so, what would that do to our stories of the modern, shot through as they are with narratives of secularization and disenchantment?
That’s all for now! See you next month!
