Melanie Phillips delivers a chilling diagnosis of the West's intellectual crisis: Ideology has replaced knowledge, and reason itself is under siege.
Key points from her 4:37 clip: – Modern orthodoxies (multiculturalism, lifestyle equivalence, etc.) are treated as absolute moral… pic.twitter.com/y2L5bVWl0u
Using soft LED lights led to an 84% drop in suicide attempts in Japan.
Japan’s innovative use of calming blue LED lighting has achieved a staggering 84 percent reduction in train station suicide attempts. In an innovative approach to public safety, Japanese railway stations are demonstrating how simple environmental changes can have a profound impact on mental health. By installing high-intensity blue LED lights at the ends of train platforms—areas often chosen for suicide attempts due to their isolation—the East Japan Railway Company has seen a dramatic shift in behavior.
Researchers from the University of Tokyo found that these calming lights, which evoke the tranquility of the sky and sea, contributed to a remarkable 84 percent decrease in suicide attempts over a ten-year period. This cost-effective intervention serves as a powerful reminder of how psychological triggers can be redirected through intentional design. The success of blue lighting is bolstered by findings linking mental health to light exposure, particularly during extended periods of overcast weather.
Data suggests that railway suicides in Japan often spike following consecutive days of rain and cloud cover, highlighting a biological need for brightness that these installations help fulfill. While traditional safety measures like chest-high barriers and sliding doors are effective, they are also incredibly expensive and difficult to install in older stations. In contrast, the implementation of blue lighting offers a scalable, affordable alternative that addresses the root of the crisis by soothing the emotional state of individuals in distress before they act. source: Psychology Today. (2025, January 27). Train Suicides Reduced by Blue Lighting. Psychology Today.
As the final waves of Gen Z — the youngest of whom are currently around 14 — make their way through high school and into colleges and trade schools, some higher education instructors are noticing a severe lack of reading comprehension skills in their students. Schools, in turn, are finding the only path forward is to drastically lower their expectations, for better or worse.
As Pepperdine University literature professor Jessica Hooten Wilsontold Fortune in a recent interview, “it’s not even an inability to critically think. It’s an inability to read sentences.”
Wilson is one of the professors who’s had to quietly lower her academic benchmarks thanks to the rise in barely literate Gen Zers graduating American high schools.
Rather than assigning reading outside of class, the literature professor told Fortune she’s adopted a kind of in-class popcorn reading, reciting passages together and discussing them “line by line.” Even that, unfortunately, might be a bit of a stretch for students these days.
“I feel like I am tap dancing and having to read things aloud because there’s no way that anyone read it the night before,” Wilson admitted. “Even when you read it in class with them, there’s so much they can’t process about the very words that are on the page.”
It’s worth pausing here to point out that you can’t really blame younger people for struggling at what were once seen as academic basics. The school system is in shambles, their education was bisected by the COVID pandemic, and they’re been reared in a world that’s increasingly deemphasized reading in favor of videos, voiceovers, and other emerging forms of communication.
Still, the situation is creating practical problems. Timothy O’Malley, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, told Fortune that students showing up unprepared for class isn’t necessarily new, but the lowered expectations are.
In the past, O’Malley said he’s assign anywhere from 25 to 40 pages of reading per class. Students would either do it, or they wouldn’t. Nowadays, that much reading would be unthinkable.
“Today, if you assign that amount of reading, they often don’t know what to do,” he explained to Fortune, adding that most Gen Z students are skating by on AI summaries. “They’ve been formed in a kind of scanning approach to reading.”
The news of Gen Z’s waning literacy comes along with a substantial decline in literary acumen among Americans more broadly.Over the last 20 years, for example, the amount of adults reading recreationally in the US has fallen by 40 percent.Meanwhile, a survey of the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) found that 59 million Americans are reading at a level one competency or below — the lowest level on the PIAAC’s five-point scale.
Whichever way you slice it, younger Americans are barely able to grapple with the written word. Short of major structural changes to the US education system, it’s likely Gen Z won’t be the last generation to experience worse literacy rates than the one that came before.
I’m a tech and transit correspondent for Futurism, where my beat includes transportation, infrastructure, and the role of emerging technologies in governance, surveillance, and labor.
Fears over a growing AI bubble that could wipe out the entire economy if it were to burst continue to mount.
For many months now, investors and even tech leaders have openly been discussing the possibility — but if or when such a collapse could take place remains a subject of heated debate.
Nonetheless, investors are already preparing for that type of major tech sell-off, theFinancial Times reports. The reporting shows that plenty of fear and uncertainty remain over the untold billions of dollars being poured into wildly unprofitable AI ventures — a dynamic that’s seen AI companies’ valuations skyrocket to record heights, despite dubious prospects of ever turning a profit.
Some are pulling back on their investments in major tech stocks, while others are outright betting on eventual drops in share prices.
“Whether there are excesses… in the equity market on AI is no longer questionable, but to figure out which exact companies will be the losers and when this reckoning will happen is difficult,” fund management firm Amundi chief investment officer Vincent Mortier told the FT.
One investment fund, Blue Whale Growth, sold its Microsoft and Meta stock in the second quarter of last year, with chief investment officer Stephen Yiu telling the newspaper that “we are concerned about the return on investment in some cases, while some of the valuations are insane — especially in private markets.”
GQG Partners chair Rajiv Jain added that “AI’s massive cash burn remains elevated with very little profitability in sight.” His fund sold all of its Magnificent Seven — investor shorthand for Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Nvidia — holdings.
“Though we had less exposure to a few Mag 7 names throughout 2025, we exited our remaining positions by early November because the risks of an AI bubble blow-up are growing, in our view,” he said.
At the same time, many remain unafraid of an imminent collapse.
“We don’t believe that we are in a bubble,” BlackRock international chief investment officer Helen Jewell told the FT, “but investors should prepare for a bumpy ride in 2026.”
Despite plenty of concerns among investors, banks remain optimistic about future growth. Wall Street has predicted double-digit gains this year. The S&P 500 has surged a whopping 92 percent since October 2022, posting double-digit returns for three years in a row now.
“2026 should be another strong year for AI stocks, with capex likely to surpass expectations,” JPMorgan’s Dubravko Lakos-Bujas wrote in a memo.
Others are far more muted about the outlook. Three years on from OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT, some are starting to wonder how long the enormous hype surrounding AI can continue to be sustained.
In a 2025 retrospective posted on Monday, Bridgewater hedge fund founder Ray Dalio warned that the tech market is “now in the early stages of a bubble.”
But a crash, some argue, may still be some ways away thanks to plenty of remaining excitement.
“A bubble likely crashes on a bear market,” Cetera Financial Group chief investment officer Gene Goldman told Bloomberg. “We just don’t see a bear market anytime soon.”
I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.
Four U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemasters are now en route to Diego Garcia — the silent launchpad of American power in the Indian Ocean.
This is not routine. This is not training.
Diego Garcia is where wars are prepared, not announced. It is the forward hub for: • B-2 stealth bombers • B-52 long-range strike aircraft • deep-penetration operations across the Middle East
When heavy airlift starts moving there, it means one thing: the board is being set.
No speeches. No headlines. Just logistics — the language of serious intent.
The Islamic dictatorship in Tehran is watching this too. C-17s don’t carry rhetoric. They carry infrastructure, fuel, equipment, and the ability to sustain operations far from home. This is how escalation begins — quietly. Storms don’t arrive with sirens. They form slowly… until suddenly they’re unavoidable.
The skies are moving. And the world is paying attention.
A MAJOR STORM IS GATHERING OVER IRAN Four U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemasters are now en route to Diego Garcia — the silent launchpad of American power in the Indian Ocean. This is not routine. This is not training. Diego Garcia is where wars are prepared, not announced. It is the forward hub for: • B-2 stealth bombers • B-52 long-range strike aircraft • deep-penetration operations across the Middle East When heavy airlift starts moving there, it means one thing: the board is being set. No speeches. No headlines. Just logistics — the language of serious intent. The Islamic dictatorship in Tehran is watching this too. C-17s don’t carry rhetoric. They carry infrastructure, fuel, equipment, and the ability to sustain operations far from home. This is how escalation begins — quietly. Storms don’t arrive with sirens. They form slowly… until suddenly they’re unavoidable. The skies are moving. And the world is paying attention.
A MAJOR STORM IS GATHERING OVER IRAN Four U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemasters are now en route to Diego Garcia — the silent launchpad of American power in the Indian Ocean. This is not routine. This is not training. Diego Garcia is where wars are prepared, not announced. It is the forward hub for: • B-2 stealth bombers • B-52 long-range strike aircraft • deep-penetration operations across the Middle East When heavy airlift starts moving there, it means one thing: the board is being set. No speeches. No headlines. Just logistics — the language of serious intent. The Islamic dictatorship in Tehran is watching this too. C-17s don’t carry rhetoric. They carry infrastructure, fuel, equipment, and the ability to sustain operations far from home. This is how escalation begins — quietly. Storms don’t arrive with sirens. They form slowly… until suddenly they’re unavoidable. The skies are moving. And the world is paying attention.
canisgallicus 