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Just 50 days before his reelection, Donald Trump took the time to hawk a new crypto platform.If the country does not build out its cryptocurrency ecosystem, “we’re not going to be the biggest, and we have to be the biggest and the best,” Trump said on a livestream on X. “It’s very young and very growing. And if we don’t do it, China’s going to do it.” The livestream was sponsored by World Liberty Financial, which has given Trump the title “chief crypto advocate” and his sons, Barron, Eric, and Donald Jr., that of “Web3 ambassador.”World Liberty Financial is the brainchild of Zak Folkman (the creator of an advisory firm called Date Hotter Girls LLC) and Chase Herro (an affiliate marketer who previously sold colon cleanses). It is a get-rich-quick scheme, and not one that seems designed to enrich its customers.It is also an emblem of a financial world that Trump’s election seems set to supercharge, populated by young men who have seen their economic prospects stagnate, their faith in the United States falter, and a champion in a baggy business suit and a red baseball cap emerge. Think of it as the bro-economy: a volatile, speculative, and extremely online casino, in which the house is already winning big.[Christopher Beam: The worst of crypto is yet to come]Its first major market sector: day-trading. I don’t mean old-fashioned, small-dollar equity investing done at the kitchen table. I mean hyper-speculative betting done with borrowed money on mobile apps, as investors shitpost and infinite-scroll. Market-moving rumors come not from corporate conferences, but from sites like YouTube and the Subreddit WallStreetBets (tagline: “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg terminal”). Users at times coordinate to buy up a certain stock with the explicit goal of screwing over a hedge fund that had bet the stock would go down.That’s what happened four years ago with GameStop: Redditors helped to push the share price up 8,000 percent. Now so-called meme stocks are resurgent. GameStop spiked this spring. Tesla climbed when Trump won. (Tesla is both a blue-chip stock and a meme stock; Elon Musk, the company’s founder, is one of Trump’s biggest donors and closest advisers, as well as being a storied internet troll and the owner of the social-media platform X.) “This rally seems unsustainable, even if you believe in the long-term growth story for the stock,” David Wagner of Aptus Capital Advisors told Bloomberg. “It makes no sense.”As noted by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, this trading behavior is in part driven by market democratization. A decade ago, the fintech firm Robinhood pioneered commission-free trading, allowing individuals to buy stocks or other financial assets without paying any fees. Today’s apps also allow users to purchase fractions of a stock and do not set minimum balances, ushering in less wealthy investors.The barriers to entry are low, yet the risks are high. Today’s young day-traders tend to make frequent transactions and gravitate toward exotic trades, when research shows that investors generate the best returns when they make simple investments infrequently. The apps encourage the piling-on of risk through push alerts, promotions, and other gamifications.The second crucial market sector: sports betting. In 2018, the Supreme Court overturned a 1992 law banning commercial sports betting outside of Nevada. That paved the way for more than three dozen states to okay the practice; 30 states also allow residents to make wagers online.It would be hard to overstate how much this has changed pro sports and the fan experience over the past half decade. Commentators talk about fantasy leagues and prop bets as much as they talk about the game; advertisements for sportsbooks are ubiquitous; millions of spectators keep DraftKings and FanDuel up on their second screen. An estimated two in five American adults engage in sport betting. One in four online bettors has wagered more than $500 in a single day. Americans staked $120 billion last year, double what they did in 2021.Many die-hard fans love the rise of sports betting: It’s entertaining, engaging, a way to support your favorite players and dunk on your friends. Still, in a survey, 37 percent of online bettors said they “felt bad or ashamed” for losing money. Nearly 40 percent said they bet more than they should; nearly 20 percent said they lied about the extent of their betting, and the same share said they lost cash that was meant for their day-to-day financial obligations. A strong majority supported the federal government “aggressively” regulating the market, “to specifically protect customers from compulsive gambling.”Third and last is crypto, which boomed into the mainstream a decade ago. Today, roughly one in three young people has traded in or used crypto. Sites such as Robinhood and Coinbase make purchasing easy. (Buying bitcoin used to take significant know-how and days of waiting.) The most recent bust, in 2022, seems to have done little to deter crypto’s most ardent fans.There might be more of them soon. For years, Trump was anti-crypto. “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air,” he wrote on Twitter five years ago. He added: “We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever, both dependable and reliable. It is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the World, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!”Today, he’s not just promoting shady crypto start-ups. He’s promising regulation that would allow banks to offer crypto assets to clients, making the United States the “crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.” Industry-friendly rules would lead to a flood of cash entering the crypto markets, enriching anyone with assets already in their wallets, but also increasing volatility and exposing millions more Americans to scams, frauds, and swindles.Day-trading, sports betting, and crypto are three floors in one bustling, high-stakes casino. Many folks trade crypto and meme stocks on the same platform, thumbing over to a second app to keep their sports bets going, thumbing over again to post their wins and losses. Apps have made the experience social. They have also made staking money as frictionless as ordering Uber Eats.[Charles Fain Lehman: Legalizing sports gambling was a huge mistake]The players in this casino are overwhelmingly young men, roughly 40 percent of whom are into sports betting and crypto. (A smaller minority is actively trading.) No surprise, Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me, when I called to ask about the bro-economy. “Risk skews male, period, for good and for ill,” he said. “There’s this greater willingness, appetite for, vulnerability to, tolerance of risk.” He appreciated how the activities gave guys something to do together and talk about with one another. He also noted how many young men felt shut out of traditional wealth-building strategies, such as homeownership.Still, the bro-economy exploits its users’ penchant for risk. Crypto companies and betting sites do not generate value; they take cash from their users, reshuffle it, and redistribute it, while keeping a cut for themselves. Postmodern trading platforms encourage excess, making their margins on esoteric trades and superfluous volume. The casino lacks guardrails, not to benefit the bettors, but to benefit the house.Musk and Trump have given young men something to aspire to. But their ascendance makes the stricter regulation of the bro-economy unlikely—and, in the case of crypto, makes deregulation a sure thing. Guys are about to lose billions and billions of dollars a year on apps designed to obscure risk and keep them coming back for a dopamine hit. Trump and Musk can afford to lose huge sums. Most young American men cannot.

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The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read BooksTo read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school, Rose Horowitch wrote in the November 2024 issue.I’m an English teacher at a private college-preparatory school, and much of “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” sounded familiar. My students, too, now struggle to read long texts. Unaddressed in this apt article, though, are changes to the broader high-school context in which reading for homework now occurs. Today, students with elite college aspirations have extracurricular schedules that demand as much—if not more—time than school itself. These commitments are necessary, in their eyes, to gain admission to selective institutions. As a result, teachers face considerable pressure from not only students but also parents and school administrators to limit homework time—no matter if the assignment is a calculus problem set or Pride and Prejudice. In combination with considerably slower rates of reading and diminished reading comprehension, curtailed homework time means that an English teacher might not be able to assign more than 10 to 15 pages of relatively easy prose per class meeting, a rate so excruciatingly slow, it diminishes one’s ability to actually grasp a novel’s meaning and structure. I see how anxious and drained my students are, but I think it’s important for them to experience what can grow from immersive reading and sustained written thought. If we want students to read books, we have to be willing to prioritize the time for them to do so.Anna ClarkSan Diego, Calif.As a professor, I agree with my colleagues who have noticed the declining literacy of American students at elite universities.However, I am not sure if the schools are entirely to blame. In American universities, selection is carried out by admissions offices with little interest in the qualities that faculty might consider desirable in a college student. If faculty members were polled—something that has never happened to me in my 20-year career—I’m sure we would rank interest and experience in reading books quite highly.Admissions decisions in the United States are based on some qualities that, however admirable, have little or nothing to do with academic aptitude. In contrast, at Oxford and Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, undergraduate admissions are typically conducted by the same academics who will teach those students. Most personal statements primarily consist of a discussion of which books the student has read and what they learned from them. Students are then expected to discuss these books in more detail in an interview. When considered alongside the undergraduate selection process, the decline in literacy among American undergraduates is totally understandable.Ione FinePsychology Professor, University of WashingtonSeattle, Wash.Having taught English in a public school for 32 years, I am not surprised that colleges and universities are discovering that incoming students lack the skill, focus, and endurance to read novels. Throughout my career, primarily teaching ninth graders, I fostered student readership not by assigning novels for the whole class to read, but rather by allowing students to select young-adult books that they would read independently in class. Thousands of lifelong readers were created as a result.Ten years ago, however, my district administration told me that I could no longer use class time for independent student reading. Instead, I was to focus on teaching skills and content that the district believed would improve standardized-test scores. Ironically, research showed that the students who read more books scored significantly better than their classmates on standardized reading tests.I knew that many students were unlikely to read at home. So I doubled down: I found time for students to read during the school day and repurposed class time to allow my students to share their ideas; to question, respond, and react along with their peers. The method was so successful that the district adopted my approach for seventh through ninth grade, and I published a university-level textbook preparing teachers to create similar communities of readers in their own classrooms.Whole-class novels just aren’t working: Some students will always be uninterested in a teacher’s choice, and perceive the classics as irrelevant and difficult to comprehend. But allowing students to select their books can help them fall in love with reading.Michael AnthonyReading, Pa.I am an educator of 16 years living in New Hampshire. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” reflects a lot of what I’ve seen recently. But a large piece of the puzzle is public-school budgets. A major reason novels have been removed from curricula is money: Many districts cannot afford to purchase a book for every student, especially in the upper grades. Typically, districts will buy a “class set” of novels, about 20 to 30 books—that’s it. The books must be used during the English blocks for instruction and reading time. There are not enough books for students to take home and read; if they are reading them only in their class block, a novel will take months and months to finish. I knew of one district that would have teachers make copies of entire novels to share with their students; they’d take turns on copy duty to pull it off. I wish I could teach more complete novels, because students love it. But districts need budgets large enough to buy books for everyone.Meaghan KellyRumney, N.H.When teaching my college history courses, I have polled my students to see how many have ever read a book cover to cover. Sometimes, only a few students would raise their hand.I inquired because I always gave them the option to read a book instead of writing a 10-page research paper. They then would have a one-on-one, hour-long discussion with me about the book they’d selected. Students who chose that option generally had a good experience. But one student shines bright in my mind. In truth, I didn’t remember him well—but he stopped me at an alumni function to say thank you. He had taken my class the second semester of his senior year to fill an elective, and he had chosen to read David McCullough’s 1776. He’d devoured the book—and he’d loved our discussion. He told me that the assignment had changed his life: Up to that point, he had never read a whole book. Since that class, he has read two or three books a month, and now has hundreds of books in his own library. He assured me that he would be a reader for the rest of his life.It was one of the most gratifying moments of my career. I hope more teachers, professors, and parents give their students a chance to learn what this student did—that books are one of the great joys in life.Scott SalvatoMooresville, N.C.Rose Horowitch replies:Anna Clark’s letter builds on an idea that I hoped to convey in the article: that the shift away from reading full books is about more than individual students, teachers, or schools. Much of the change can be understood as the consequence of a change in values. The professors I spoke with didn’t think their students were lazy; if anything, they said they were overscheduled and frazzled like never before, facing immense pressure to devote their time to activities that will further their career. Under these circumstances, it can be difficult to see how reading The Iliad in its entirety is a good use of time. Acknowledging this reality can be disheartening, because the solution will not be as simple as changing curricula at the college, high-school, or middle-school level. (And as several of these letters note, changing curricula isn’t all that straightforward.) But letters like Scott Salvato’s are a hopeful reminder of the power of a good—full—book to inspire a student to become a lifelong reader. The Atlantic Behind the CoverIn this month’s cover story, “How the Ivy League Broke America,” David Brooks describes the failure of the United States’ meritocracy, created in part by James Conant, the influential president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. Conant and like-minded reformers had hoped to overturn America’s “hereditary aristocracy of wealth”; instead, they helped create a new ruling class—the so-called cognitive elite, selected and credentialed by the nation’s top universities. For our cover image, the artist Danielle Del Plato placed the story’s headline on pennants she created for each of the eight Ivy League schools, which have been instrumental in shaping and perpetuating America’s meritocracy.— Paul Spella, Senior Art DirectorCorrectionsDue to an editing error, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” (November) misstated the year Nicholas Dames started teaching Literature Humanities. He began teaching the course in 1998, not 1988. “What Zoya Sees” (November) misstated where in Nigeria Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi and her husband, Sunny, have a home. Their home is in Ngwo, not Igwo.This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”