[link removed]


** Daily Newsletter: October 14, 2025
------------------------------------------------------------


** In today’s newsletter:
------------------------------------------------------------

LOUISE PERRY: Indigenous London ([link removed])

JONATHAN J. SANFORD: Education Is Not a Commodity ([link removed])

MARK BAUERLEIN: The Problem of Population Decline ([link removed])

Welcome to the First Things daily newsletter, your guide to the ideas and events shaping our shared moral, cultural, and religious life. Each article we publish continues the conversations First Things has led for thirty-five years.

Stay with us as we explore cockney London with Louise Perry, liberal education with University of Dallas president Jonathan Sanford, and demographic downturn on Mark Bauerlein's
Conversations podcast.
[link removed]


** Indigenous London ([link removed])
------------------------------------------------------------


** Louise Perry
------------------------------------------------------------

From the November issue: “Before London was a global city, it was just a city, and people lived there,” begins Louise Perry in her feature for this month’s magazine. Tracing the decline of London’s cockney working class, much of which took place in the last twenty years, Perry portrays a city that has lost part of itself. Due to both suburban aspiration and hostile housing policy that favored immigrants, London is no longer home to a people “who understand well their own country.”

For further reading: After years of open borders, grooming gang scandals, and crackdowns on free speech, some are daring to ask: “Is Britain back?” There are a few hopeful signs we covered in these pages. First, Rhys Laverty wrote in “The Summer of Our Discontent ([link removed]) ” about the Unite the Kingdom rally in September, which saw a massive number of protesters take to the streets to assert that the English nation exists. Around the same time, “flagging” (stealthily hanging St. George’s flags and Union Jacks in public places) became a popular protest. Historian Francis Young wrote about it in “St. George’s Cross, Flag of the People ([link removed]) .”
[link removed]


** Education is Not a Commodity ([link removed])
------------------------------------------------------------


** Jonathan J. Sanford
------------------------------------------------------------

The dismantling of humanities programs around the country betrays an ignorance of the true purpose of education, University of Dallas president Jonathan J. Sanford writes today. “To treat education as a commodity is to betray its essence. The genuine task of the university is the formation of free and virtuous persons,” he writes. Properly undertaken, education is a pilgrimage that “stands athwart the spirit of the age.”

For further reading: Though higher education has a liberal education crisis, classical schools for younger students are becoming more popular. Read headmaster Jay Boren’s “Catholic Classical Education on the Rise” ([link removed]) (2017) or Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’ “Children Have a Right to Classical Education ([link removed]) ” (2023).
[link removed]


** The Problem of Population Decline (ft. Georgina Kiss-Kozma) ([link removed])
------------------------------------------------------------


** Mark Bauerlein
------------------------------------------------------------

Listen: On this episode of Conversations, Mark Bauerlein speaks to Hungarian researcher Georgina Kiss-Kozma about the younger generation, family formation, and population decline. Kiss-Kozma is deputy director of the Youth Research Institute at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.

Upcoming Events
* November 2, 2025: A Night of Poetry with Ben Myers | New York, NY. Register here ([link removed]) . ([link removed])
* November 3, 2025: The 38th Annual Erasmus Lecture: In Praise of Translation with Bishop Erik Varden | New York, NY. Register here. ([link removed])
* November 11, 2025: The Future of Higher Education, a discussion with Mark Bauerlein and Mark Regnerus | Irving, TX. Register here. ([link removed])
* January 9, 2026: Second Annual Neuhaus Lecture at the New College of Florida | Sarasota, FL. Details coming soon.

Until next time.
Virginia Aabram's signature


** VIRGINIA AABRAM
------------------------------------------------------------
Newsletter Editor
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]

Copyright © 2025 First Things, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you opted in at firstthings.com.

============================================================
Our mailing address is:
First Things
9 East 40th St Fl 10
New York, NY 10016
USA
Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can ** update your preferences ([link removed])
or ** unsubscribe from this list ([link removed])
.