Link roundups and commentary on culture, politics, and philosophy.
Tolkien and Tech by Michael Lucchese Tolkien’s near-Luddite skepticism can still teach us how to relate to new technologies, even if motorcars have become an insurmountable fact of modern life. The Digital Revolution, from smartphones to artificial intelligenc…
The Politics of Pathology by Theodore Dalrymple There was recently an article in the British Medical Journal about the ethics of diagnosing President Trump’s psychological or medical condition by doctors who had never examined him. It was generally a very fair…
Gen Z Is Lost in the Backrooms by Jack Butler These places are easy to ignore. But an entire subculture, mostly populated by the digital natives of Gen Z, is obsessed with them. To zoomers, they have a sterile, stifling quality. They’re oppressively nondescrip…
From the Fourth Estate to Digital Fragmentation by Itxu Diaz It is also not easy to know the sources or the origin of information. As the profiles of what used to be a conventional journalist have become blurred, those who spontaneously turn to reporting do no…
The Bitter Lessons of Sugar Control in World War I by Daniel J. Smith The Food Administration proudly claimed it had saved consumers millions. Yet as Roy Blakey (1918) observed, gratitude evaporated when sugar simply sporadically disappeared from tables in reg…
Defenders of Classical Liberalism Are the Real Revolutionaries by Adam A. Millsap This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. There will be no shortage of celebrations, but as we commemorate the occasion, we should remember what e…
The Parents Who Let Their Daughter Die by Rupa Subramanya Then the pandemic hit. As lockdowns stretched on, Iris retreated—into her room, away from friends, away from everything. At 15, she tried to kill herself twice. The first time, she attempted to hang her…
Flourishing is a choice by Allison Schrager Many people will fail, of course. Some ideas are bad, or the timing is wrong, or we bet on the wrong horse. That’s OK. Dignity is living in an economy where you can take risks to move yourself and the economy forward…
Cosmetic Surgery’s False Promises by Sarah Jane Souther Women who get breast implants are significantly more likely to commit suicide than women who don’t. These troubling statistics don’t imply a cause-and-effect relationship between breast augmentation and s…
Notes from Upstream: Root, Hog, or Die by Max Cossack > Stick to what got us here. We can and should stay true to what Lincoln called his “ancient faith” of the Declaration of Independence, which in turn found its sources in moral and spiritual traditions whic…
When Education Stops Being About Truth by George Leef It used to be the case that our educational institutions focused on teaching students truth and how to find it. But over the last 50 years or so, many academics decided that it was more important to indoctr…
Mark Twain’s Exaggerated Unbelief by John J. Miller The best evidence that Twain was more than an atheist with a sense of humor remains hidden in plain sight: his novel about Joan of Arc. Its narrator calls the French heroine “the most noble life that was ever…
The Mythology Machine Moves Left by Erick Erickson Democrats once understood the danger of building a coalition on emotionally satisfying falsehoods. They warned the country about it, loudly, for four years. The test of whether they actually believed their own…
The US and Cuba intensify negotiations as the island’s collapse deepens by David Marcial Pérez, Carla Gloria Colomé This week, both Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President Trump issued conciliatory messages. Shortly before that, they had further tightened…
The poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky said, “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” And not being capable of reading them is even worse than that. Rich Lowry
Is Polaroid coming for today’s stock market? by Richard Abbey Even though proponents cite fundamentals to justify current pricing, he says it’s hard to make a common-sense case that the outlook has swung so swiftly for a sector of such size: It’s one thing to…
America’s New Debt Milestone by Julia R. Cartwright > The institutional signals are also deteriorating. In May 2025, Moody’s stripped the US of its AAA rating, the last of the three major agencies to do so, joining S&P (2011) and Fitch (2023). All three have n…
Big Brother Is a Bad Daddy by Rob Henderson If the problem is that fewer couples are forming, we should ask why. Economics explains some of it. So does culture. Some of it is the slow erosion of norms—religious, civic, familial—that once nudged young people to…
President Trump’s Opportunity to Bring Home Jimmy Lai by Katie LaRoque, Jamie Fly Many of us advocating for Lai’s release were heartened by President Trump’s public commitment to secure his freedom. During his campaign for the presidency, he pledged to raise L…
SOME THOUGHTS ON MOTHERS by Susan Vass > Did you know that they have Hotel bed-making national competitions? The championship two-person team from Super 8 made the winning bed in 15 seconds! Well done! NOW, add two lively black kittens to the mix. Ha! Not so e…
In Praise of Crazy Visionaries by Jeffrey Blehar Ted Turner passed away today, at the age of 87. He had been out of the public eye for several years now, first retiring from corporate responsibility in 2006 and finally conceding to the inevitable toll of a pub…
Bernie the Dupe by Jack Butler What is Mr. Sanders thinking? It isn’t the first time he’s found solace in a communist country. But there’s more going on here than that. The supposed model for this “dialogue” is how the U.S. and the Soviet Union collaborated to…
The Geopolitics of Cinco de Mayo by Rod D. Martin The delay made all the difference. Puebla was immensely inspirational, encouraging resistance throughout Mexico. Even once victorious, the French were never able to pacify the country, much less project power n…
Data Center Panic Gets Electricity Prices Wrong by Julia R. Cartwright > The deeper problem, as a growing body of research makes clear, is state energy policy itself. A Charles River Associates report found that rate increases are heavily driven by local regul…
Goodbye, Information Age by Joel Kotkin Long-time laggards Alabama and Mississippi now produce more vehicles annually than Italy or Britain. Many of the new data centers are in the rural areas of red states, including places like northern Louisiana, where Meta…
The New Great Game: The True Significance of the Hormuz Struggle by Jim Thorne Kipling’s line in Kim — “There is no sin so great as ignorance. Remember this.” — lands differently now. Keynes identified the contradictions of the old order at Bretton Woods, but…
The Great Books and Great Books: An Education for Liberty by Pano Kanelos For the Western tradition is not a fixed body of knowledge to be possessed, but an inheritance to be received, tested, and renewed. It lives only insofar as it is taken up—personally, se…
How Identity Politics Killed the New Left by Steven F. Hayward It is customary to think of “identity politics” as something of relatively recent origin, tracing back to some notable breaks in the Obama years. Perhaps you’ve seen the histograms of the usage of…
European Exceptionalism by Theodore Dalrymple The author has, mercifully, no axe to grind, no procrustean theory into which facts must fit, and is very fair minded. He begins with an evident truth which nevertheless will raise the hackles of many young people…
Distracted by Books and Dragons by Rebecca Richards Aside from the surface-level parallel of war in the Middle East, low literacy rates, and a recent pandemic, our times appear to have little in common with the Middle Ages. Yet, we can relate to the cultural u…