Link roundups and commentary on culture, politics, and philosophy.
The End of ‘El Mayo’ Is Only the Beginning by Joshua S. Treviño ‘Violence should stop in Mexico,” said the tired old man. “Too many lives are lost. It destroys families. It thrusts youths into a life without future. Nobody will win this war.” Then, having spok…
The Baseball Tax That Made the Great Depression Worse by Antón Chamberlin Baseball during the Great Depression is only one memorable example. Governments often prefer to tax that which is visible, convenient at scale, and politically feasible, making mass cons…
7th Prime Minister in 10 years by Bill Glahn The 7th in ten years, dating back to David Cameron in 2016. By my count, only Burnham’s immediate predecessor, Keir Starmer, took office immediately following a general election. Burnham and four others first assume…
America Needs the Filibuster by Ben Sasse When partisans talk about killing or “reforming” the filibuster, they’re saying they want to turn the Senate into another House of Representatives. That would be a tragic mistake. The filibuster prevents the dramatic p…
Let Swifties Be Swifties by Shira Kaplan Every Taylor Swift-dedicated space allows the fan to act as an exegete: poring over CD liners with hidden messages, going frame-by-frame in music videos to find secret clues, analyzing the words she uses in interviews a…
This Week in American History: How to Say Goodbye to a King by Jonathan Horn At a time when the written word could travel no faster than the riders carrying it, news of the Declaration took time to spread. Some Americans first saw the text printed in newspaper…
When Uncle Sam Turns Venture Capitalist, What Could Go Wrong? by James Varney Government funding of private companies is receiving new scrutiny as the Trump administration is upping the ante on such efforts by demanding that the feds receive an equity stake fo…
America’s Indispensable Man by Wilfred M. McClay The Americans had another crucial advantage. They were blessed with an inspiring leader in the person of George Washington, a committed patriot with extensive military experience and extraordinarily fine charact…
The Rise of Grocery Tourism by Nicole James > I loved the products. Not necessarily the customers who could turn feral over a five-cent discrepancy in canned tomatoes. The conveyor belt was a pageant of human need. It was anthropology in a polyester apron. > W…
The enduring promise of America by Joel Kotkin The greatest Americans – Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, the Roosevelts – may be horrified by the banality of Trump’s America today, as well as its gaping fiscal worries. But they woul…
Europe Chooses to Broil by Matthew Hennessey European homes aren’t air-conditioned the way American homes are, and the consequences are proving deadly. Houston has roughly the same population as Paris and very few people die there when the temperature spikes.…
America’s Promise and Achievement by Leonidas Zelmanovitz History offers sobering reminders of how fragile civilizations can be. The collapse of Roman authority in Western Europe did not occur in a single dramatic moment. It unfolded gradually through institut…
A Time of Monsters by Jonathan Rosen Walter Russell Mead identified a version of this phenomenon in his book The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, where he likened obsessive, magical thinking about the “Israel lob…
Mexico’s Yūshūkan Mindset by Joshua S. Treviño > Ulysses S. Grant, in his Memoirs, disagreed emphatically with the characterization of Mexico’s soldiery of 1846–1848 as intrinsically inferior, and the certainty of American war success was much more tenuous tha…
America’s Immigrant Soccer Team The U.S. team last week clinched a spot in the knockout round after defeating Australia. A quarter of its players were born outside of the U.S., including Gio Reyna, Antonee Robinson and Sebastian Berhalter (U.K.), Sergiño Dest…
Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Fed, dies at age 100 by Marty Steinberg > The influential economist died Monday at his home from complications of Parkinson’s Disease, said his wife of 29 years, Andrea Mitchell, the chief Washington correspondent and chi…
Great Americans: The Man Who Built America’s Stonehenge by Josh Code “Great art is not a matter of science or of manual dexterity,” Fite said. “It is intellectual and philosophic, and the artist must satisfy the aesthetic sense by working with the limitations…
What to Make of the Iran Deal by Steven F. Hayward • Did Trump and Netanyahu think the Iranian regime would fold or be overthrown? Pretty clear the surviving Iranian leadership are hardened men, and cannot be toppled that easily. The late Angelo Codevilla gave…
An Epochal Mass Casualty Attack Targeting ‘Capitalist Elites’ Thwarted by Noah Rothman At least 23 people were allegedly captured in an encrypted Signal chat plotting to execute a sophisticated, multistage attack on Washington, D.C. — a plot advanced enough th…
Welcome to the World Cup of U.S. Hospitality by Jack Butler Yet many Europeans turn the glories of American capitalism into a criticism, a sign of a superficial people. They’re wrong about that, too, if these World Cup visitors are any indication. Europe’s pop…
The Keeper of American Memory by Colleen Shehan Following in the footsteps of his renowned mentor, Bernard Bailyn, Wood never regarded history as a vehicle for present-day political causes. Nor did he see it as a tribunal before which the dead must endlessly a…
Through Strangers’ Eyes May We See Ourselves Again As Great by Erick Erickson Two hundred and fifty years ago, fifty-six men signed their names to a document that pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to forge this nation. Some went bankr…
Ancient Clay Tablets Show Markets Worked 4,000 Years Before Economists Explained Them by Surse Pierpoint Archaeologists have recovered more than twenty thousand clay records from Kanesh. Most are business documents: receipts, loan contracts, shipping orders, c…
The sort of working class by Allison Schrager There was only a two-year period of my career when I was required to be in an office with any regularity. At the time I appreciated the structure and socialization, but it was kind of annoying and time-consuming to…
The Legacy of D-Day Lives On by Kate B. Odell World War II is, if anything, understudied, and D-Day deserves its place of honor in America’s origin myth. “The more I dug into it,” the scholar Michael Paradis said on the School of War podcast in 2024, “the more…
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…