“The Gladiator & the Gadfly.” Charles McNamara wrestles with how we might regain the virtues needed for real education: “As the nation rushes into authoritarianism and as young people in particular are “losing faith in democracy,” universities must urgently recommit to the project of civic education: advanced literacy, moral reasoning, deliberation. Many people, including Charlie Kirk, have correctly diagnosed our colleges’ anemic efforts to produce good citizens. But his prescription of partisan spectacle—what figures like Ezra Klein and Gavin Newsom have euphemistically called his “spirited discourse” and “moxie”—was more ailment than antidote. Practicing politics as Kirk did might be good content, but it is not good education.”
“Thomas McGuane Is the Last of His Kind.” Tyler Austin Harper visits McGuane’s ranch and reflects, in a lovely essay, on the endangered tradition in which he stands: “He is arguably the only major American fiction writer still living whose work is inextricably connected to fishing, hunting, and ranching. And he may be the last.”
“MAHA, Medicalization, Karma, and Control.” Matthew Loftus sorts through the good and bad of MAHA and gets to the root problems that are making many Americans unhealthy: “If every aspect of our health is controllable, every sickness becomes a personal failing—or a nefarious consequence of corporate greed that fills our bodies with illness-inducing toxins. This worldview is bad for us because while it may encourage people to act wisely in regards to their bodies, it ignores the reality that some illnesses aren’t preventable and some “root causes” are inscrutable. This makes health a matter of control, measurement, judgment, and shame rather than a gift that we steward.”
“‘I’m Shocked, Shocked to Find That Gambling Is Going On in Here.’” When even the “dispositionally libertarian” David French is calling for gambling regulation, it’s a sign that maybe the time is ripe for reform: “The evidence is now in. The explosive growth in sports gambling is bad for sports, and—most important—it has proved to be bad for the millions of Americans who gamble past the point of prudence and move directly to the point of pain. The sports gambling revolution needs more regulation. It may even need termination.”
“The Coming AI Cataclysm.” Gabriel Rossman points out that AI will do many tasks better than the average human in large part because its prevalence will make the average human dumber: “even if the technology stopped improving tomorrow, it would still be an increasingly good substitute for human capital. This is because it is already capable of giving human beings, and especially young people, the choice to idle in stupidity and ignorance.”
“Why Pen-Pushers can’t Run Prisons.” Mary Harrington wonders if there’s anyway to escape managerial rot, detailing the plans of one British legislator who “promised to set targets for regulators to speed the cutting of red tape, including — wait for it — red tape-cutting league tables, to measure progress in red tape cutting. Anyone who has sat through a public-sector meeting of any kind knows what proposals of this kind look like in practice: more spreadsheets, more “evidence”, more guidelines. Watching the sclerosis hardening, news cycle after news cycle, it’s hard not to feel a kind of angry helplessness. But this feeling is itself part of the problem, which is fundamentally not material but spiritual. Few in our governing class seem able to imagine any form of action; only more rules.”
“Why Trump’s East Wing Demolition Needed to Happen.” Ross Douthat contrasts Obama’s presidential library with Trump’s new White House ballroom: “progressives and urban institutions are good at protecting architectural beauty where it already exists, lousy at making sure that new development happens on a reasonable timeline and consistently terrible at encouraging loveliness in the developments that do get built. The case for Trump’s ballroom is connected to these failures. First, it is simply good to build a White House ballroom, the presidency has needed one for a long time, and it’s absurd that the leader of a superpower has to host state dinners inside temporary tents.”
“‘It was the start of a new movement’: The Dutch Rewilding Project that Took a Dark Turn.” Isabelle Gerretsen describes the difficulties faced by those trying to rewild domestic landscapes: “The rangers now also manage the landscape by modifying how much water enters the different habitats. . . . They have planted young trees, surrounded by small fences to keep them out of the grazers’ reach, and created small pools in the grassland area where herons and wading birds gather. ‘There is human intervention, but it’s not a total paradigm shift,’ says Kuypers. ‘This is a landscape shaped by humans, where we have created space for natural processes.’”
“The Innovation That’s Killing Restaurant Culture.” Ellen Cushing tracks the steep price that food delivery is exacting from restaurants and the dinning experience: “Whatever you order, it will come from a business that operates a bit differently than it once did: less like a restaurant and more like a pickup counter, the product on offer less like ‘an experience,’ as the restaurateur Tom Colicchio told me earlier this year, and more like ‘a commodity.’ It will, in all likelihood, be packed into paper and so much plastic, bundled up like a baby in a snowstorm, doing its best to survive a trip it isn’t entirely equipped to make. . . . In 2024, nearly three out of every four restaurant orders were not eaten in a restaurant.”
“Amazon to Receive $80M in Tax Breaks for Orange County Warehouse.” Speaking of delivery, Amazon keeps getting scads of cash for projects whose benefit to local communities is dubious at best. Nora Mishanec reports on a new warehouse in New York: “Amazon will receive more than $80 million in tax savings over 15 years for its proposed 3.2 million-square-foot warehouse in rural Orange County. . . . The warehouse is expected to create 750 new jobs within three years of completion, according to the IDA.”
