Author: Thomas L. Knapp

Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Karthik Sankaran

“For all the uncertainty about what will happen next on the military and diplomatic front in the Iran war, there is certainty about what has already happened on the economic front. And it is not good.” (05/26/26)

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/economy-iran-war/

Source: UnHerd
by Sohrab Ahmari

“A two-millennia-old institution with one foot in the Roman Empire challenges Silicon Valley’s masters of AI and automation to do better. That’s the generic read on Pope Leo XIV’s debut encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, dramatized by photos from the Vatican of the pontiff shaking hands with Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. And that’s true enough: ‘artificial intelligence’ is right there in the encyclical’s subtitle, and many of its 245 paragraphs are devoted to the topic. Yet Magnifica Humanitas only incidentally concerns the promise and peril of the AI revolution. A closer examination reveals that Leo’s ultimate project is nothing less than a defense of moral and political universalism — the collective struggle for ‘a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason,’ as the pope puts it — just when universal reason is menaced on every side by various irrationalisms.” (05/26/26)

https://archive.is/co6Wr

Source: Los Angeles Times
by Stephanie Coontz

“I’ve spent much of my career as a historian criticizing any idealization of 1950s marriages. Domestic violence and child abuse were much more common then than today. It was perfectly legal for a man to forcibly rape his wife. And depression among homemakers was so widespread that by the end of the decade, physicians had labeled it the ‘housewife’s syndrome.’ … But I now believe I’ve been too dismissive of such nostalgia. The sense of loss that underlies it is not ‘all in people’s heads.’ Instead, I’ve come to see it as an example of what physicians call ‘referred pain,’ like when a problem in one part of the body is experienced as pain elsewhere. So too, I think, much of the pain we feel in our social and family relations originates in a deeper part of the economy and the body politic.” (05/26/26)

https://archive.is/4PsMG

Source: Washington Monthly
by Gillen Tener Martin

“Why Emmanuel Macron can’t convince his voters to rearm.” (05/26/26)

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/05/26/the-french-rejection-macron-defense/

Source: EconLog
by Joy Buchanan

“In a controversial conversation platformed by the New York Times and recently discussed in The Atlantic, streamer Hasan Piker implied that he might steal a car if it carried no consequences. In the interview, author Jia Tolentino also casually admits to shoplifting lemons from Whole Foods. Although petty theft is common, the interview clip spread quickly because the justification for looting felt oddly assertive. Piker referred to the iconic anti-piracy campaign that sought to use moral vibes (rather than rational arguments) against taking physical property to convince people to further control their impulses and not copy music without paying. The anti-piracy clip ‘You Wouldn’t Steal a Car’ indicates an implicit assumption from 2004 that American society was broadly agreed on the stability of physical property. In other words, most Americans do not think ‘property is theft.'” (05/26/26)

https://www.econlib.org/econlog/would-hasan-piker-steal-a-car