“Eli Lilly reached a major milestone Friday, becoming the first healthcare company in the world to hit a $1 trillion market value. The drug company briefly crossed the trillion-dollar mark during morning trading before its stock pulled back slightly. Shares were last trading at around $1,048 each. Eli Lilly is now just the second non-technology company in the U.S. to reach a $1 trillion value, after Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Much of that growth comes from two blockbuster drugs: Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for weight loss. The Indianapolis-based drugmaker’s stock is up more than 36% this year, as demand for its weight loss and diabetes treatments continues to rise, CNBC reported.” (11/24/25)
“Chris Spangle and Matt Wittlief reunite to bring back History of Modern Politics after a long hiatus. In this episode, they explain why the show is returning, how seasons two and three are already underway, and what listeners can expect as they continue tracing political thought from the Roman Republic to the American founding.” (11/24/25)
“Cancellations, sometimes violent protests, behind-the-scenes censorship, and overt government threats to muzzle the media. Free speech is doing better in the U.S. than elsewhere in the world, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing well. It’s besieged by hostile politician and a shifting culture that is eroding the foundations of tolerance for dissent and an open marketplace of ideas. That has Americans worried, though even as they fret over the future of free speech a significant minority contribute to the problem.” (11/24/25)
Source: Bluegrass Institute
by Caleb O Brown & Colleen Hroncich
“Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman’s passionate case for guaranteeing preschool access for every 4-year-old in the state deserves scrutiny. The evidence for universal pre-K as an economic development strategy is far weaker than she suggests. Kentucky families deserve honesty about what this expensive and expansive program can – and cannot – deliver. Coleman omits the most rigorous recent research on the subject. Researchers from Vanderbilt University followed nearly 3,000 low-income children through sixth grade with alarming results: Children who attended Tennessee’s Voluntary Pre‑K (TN-VPK) program fared worse on a range of metrics compared with children who didn’t attend.” (11/24/25)
“For many years, I found my ideological and professional home at the Heritage Foundation. I first joined the organization in 1986 as a policy analyst and departed it in 2021, ending my 35-year tenure there as executive vice president. My years at Heritage taught me many things about how a think tank should — and perhaps equally importantly, should not — operate.” (11/24/25)
Japan’s defense minister, visiting a military base close to Taiwan, said plans to deploy missiles to the post would move forward as tensions smolder between Tokyo and Beijing over the East Asian island. ‘The deployment can help lower the chance of an armed attack on our country,’ Shinjiro Koizumi told reporters on Sunday as he wrapped up his first trip to the base on the southern Japanese island of Yonaguni. ‘The view that it will heighten regional tensions is not accurate.’ … China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a regular briefing on Monday that the deployment of missiles would be ‘extremely dangerous’ and described it as a ‘deliberate move that breeds regional tensions and stokes military rivalry.'” (11/24/25)
“Between the Trump-Putin meeting in Anchorage Alaska and the proposed Trump-Putin meeting in Budapest, the diplomatic track that the U.S. and Russia were on seemed to die. In October, Trump and Putin had a ‘very productive’ two hour phone call that led to a phone call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov that was to lay the groundwork for a meeting between Trump and Putin in Budapest. But, by the time Rubio had hung up the phone, the Budapest meeting was off. … But then hints emerged that restarting talks may not be impossible.” (11/24/25)
“The data nerds among us were happy to finally get their September jobs report fix, even though these data are somewhat stale now. However, we still learned a few things about the state of the economy. Before saying what we learned, it’s worth a few words on what we didn’t learn but people are saying anyway. First and foremost, this was not a strong report in any real-world sense of the term. To be clear, the 119,000 jobs reported for the month was stronger than most analysts had expected, including me. But this hardly implies robust job growth. We averaged 170,000 jobs a month in 2024, so now we’re supposed to be celebrating a report showing job growth that is 70 percent of last year’s average?” (11/24/25)
