Source: USA Today
by Kris Edney
“The world’s tech leaders – the ones who are driving the AI revolution – insist that people like me are actually the foundation of the technology shaping the future. The numbers prove them right.” (04/19/26)
Source: EconLog
by Joy Buchanan
“When astronaut Christina Koch, the first woman to fly around the moon, reported an issue from space that could have been copy-pasted from any IT helpdesk ticket, something clicked for Americans. Her grievance? ‘No joy seeing the device in the list of available devices when I attempt to re-pair it after doing the Bluetooth forget.’ Commander Reid Wiseman, orbiting Earth aboard the Artemis II mission, radioed Houston with a problem millions of office workers share: ‘I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working.’ So much for old ‘one small step for man …’ Internet commentators found these moments painfully relatable and shared them widely. Why did those quotes about tech maintenance go viral in April 2026? Beneath the comedy lies an underappreciated cost of modernity: we are wealthier, and that wealth means we own more things.” (04/17/26)
https://www.econlib.org/econlog/tech-troubleshooting-in-space
Source: Fox News
by Jonathan Turley
“The legendary baseball player and manager Ted Williams once wrote a letter to Angels outfielder Jay Johnstone on improving his hitting. Among his pieces of advice was that ‘with two strikes, you simply have to protect the plate.’ Williams'[s] advice on not striking out came to mind this week when another leak of confidential information rocked the Supreme Court. (The prior leak of the Dobbs decision went unsolved.) For Chief Justice John Roberts, the message is clear: it is times like these when you have to protect the plate. Roberts, of course, is famous for his own baseball analogies. In his confirmation, he declared that ‘judges are like umpires. Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them … Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.’ Yet, justices do make rules not only in new precedent, but in the operation of the court system. Those rules are being broken.” (04/19/26)
Source: The Findings Substack
by Paul Rosenberg
“Race-consciousness is not something that belongs in the minds of children; rather than being a virtue, it’s far more of a poison. I want children to be entirely separated from and ignorant of racial issues. Rather, they should simply see people, with their pigmentation being an accidental triviality. Race-consciousness robs that from them, and I think it’s tragic.” (04/17/26)
https://thefindings.substack.com/p/why-i-oppose-race-consciousness
Source: Common Dreams
by Abby Zimet
“Seeking to rally the troops for his unholy war, Christian nationalist, TV-carnie and war fanboy Pete Kegseth just passed off some vengeful Gospel According to Tarantino as scripture at his (unconstitutional) Pentagon prayer service, and yes we have them now. Added to the ‘shameless blasphemy’ of quoting — without credit — Samuel Jackson’s homicidal hitman Jules as ‘prayer,’ Pete moronically misses the redemptive point: As he cites the ‘tyranny of evil men,’ he, unlike Jules, doesn’t friggin’ get that he is one.” (04/18/26)
https://www.commondreams.org/further/on-witless-great-vengeance-and-furious-anger
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Alex Thurston
“This month marks the third anniversary of the war in Sudan. Estimates of the death toll range from 150,000 to 400,000 or more; 2025 was, according to the United Nations’ internal estimates, a particularly deadly year for civilians. The humanitarian impacts are even broader: the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs calculates that, as of April 2026, nearly two-thirds of Sudan’s 46.8 million people need humanitarian assistance.” 904/17/26)
Source: The Weekly Dish
by Andrew Sullivan
“The Pope rightly calls out the objective moral evil of this indefensible, immoral war.” (04/17/26)
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/and-augustine-wept-862
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Walter Block
“Everyone is now concerned about the unemployment rate, it would appear. The scribes are busily scribbling as to the possible causes of this economic debilitation. Their list is long, creative, and clever. One explanation is that the quit rate has plummeted. People are sticking around in jobs they would have left in rosier markets. Well, yes, if this replacement source of new job openings is decreasing, that could well account for fewer new employment slots opening up. But this is a two-way street. Presumably, people are not downing tools for fear that new appointments will not be open to them, at least not on better terms, overall, than they now enjoy. So, it is likely that the unemployment rate is at least partially a cause of this phenomenon, not only a result. Further, this is a sign of economic health, rather than disarray.” (04/17/26)
https://fee.org/articles/the-causes-of-unemployment-whats-missing/
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Roger Bate
“There are moments in public health when the path forward is unusually clear, when the evidence aligns with behavior, when risks are well understood, and when policy has a genuine opportunity to reduce harm at scale. This should be one of those moments. Non-combustible nicotine products — vapes, heated tobacco, and especially nicotine pouches — are widely understood to be far less harmful than smoking, a point I and many others have covered repeatedly, and one that no longer sits at the frontier of scientific debate. … One might expect regulators to respond accordingly, adjusting policy to reflect both the risk gradient and the changed behavioral landscape, but that has not happened. Instead, the system has stalled, quietly but decisively, with approvals for new products slowing to a near standstill.” (04/17/26)
https://brownstone.org/articles/marty-makary-the-fdas-quiet-blockade-on-safer-nicotine/
Source: New York Post
by Harvey C Mansfield
“The Ivory Tower was an image, medieval like the university itself, of an institution made of a valuable material and grounded in society but towering above it. In this view, any university in America depends on America for its survival but does its best to rise above its politics. Politics is argument, for example about welfare policies. As an Ivory Tower, the university tries to define the bigger, more abstract question of what is welfare. Policies are about society; abstract definitions come from the Ivory Tower. In abandoning the Ivory Tower Harvard was denying its independence.” 904/19/26)
https://nypost.com/2026/04/19/opinion/how-harvard-has-made-itself-vulnerable/