Source: Liberal Currents
by Guillaume AW Attia
“John Adams'[s] rocky presidency illuminates the long-running conflicts over how Americans conceive of the executive power.” (07/22/26)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/trump-didnt-invent-the-tribunate-presidency/
Source: The Daily Economy
by Antón Chamberlin
‘Nothing’s more American than baseball and taxes, but combining the two in 1932 cost millions their affordable day out.” (07/22/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/unseen-cost-of-a-ten-cent-tax-on-tickets-less-joy-in-dark-times/
Source: Persuasion
by Mitra Vand
“It is not surprising that June’s Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding between Iran and the United States has proven to be shaky to the touch. Nothing about this conflict has ever been resolved, only paused. Not because either side is incapable of diplomacy, but because neither side has ever fully believed the other side to be trustworthy. But for people inside Iran, the news meant what it has always meant: life was about to get harder. Both countries hold competing narratives about why, but the result is the same: the war has returned to Iran’s southern provinces.” (07/21/26)
Source: New York Post
by Shirin Yadegar
“As a California mom, I don’t wake up wondering whether an algorithm determined which coupon landed in my inbox. I wake up wondering why a quick trip to the grocery store now costs hundreds of dollars. I wonder whether my children will ever be able to afford a home in the state where they were raised. I wonder how many more families are quietly putting groceries on a credit card just to get through the month. Like millions of parents across California, I’m asking a simple question: When will Sacramento start making life more affordable instead of more complicated?” (07/21/26)
https://nypost.com/2026/07/21/opinion/let-california-moms-keep-our-grocery-coupons/
Source: Wired
by Maddy Varner
“Federal lawyers say anti-mask laws would endanger immigration agents, citing an ICE face-recognition art project that doesn’t actually work.” (07/22/26)
Source: Reason
by Katarina Hall
“Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega announced on Sunday that the country will no longer hold elections, preventing the opposition from competing for power and further cementing his authoritarian grip on the country. … Ortega, now 80 years old, is a former guerrilla fighter who first came to power after the Sandinista Revolution and served as president from 1985 to 1990. After suffering a defeat in 1990, he returned to power in 2007 and has remained there ever since. His regime, which he now formally leads alongside his wife and ‘co-president,’ Rosario Murillo, had long since extinguished what remained of democracy in the country. Over the years, it has cracked down on political dissent, free speech, independent media, and civil society. Ortega’s most recent announcement is just an escalation of that trend.” (07/21/26)
https://reason.com/2026/07/21/nicaraguas-regime-drops-the-pretense-of-democracy/
Source: The American Conservative
by Daniel E Zoughbie
“‘If you cross the Halys River and attack the Persians, you will destroy a great empire.’ According to Herodotus, when Lydia’s King Croesus asked the Oracle at Delphi whether to make war on Cyrus the Great, he heard only what he wanted to hear, crossed the river and lost. The empire he destroyed was his own. Today’s oracles are far less discerning. When pastors gathered in the Oval Office this past March to lay hands on the president and pray for war, not one paused to warn him of the cost. Yet this modern hubris was not born in a vacuum. The crisis was a decade in the making.” (07/22/26)
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-lesson-trump-can-take-from-herodotus-paradox/
Source: Independent Institute
by Richard K Vedder
“Should it take four years to earn a bachelor’s degree? No. If you can earn a bachelor’s degree at Oxford or Cambridge Universities in three years, why not at Harvard, Florida State, or the University of Oklahoma? Is the three-year degree being promoted by some in Virginia and Ohio, therefore, a good thing? No, because it appears to aim to achieve this goal by reducing the academic work required by about 25 percent, to about halfway between what an associate degree and a traditional bachelor’s degree require.” (07/21/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/07/21/dont-water-down-the-bachelors-degree/
Source: Washington Monthly
by Paul Glastris
“In recent years, conservative pundits have compiled an unbroken record of attacking the American entertainment industry’s biggest stars and then finding themselves on the wrong side of public opinion. … It was perhaps predictable, then, that right-wingers would fulminate over Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey before any of them had seen it. … Then the movie came out. Suddenly, conservatives had to contend not only the fact that it brought in more revenue in one weekend ($264 billion) than it cost to make ($250 million), but that, as Ben Shapiro conceded after watching it in IMAX, ‘it’s really, really, really good.’ In moments like this, when ideologues are mugged by reality, a period of adjustment ensues as political allies attempt to get their story straight. We are in that sort of moment now.” (07/22/26)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/07/22/christopher-nolan-odyssey-woke-conservatives/
Source: Quillette
by Jonathan Kay
“I’ve often used the term ‘social panic’ to describe the unmarked-graves claims that swept through Canada in 2021. For reasons described below, the term feels inadequate. But I can’t think of any word or phrase that better captures the spasm of manic self-denigration that unfolded following the purported discovery of 215 dead children (some ‘believed to be as young as three years old,’ gullible reporters told us) on the grounds of a former Indigenous residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. … It would take months, or even years in many cases, before mainstream media outlets began admitting—tacitly or otherwise—that they’d been duped by Casimir’s fake news (as the Globe & Mail newspaper finally did last month). Despite the passage of five years since the original announcement, many public figures, including former prime minister Justin Trudeau, have never come clean on the issue.” (07/21/26)