Source: Law & Liberty
by Nadya Williams

[W]hy exactly is it so bad that screens have destroyed so many people’s ability to focus and read since 1980, and even more dramatically since 2007? What do we lose if people no longer read like it’s the 1770s? Quite a bit, [James] Marriott contends. One significant concern for him is the damage to politics that he blames on the decline of reading: ‘Perhaps the most worrying victim of the Great Simplification is our public discourse. It seems that our distracted and trivial culture increasingly struggles to sustain a rational debate on almost any issue.’ In other words, reading trains our brains to engage with ideas in earnest and to use our attention spans to listen to elaborate arguments and process them afterwards. But those who do not have these skills are unable to engage with serious arguments in the public sphere.” (10/09/26)

https://lawliberty.org/book-review/evangelizing-a-post-literate-society/

Source: The American Prospect
by Whitney Curry Wimbish

“Thousands of people are preparing to protect the midterm elections and mobilize immediately if President Trump interferes with the results. They are drawing lessons from the American civil rights era and from fights against authoritarianism worldwide, attending political education classes, and reassessing exactly how much they will risk, personally, to stand between a government takeover and the will of the voters. ‘There’s a deeper, broader, bolder set of efforts afoot to prepare people for much more existential scenarios that could come our way that would call into question the pillars of our democracy itself for what it’s for and who it’s for,’ said Jackson Potter, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union. ‘People are zeroing in.’ He’s organizing with May Day Strong, which this month hosted more than 750 ‘solidarity school’ training sessions nationwide.” (10/09/26)

https://prospect.org/2026/10/09/america-mobilizing-to-protect-midterms-trump-election/

Source: The American Conservative
by Philip Pilkington

“Treasury bonds are not just any old asset. For one, they are the debt of the U.S. government. If they become uninvestable, the capacity for Washington to live beyond its means through debt issuance is open to question. Treasuries are also the benchmark asset for the entire global dollar system that has allowed the U.S. to run enormous deficits for decades. If this asset starts ‘trading like a meme stock’ and generating awful returns, foreigners will opt for something else. … The Trump administration has become fixated on the Strait of Hormuz, seeing it as a decisive battlefield on which the U.S. can win the war. But the Strait is merely a means to an end. For Iran, that end is to slowly demolish the American economy and financial system until the pressure becomes too much and the U.S. backs off.” (10/09/26)

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/hormuz-and-the-looming-economic-catastrophe/

Source: The Daily Economy
by Caleb S Fuller & Scott Burns

“Trump’s ‘Economic D-Day’ against Iran bears an uncanny resemblance to his ‘Liberation Day’ strategy for America. Both rely on the same basic mechanism: restricting trade. Yet Trump assures us they will produce opposite results. For Americans, trade restrictions will bring economic revival; for Iran, they will bring economic ruin. You don’t need a PhD in economics — or any degree at all — to spot the contradiction. The renowned American economist Henry George — a middle school dropout who taught himself economics — exposed the paradox of protectionism in 1886: ‘What protection teaches us is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.'” (10/08/26)

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/economic-blockades-protectionism-as-punishment/