There’s a line in Mao II, Don DeLillo’s novel about a Salinger-like reclusive writer who wonders: Why are so many so obsessed with my invisibility, my hiddenness, my absence?

“When a writer doesn’t show his face,” he answers himself, “he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.”

The silence of a writer is not the same as the silence of God, but there’s something analogous: an awe-inspiring creator, someone we believe has some answers of some kind, refusing to respond to us, hiding his face, withholding his creation. The problem, the rare phenomenon of the unavailable, invisible, indifferent writer (indifferent to our questions, indifferent to the publicity-industrial complex so many serve), is the literary equivalent of the problem of theodicy, the specialized subdiscipline of theology that addresses the problem of the apparent silent indifference of God to the hell of human suffering.

And when a writer won’t break his silence, we think of ways to break into it. We think of knocking on his door or leaving messages in his mailbox.

S.’s two mailboxes beckoned to me as I stood at the bottom of his driveway.

GK Chesterton wrote, ‘America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence.’ Often forgotten is that the Declaration of Independence raged against the monarch of Great Britain for opposing migration and naturalisation: ‘He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.’

The American creed is also clearly defined. ‘Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but it corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories,’ Alexis de Tocqueville wrote. James Madison argued that the US should never fall under the tyranny of majoritarianism: ‘Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.’

The first major attempt at charting the story of the republic, by George Bancroft in his History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, had this sentence: ‘The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine; of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome.’ Abraham Lincoln said that America is a nation defined by a proposition, that all men are created equal: in other words, a creed.

To call the DSA platform antithetical to the U.S Constitution is not hyperbole, or an insult to the platform’s authors. The DSA preamble states plainly that the end goal is to “draft a new constitution” to “create a democratic socialist republic.” Such a new U.S. constitution, the DSA envisions, would “replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” which would be unicameral after abolishing the Senate.

That last bit about the Senate may sound appealing. The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait called it DSA’s “best idea” since the Senate’s structure gives disproportionate power to voters in less populated states in ratios likely unimagined by the Founders. But it can’t be viewed in isolation from the broader DSA program, which is an obliteration of the Constitution’s system of checks-and-balances among three equal branches of government.

In the DSA view, the Constitution’s diffusion of power is “anti-democratic” and an inherent obstacle to a “democratic society of the working class.” America’s “political and economic system [is] built on private ownership and profit at all costs,” and DSA warns that “as capitalism fails to solve problems of its own making, it turns to right-wing authoritarianism.”

But what DSA fails to recognize is that the Constitution’s diffusion of power is what has prevented Donald Trump and his MAGA minions from permanently installing right-wing authoritarianism.

Which is why the Trumpists hate the Constitution too.

The good news is that there is a very straightforward and well-understood idea that would have a meaningful short-term impact on prices without killing incentives for new investment.

The bad news is that nobody in their right mind even talks about this idea because it’s universally understood to be politically toxic and something everyone would hate.

I’m not here to dispute that diagnosis, just to say that failing to even talk about it is impoverishing the discourse — I keep encountering efforts to essentially recreate it with extra bells and whistles, and I don’t think that anyone coming up with these “new” ideas is taking seriously enough the question of why we don’t just do the straightforward thing.

So what’s the straightforward thing? It’s simple: We could charge household electricity users the spot price of electricity.

Tax externalities.

The sources of alarm seem inexhaustible: the fighting up north in Lebanon; the Trump Administration’s turn from frenetic negotiations with the newly emboldened regime in Tehran to a prolonged bombing campaign; Netanyahu’s deals of convenience with the ultra-Orthodox, a crucial component of his voting bloc; the deepening hostility toward Israel across the ideological spectrum and all over the world. What is far more rarely discussed, in Kfar HaNagid and elsewhere, is the colossal human suffering and devastation in the Gaza Strip and the mayhem committed daily against Palestinians by settlers in villages throughout the West Bank.

Finally, Eisenkot arrives. He is sixty-six, a man of broad belly and pained expression. When he smiles, he winces as if from a twinge of sciatica. He is dressed in a dark polo shirt, his post-military uniform. Eisenkot’s parents were Moroccan immigrants of modest means. He was born in Tiberias and grew up in Eilat, two cities considered to be on the Israeli periphery. Were Eisenkot to win, he would be the first Prime Minister with such a background.

This presents a problem for Netanyahu. Despite growing up in an affluent neighborhood in Jerusalem, and being the Ashkenazi son of a prominent historian of the Spanish Inquisition, Netanyahu has long positioned himself, and his Likud Party, as the security-minded champion of the working class, the pious, the voiceless, and the Mizrahim, who came to Israel from Jewish communities in predominantly Muslim countries. Most analysts here believe that, in a close election, Eisenkot can prevail if he attracts at least some “soft right” voters in provincial cities like Kiryat Shmona, Ofakim, Ashdod, Nahariya, and Dimona. In many traditional Likud strongholds, the journalist Hilo Glazer wrote in Haaretz, Eisenkot is described by his supporters as dialina, Moroccan Arabic for “one of us.” […]

He is just short of dull and makes a virtue of it. Last year, he founded a party called Yashar—the name meaning straight, upright, just. At the lectern, he briskly ticks through his themes and campaign promises, among them a pledge to restore Israel as a “Jewish, democratic, progressive, and liberal state.” This sort of phrase is rarely heard from Netanyahu, much less from two of his most racist and reactionary ministers: Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, and Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance. Both are unapologetic in their support for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the annexation of the West Bank.

Imagine a healthcare system made up of multiple AI agents: one that manages symptom assessment, another scheduling, a third insurance, and a fourth pharmacy.

Each is an expert in its domain. But they all have their own distinct knowledge and objectives. Today they can exchange data, but they are not yet able to actually coordinate patient care without a human making the decisions.

“The intelligence is already there. What is missing is the connective tissue that turns four strangers into one team,” explains Vijoy Pandey, senior vice president and general manager of Outshift by Cisco.

This “connective tissue” comes from adding a semantic layer—what Outshift calls the “Internet of Cognition”—that enables agents across domains to work together and, critically, “think” together through shared intent, context, and reasoning.

Reagan was right about Daniel Ortega all along (Jon Miltimore, July 25, 2026, Restoring America)

Ortega, the son of a shoemaker, first came to power in 1979 after dropping out of law school to join the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a socialist revolutionary movement. He became an unapologetic disciple not just of Karl Marx but also of Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik revolutionary who brought terror as well as revolution to Russia.

“I admire Marx, I respect Marx, as I also admire and respect Lenin,” Ortega told the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s.

Like the Bolsheviks, Ortega had little hesitation about expropriating private property, helping himself to the luxurious mansion of a wealthy banker. Throughout the 1980s, Ortega implemented a familiar socialist playbook: nationalizing industries, redistributing wealth, and radically reallocating land, all while enjoying the spoils of what capitalists had built.

President Ronald Reagan famously dismissed Ortega as a “dictator in designer glasses.” Yet many argued Ortega was a reformer disinterested in personal power.

The desire to accommodate remnants of prior regimes–particularly the army and judges–is admirable, but disastrous.

Dan Neidle, a tax policy expert who was part of the Scottish government’s recently axed tax advisory group, said its decision to impose a 48p top rate had instead reduced revenues.

All comedy is conservative.

In other words, during the course of the Enlightenment, man truly became the measure of all things. By being reduced to his mere physicality, he became both an object of social control through seemingly innocuous behavioral standards—such as we find in Chesterfield—and an object open to radical distortion and experimentation—such as we find in Sade and Shelley. In the quest to rationalize the body, and therefore separate it from its metaphysical dimension, eighteenth-century society did not eliminate the darker impulses, the passions, and the brokenness inherent in man’s fallen state. Instead, it pushed them to the fringes, consigned to the sick imaginings of Sade’s Juliette and of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.

Here we arrive at the chief issue with the Enlightenment: the idea that the persistent application of reason can cure all of the ills of mankind. In Földényi’s words,

The belief in the omnipotence of reason that illuminates all phenomena—similar to the sun—is the great inheritance of the Enlightenment. Thinking, of course, ever since humans have existed, has always tried to disperse the darkness. Earlier individuals did not cherish the illusion that here on earth they would be able to liquidate every shadow and every darkness. During the Enlightenment, however, the conviction that only time and intellectual preparation were required in order to eventually cast light upon all things—with no dark corners remaining anywhere unilluminated by the light of reason—became resolute.[11]

As a critic and philosopher of art, Földényi is preoccupied with the “duality” between light and darkness, much like a composer is fundamentally concerned with the relationship between tension and release. What Földényi sees in the Enlightenment is man’s attempt to assert his autonomy over light and darkness, with the express purpose of eliminating the latter through the use of rational control.

Red Scare? The democratic socialist mayor of New York City spent this week talking about red tape.

On Tuesday, Zohran Mamdani – the politician at the center of a revived rightwing panic about socialists and purported communists winning elections across America – posted a video on X of himself putting a sheet of paper with the phrase “RED TAPE” into a paper shredder. Other pieces of paper, with phrases like “cumbersome fees and fines” and “a permit you need just to serve ice-cream”, were shredded too. The video, set to Wu Tang Clan’s If Time Is Money, shows Mamdani joining a handful of city officials and small business owners throwing the resulting paper shreds into the air like confetti.

“New York’s small business owners have said it over and over: endless paperwork and the uncertainty of dealing with City government has made getting their stores up and running too difficult,” Mamdani wrote on X, announcing a package of 50 policy changes aimed at easing the financial burden of fines, fees and regulations on mom-and-pop shops across the five boroughs.

Economics trumps ideology.

Looking back, it is easy to see why. Inflation reached 25% in 1975. Britain was suffering a brain drain, with highly skilled engineers and academics leaving the country. Why would they stay when the top rate of income tax stood at 83%? Then there was the 1976 IMF bailout, followed by the Winter of Discontent. In 1979 alone, 29.5 million working days were lost to strikes. Unemployment reached 2 million. The dead went unburied, and hospitals were reduced to emergency treatment only.

When the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, says he wants to ‘undo Thatcher’s economic legacy’, is that the Britain he wants to return to?

In a 20-page ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit wrote that Mr. Trump’s order “directs unprecedented levels of involvement by federal officials in how states administer elections.”

But prices could be poised to go significantly higher, energy analysts and executives warn, as oil markets are forced to recognize the dislocations the conflict has inflicted on global energy infrastructure and the slim prospects of a speedy recovery.

Renewables are independence.

Moody’s upgraded Argentina by one notch to B3 from Caa1, with a positive outlook. While the move still leaves the country deep in speculative territory, all three major credit-rating firms now rate Argentina above the highly distressed category, a milestone for a country that spent years among the riskiest sovereign borrowers in global markets.

“The upgrade is clearly positive and reinforces the macro stabilization story under Milei,” Murilo Riccini, Head of Andean Equity Strategy at Bradesco BBI, wrote in a report.

Taxation is at the highest level since World War II, yet public services have deteriorated. The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together…

Incomes can be shockingly low: Junior doctors recently went on strike for the 15th time in three years over their salaries, which start at just £38,800; the median salary for British civil servants is £35,680…

Recent plans to transform the country[‘s transportation system] have rested in no small part on High Speed 2, a superfast rail line intended to connect London with Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester. But since HS2 was proposed, in 2009, its costs have tripled, to more than £100 billion. It is the most expensive rail line in the world. (A special structure to protect a rare bat species near the rail line in Buckinghamshire required 8,000 permits and was built at a cost of £216 million.) The most important sections of the proposed route have been lopped off. The rump line—going from Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, to not-quite-central London—may be finished by 2040…

Building infrastructure, or much of anything else, has become all but impossible in the United Kingdom. In addition to having the world’s most expensive (not yet built) train line, Britain also hosts the world’s most expensive (not yet built) nuclear-power plant, Hinkley Point C. Its environmental-impact assessment ran 31,401 pages; the plant will feature a £700 million “fish disco,” which will pulse sounds underwater to deter animals from its intake pipes. The government spent 32 years and £179 million planning a tunnel beneath Stonehenge to relieve traffic, only to officially scrap the plan this year. Even basic tasks, such as obtaining power, can be nightmarish…

Britain suffers from a housing crisis significantly worse than America’s. The problem cannot even be blamed on zoning, because Britain does not have a zoning regime to speak of. Rather, every attempt to build is a painful, ad hoc negotiation with local government councils and NIMBY residents. As a result, housing costs per square foot are among the highest in Europe. In the words of one report, “Our housing stock offers the worst value for money of any advanced economy.” France has roughly the same population as the U.K., but almost 50 percent more homes. And yet, since the financial crisis, the U.K.’s rate of housing production has only fallen…In London, the typical house sold in 2024 cost 11 times median earnings.

“I think that is a bad rap,” Justice Elena Kagan said during an appearance in Washington State, at an annual gathering of judges and lawyers who work in the judiciary’s Ninth Circuit.

“Is this court very conservative?” she continued. “Does it do a bunch of things that are out of the playbook of the conservative legal movement that I think are deeply wrong? Yes.”

“But,” she added, “is this court kind of a puppet for the current administration? I think definitely not.”

Keynes believed, according to his biographer, the economist Roy Harrod, that “the government of Britain was and would continue to be in the hands of an intellectual aristocracy,” of which he was part. He supported economic central planning, via corporatism, because he assumed that enlightened experts like himself, a leading member of the Bloomsbury group, not a goon like Mussolini, would be doing the planning. He underestimated the political dangers of replacing decentralized decision-making with central planning, assuming that economic freedom could be curtailed without curtailing other freedoms.

But if we can excuse such a belief held in 1926 as naivety, how can we excuse it still held ten years later when fascism’s true nature was becoming apparent? In September 1936, Keynes wrote in the preface to the German edition of his masterpiece, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, that “the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of the production and distribution of a given output produced under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire.”

If a totalitarian state is the price we must pay for the Keynesian “theory of output” to be put into practice, it is not a price worth paying. Likewise, if laissez-faire was the economic manifestation of political liberalism, then its death was to be mourned, not celebrated. If economic freedom is surrendered, other freedoms follow. “The economy” is just people acting, and one can only control “the economy” by controlling people.

In 1985, a female wolf with a creamy white coat was traversing the mountains surrounding the Moose Creek meadow, searching for a mate. She found him and by May that year had built a den just north of Montana’s Glacier National Park, where the white wolf nursed and played with her seven new black pups. She had five more pups the next year, this time inside the park.

The white wolf was canny and intelligent. Boyd used her best tricks to try and capture her. She wanted to replace her radio collar before its signal failed. But the “white phantom” kept outwitting her. The white wolf would paw the dirt around Boyd’s traps, expose the buried piece of metal, and pull the trap to the ground, sometimes without springing it. She would defecate to the side of the trap, “proclaiming this turf as hers,” Boyd wrote.

Family dynamics in a wolf pack never stand still. In 1987, the white wolf was deposed as the breeding female from her pack. Her allure, though, hadn’t faded, and in just months she found a new mate and gave birth to her third litter of pups. Something roiled her previous pack, and some of the members rejoined the white wolf to help raise her new family.

In September that year, five of the white wolf’s pups ran afoul of Canadian hunters and poachers, who shot and killed them. The remaining wolves who had lived with the white wolf fled south to their old pack in the sanctuary of Glacier National Park, “seemingly understanding the danger of the British Columbia wolf hunting season,” Boyd wrote.

The white wolf, solitary again, wandered for years through the Northern Rockies. She was 9 years old in 1992, elderly for a wolf, and lingered in the foothills near a forestry camp in Alberta, Canada, where an outfitter shot and killed her.

Before she died, the white wolf trotted across the Moose City meadow toward Boyd’s cabin. She locked eyes with Boyd and then turned around and trotted back in the direction she had come from, disappearing into the willows. Boyd wondered why the white wolf had come. Did she recognize her scent from her traps? Boyd decided the white wolf had “dropped by to let me know that she was still out there, still in control, and still smarter than me.”

The Woman Who Runs with the Wolves: Biologist Diane Boyd has spent 14 years studying the animals in the far reaches of the Rockies (Perri Knize, Sports Illustrated)

The first few times I don’t meet Diane Boyd, I become convinced she must be every inch the misanthrope that she is reputed to be. In the 56 days it took me to track down the held biologist, who is documenting the return of the wolf to the northern Rocky Mountains for the University of Montana’s Wolf Ecology Project, I found phone calls and letters to be useless. Tips from her acquaintances and associates led to dead ends. Vague plans to meet were scrapped abruptly and without warning when she suddenly disappeared. “This is Diane. Don’t come up. I won’t be available” became a mantra my answering machine intoned almost every time I checked in. The woman was as elusive and difficult as the subjects of her research. “Finding Diane Boyd is a project unto itself,” Jim Cole, a local cougar tracker warned me. “Sometimes the only way is to just go up there and find her.”

FOR A MOMENT before The Moment — no, not that one; the other one, the one that started it all — Sophie Cunningham considers exercising restraint.

Her team is fine. The Fever are up by 17 over the Sun, and there are only 46 seconds left in this 2025 game that long ago went off the rails.

Her teammate is fine. Caitlin Clark took a finger to the eye in the third quarter, courtesy of Connecticut guard Jacy Sheldon. But Clark’s final act before calling it a night and retreating to the bench was to drain a 3-pointer, which put the game well out of reach with a few minutes left. So, advantage, Clark.

This is all fine, Cunningham thinks, as she runs the length of the court. She’s chasing after Sheldon, of all people, who has just stolen the ball for a fast break, and Cunningham tells herself she doesn’t have to foul. She can let this go, can let Sheldon go, because everything is f…

F— it.

Her sister, Lindsey, watching at home in Missouri, can hear Cunningham’s resolve snap all the way from Indianapolis. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” Lindsey prays. “And … there it is.”

In a new working paper, Benjamin Verschuere and Angus Cameron argue that the wide dispersion in economists’ forecasts for the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy stems from two gaps. The first is that estimates for growth, jobs, and prices are each built in isolation, with no single framework to reconcile them. The second is that models fixate on AI’s current capabilities, rather than on how fast it spreads and how much of a given job it can eventually reach. The authors build a unified framework that predicts roughly $2 trillion in long-run output gains, the loss of about 20 million American jobs, and falling prices.