We began our journey by driving north through New Mexico. The June heat radiated off the highway, and our packs full of gaiters, puffers, and other winter gear felt absurd. But as we crossed the Colorado border and gained altitude, it felt as if someone had shifted the dial backward on the seasons. At 10,000 feet, winter conditions can last half the year. Steep peaks rose all around us, covered in blankets of snow.

We stopped to grab some provisions (whiskey) in the tiny former mining town of Creede. There I met Cole Birdsey, who was sitting outside his fly-fishing shop. A fifth-generation Creedite, he told me that his ancestors were miners; the first of them had come during the silver rush in the late nineteenth century. Deep in one of those mines, Birdsey’s grandfather had watched his brother die in an accident.

You can still spot the occasional flash of metal ore in the Rio Grande near Creede. That sort of natural wealth has driven settlement and industry across the American West for nearly five hundred years. In 1540 the conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado left present-day Mexico in search of the Seven Cities of Cíbola, rumored to be rich in gold. He eventually hunkered down along the Rio Grande near what became Bernalillo, New Mexico, where he terrorized the local Tiwa. Coronado never found Cíbola, but successive generations of European settlers searched for new ways to create wealth in the lands they had conquered.

By the late nineteenth century, deserts flanking the Rio Grande were bursting with cotton. Settlers diverted the river to irrigate these ever-expanding fields. Later, a public works project flooded valleys and renamed them reservoirs. Laborers built hundreds of miles of canals and pipes that today make it possible for humans to capture, claim, and use nearly every drop of the river.

The resources extracted from the dry West have helped build one of the most powerful, wealthiest civilizations in history. Yet some of the small towns in this area tell another story about the cost of that growth. Every boom inevitably goes bust.

Gender-referred adolescents showed significantly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls both before (45.7% vs. 15.0%) and ≥ 2 years after referral (61.7% vs. 14.6%). Those referred after 2010 had greater psychiatric needs than earlier cohorts, both before (47.9% vs. 15.3%) and ≥ 2 years after (61.3% vs. 14.2%) referral. Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender reassignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment. After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment, all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls.

Conclusion
Severe psychiatric morbidity is common among gender-referred adolescents and appears to be more prevalent in those referred after the recent surge in referrals. Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment.

We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there. From my past reporting, I knew that P.T.A.s at poor schools often can raise only a few thousand dollars, but Faraji and I could write checks that exceeded the annual P.T.A. budget. I witnessed how dismissive school officials could be to lower-income parents who lodged complaints or made demands for resources and how deferential they were to wealthy ones. I believed Faraji and I could bring some of that power with us. We had connections and time and status that should not matter, but that we all know do. And more than that, we believed strongly that if families like ours went into schools like this one, it would challenge other families with similar values to do the same.

After much internal debate in our household, in 2015, we enrolled Najya in pre-K at Public School 307, a segregated, high-poverty school across from the Farragut housing projects in Brooklyn. […]

In the outside world, my choice had earned me valor. And yet that day, under the withering glare of my daughter, the words that I was formulating sounded hollow to my ears even before they passed my lips.

“Your school is not bad,” I told her, modulating my voice. “What are you talking about?”

Najya grew agitated. “You know what I am talking about. We looked up our school! We saw the test scores. We saw the ratings.” She ticked off the school’s below-state average reading and math scores, and that it ranked poorly on a popular school-rating website. I said I was aware of her school’s academic rankings, but that test scores alone do not define a school.

Glancing between her and the road, I told her everything that I had said a hundred times on stages, in interviews, in discussions since I had made her a symbol of how the choices we make can help sustain — or dismantle — educational inequality. I talked about the deep inequality in New York’s schools and how, like those Black families who came before us, we had an obligation to be part of the struggle of our larger community. Even if her schools were not academically the strongest, I explained, her father and I knew that we could provide for her tutoring and any other assistance to make up for what her school may have lacked.

But my child just shook her head, her face a mask of disbelief, and something else: betrayal.

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” she said, hurling her words. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

The core message of Capra’s films, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals, and Levi’s novel, what makes them so beloved by so many Americans, is best summed up in a rousing speech from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The honest but naïve Jefferson Smith is chosen by the corrupt political party of his state to serve out the term of their flunky in the Senate who died suddenly. Jeff takes his cues from senior Senator Paine who knew his father and whom Jeff idolizes. When Jeff learns that Paine has compromised and is in the pocket of the ruthless businessman Taylor, he speaks up, only to be framed for the very crime he tried to expose. He flees to the Lincoln Memorial, prepared to give up the fight and return to his state. There he is met by his secretary, Clarissa Saunders, who, though she has not approved of Paine’s corruption, has succumbed to cynicism and apathy.

But Jeff has woken something decent and hopeful in her. She meets him at his moment of deepest despair and challenges him to renew his faith and hope in himself and the country he loves:

Your friend, Mr. Lincoln had his Taylors and Paines. So did every other man who ever tried to lift his thought up off the ground. Odds against them didn’t stop those men. They were fools that way. All the good that ever came into this world came from fools with faith like that. You know that, Jeff. You can’t quit now. Not you. They aren’t all Taylors and Paines in Washington. That kind just throw big shadows, that’s all. You didn’t just have faith in Paine or any other living man. You had faith in something bigger than that. You had plain, decent, everyday, common rightness, and this country could use some of that. Yeah, so could the whole cockeyed world, a lot of it.

Rarely has the true, optimistic but realistic, idealistic but conservative, quixotic but practical ethos of America been so clearly stated. There is evil in the world that is manipulated by self-aggrandizing individuals, but there is also a goodness and a rightness in people that can overcome the corruption. Good is stronger than evil, but it too often lacks focus, confidence, and vision. There is no Rousseauvian denial of original sin here. Sin is real and predatory, and no one is immune from its ravages. But there is a bigger picture, a larger hope that we have lost sight of. We need fools—dare I say holy fools—like Jefferson Smith to wake us up to what we know is true. The villains are so brash and bold that they cow us into believing that they are the majority, that their theories and methods are unassailable, that we cannot resist their will. They give us only two options: Join the team or be crushed. Jeff finds a third way.

Recognizing our Fallenness does not exempt us from trying to be decent, even loving, towards one another.

A majority of voters disapproved of Mr. Trump’s handling of every major issue included in the poll: the economy, immigration, tariffs, the war and, especially, the cost of living.

And voters said they trusted Democrats more than Republicans on not just health care and foreign wars but also on the two issues that powered Mr. Trump’s 2024 victory: immigration and the economy.

He’s failed at everything he ever tried in his life; why would governing be any different?

Strip away the polemics on both sides, and the structural problem is fairly simple to state. Zionism, as a historical movement, was a 19th-century national-liberation project: the claim that Jews constituted a nation entitled to self-determination on a specific piece of territory.

Liberalism, as a political tradition, is committed to individual rights, pluralism, and, in its more universalist versions, a certain skepticism toward ethnic or religious particularism as the organizing principle of a state.

Liberal Zionism is the attempt to hold both of these commitments simultaneously: a state that is both a Jewish national home and a liberal democracy extending equal rights to all who live under its authority, including the roughly five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who have no vote in the government that controls their lives, and the two million Arab citizens of Israel proper who do vote but have long complained of structural inequality.

The aircraft handled critical portions of the mission autonomously, including taxiing, takeoff, navigation and landing. Remote operators supervised the flight from distances reaching 2,323 miles.

The future always happens faster than you expect it to.

I had two responses to French’s tweet. First, the picture itself helps refute one of the most common arguments from the populist right — that immigrants from Asia and the global south can’t assimilate into American culture, that there’s just something about them that’s different from, say, the Irish or, in the president’s famous formulation, Norwegians, that prevents them from becoming truly American.

I’m sorry, but when you’re wearing a cowboy hat, losing your mind at a college-football game and throwing up the (very annoying) hook ‘em horns sign, you’re doing a lot of things and one of them is assimilating.

In fact, anyone who spends five minutes with immigrants knows and sees the power of American culture. It’s a prime reason people come here in the first place. They don’t want to replace Americans; they want to be Americans.

But don’t tell that to MAGA populists. They came out in force to defend French. They’re here to tell you that, regardless of whether the students in that picture were immigrants or natural-born American citizens, there is something about their home countries — or their parents’ home countries — that will always and forever make them different and somehow dangerous for the American experiment.

And also, there is a real victim here: white people, and white men especially.

“Texas politicians rigged the game against their own citizens,” Sean Davis, the co-founder of The Federalist, wrote, “broke the rules to make sure their own children didn’t suffer under the new regime, and then had an absolute meltdown when one guy pointed it [out]. Here are the latest numbers at the University of Texas: only 13% of undergrads are white men.”

Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point USA, the organization Charlie Kirk co-founded, and the executive producer of the Charlie Kirk Show, wrote: “America was ~80% white 40 years ago. Now it’s ~50%. The demographic replacement of America is happening at a historic, truly insane pace. It’s not racist to notice.”

Jack Posobiec, a MAGA influencer with an immense following, posted, “Defend @bofrench like the Alamo.” (Given the fate of the Alamo, I’m not sure that’s the analogy Posobiec wants to use, but never mind about that.)

And if you want to know why South Asians can’t assimilate, then Steve Deace, a Christian talk show host, can tell you: “Why is it a bad idea to import so many people from India? Just 2.3% of India is Christian.”

On that theme, John Daniel Davidson, a senior editor at The Federalist, posted on X, “You know what would be way WAY more Texas-assimilated than wearing a cowboy hat and cheering at a Longhorn game? If Indian immigrants converted to Christianity and tore down the 90-foot demon monkey statue they erected in Sugar Land.”

(Davidson is referring to a statue of Lord Hanuman, a part-monkey, part-human Hindu deity, that was consecrated in 2024.)

These arguments get to my second, deeper response to French’s post. Parts of the populist right are taking aim at the American experiment itself.

Not part, all.

Here’s one more aspect of my life that might be a bit odd: A friend told me that he doesn’t know anyone who is more compelled not only to think about these issues, but to work out a framework in which the questions make sense; come to a resolution of the issues consistent with that framework, even if the conclusions are not convenient; work to explain the framework and resolutions in plain language; then defend the results in public, even if it leads to clashes not only with political opponents but also with friends.

Few things flatter the faithful more than the attempt of agnostics to structure their lives as if the God they claim not to believe in did exist.

The principles that Jefferson championed—that all men are created equal because all men have innate worth—remain more relevant than ever. At their very best, these ideas have been the driving force behind liberalism, breaking the chains of slavery, fueling social movements that have pushed for greater equality in all walks of life, and sparking revolutions against oppressive governments across the globe. In many ways, Jefferson’s greatest hopes have come to fruition and liberalism has, as he predicted, been a force for good across the world.

The idea of an egalitarian human dignity at the heart of the political order was not just Jefferson’s quirky view of liberal government and society. For most of liberalism’s early history, liberal thinkers saw themselves as making more universal and secular the Christian idea of the Imago Dei—that everyone is born with God Himself reflected in their being.

Freeloaders welcome.

In 2025, a family with two adults and two children was classified as in poverty if their annual income was less than $32,649, the bureau said. The official poverty rate for children fell to a ‌historic low of 13.4% in 2025.

Here’s the thing: if that family works 80 hours a week at McDonalds their income is over $50k

Growing up in the 1980s, I was the last generation to live through the highest period of lead exposure in U.S. history: Exhaust from cars fueled by leaded gasoline, as well as paint chips and lead pipes, added to the toxic burden in my body. Trillions of lead atoms are now part of my being.

For more than 90 percent of the population born between 1951 and 1980, blood lead levels exceeded 5 micrograms per deciliter, a level we now know is associated with lower IQ, attention and behavior problems, and smaller brain volume. In the late 1970s, the peak of the lead crisis, levels in children under 5 averaged 16 micrograms per deciliter, nearly five times higher than today’s threshold for triggering public health intervention. Before national monitoring began in 1976, lead levels were probably much higher.

That arguably makes lead exposure the largest quiet mass poisoning in human history, said Jennifer Weuve, an epidemiologist at Boston University’s School of Public Health.

Despite persistent cost-of-living pressures, workers maintained historically high savings habits. The average employee 401(k) contribution rate remained steady at a record 9.6 percent in the second quarter.

Michael Shamrell, vice president of thought leadership at Fidelity Investments, told CBS News that most 401(k) millionaires achieved their balances through long-term consistency rather than market timing.

“It’s not that they have reached that — it’s how they did it,” Shamrell said. “What was their behavior? One is just saving for a long time.”

The first thing to know is that while reflexes are important, they are not what distinguishes a truly elite driver.

“This is something that people don’t realize when they think of racing drivers living off their reflexes,” said Dr. Lappi, who studies eye movements of various types of athletes. “Most of their skill is anticipation. The anticipation is how the brain buys itself time.”

In other words, a great driver doesn’t react to the road, he predicts it. In many ways, this isn’t surprising because the entire brain is often said to be an elaborate prediction machine. But in Formula 1 drivers, this looks a little different.

There have been many studies of how regular people’s brains adapt to driving, but only a few have actually used elite drivers, because it is hard getting international celebrities to visit a neuroscience lab.

In two small, yet remarkable studies from 2014 and 2013, an Italian team compared 11 professional (including Formula 1) drivers with 11 normal ones. As one might expect, they found that elite drivers had good reaction and visuospatial skills. But the most interesting difference was in an area buried deep in the back of the brain called the retrosplenial cortex, which acts as a hub connecting spatial reasoning and — crucially — memory.

Whereas other parts of the brain might allow you to navigate unfamiliar places, this is the part of the brain that connects where you are now to where you have been before (and was heavily used by London taxi drivers in a 2006 study). A person with a damaged retrosplenial cortex, say, from Alzheimer’s disease, might recognize their home, the corner store and a nearby school, but would have no idea how to use one to find another.

The Italian team found that elite racecar drivers had more densely packed cells in this region and more connectivity to other parts of the brain. In other words, they can make highly detailed spatial maps of places they have been and pull them up quickly. What’s more, among the 11 professional drivers, more density in that region meant more racing victories.

But it’s not just about how many brain cells you have, it’s also about how well you use them. The studies also suggested that elite drivers use far less of their brains while racing than regular drivers.

“This what we call neural efficiency,” said Pietro Pietrini, an author on the paper and a professor of neuroscience at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in Italy. “So if you are very skilled, you rely on less brain.”

Dr. Lappi added that drivers in his studies will often look ahead around corners, even when they are completely hidden from view. The point is not to see the turn, but to see it in their mind’s eye.

As a Jewish Israeli, I grew up inside that language. It turned violent domination into “security,” dispossession into “settlement” and large-scale violence into “self-defense.” That language draws much of its power from real fear. I know that fear. I grew up with it. That fear has many sources, including decades of armed attacks against Israelis. The Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023, has intensified it. Israeli political language manipulates it by dehumanizing Palestinians, collapsing them into a single category — namely, a threat. It uses violence by some to justify the control and oppression of an entire population. This is one way apartheid sustains itself.

The language I grew up with did not require me to deny Palestinian suffering. I could acknowledge it, even be horrified by it, while still regarding the system that produced it as fundamentally legitimate. Today, after years of deepening dehumanization, Palestinian suffering is simply ignored in much of Israeli public discourse. That is why the language of those who live under this system matters so much. The people who witness, endure and survive under that power can describe what their lives look like: unprotected, shaped by fear, vulnerability and uncertainty.

On Monday, B’Tselem is publishing a report on the process unfolding in the West Bank. It tells a story with deep roots. From the mass expulsion and displacement of Palestinians during the Nakba in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced or expelled and the subsequent refusal of refugees’ right to return, through occupation, settlements and apartheid, Israeli policy has repeatedly worked to entrench Jewish sovereignty while making Palestinian presence and political life more precarious.

Yet the investigation into whether the bones belong to Charles de Batz de Castelmore d’Artagnan, who died during the Siege of Maastricht in 1673, was about to take twists and turns that might have impressed Dumas himself.

Within days of our conversation, Mr. Dijkman would find himself in a cell at the local police station. Within weeks, he’d be arguing in the local media that he was being framed for grave mistakes in unearthing and processing the skeleton.

Within months, it would become clear that Mr. Dijkman and his band of mostly amateur archaeologists might well have uncovered D’Artagnan’s remains — but the town of Maastricht would allege that they may also have impaired the chances that the world will ever know whether the bones truly belong to the musketeer.

The quest for D’Artagnan’s skeleton would prove to be a story full of power struggles, hubris and hot heads. It continues to consume the little corner of the Netherlands, nestled between Belgium and Germany, where it has unfurled.

“Everyone comes here and is afraid of Jaws,” he said. “That is not what you should be scared about. It’s the little things.” […]

Roden-Reynolds pointed to a row of stocky little bugs, each with a white dot on its back. These were lone-star ticks, first confirmed to be on the island in 2011. Most ticks are content to sit and wait for a meal to wander past; lone stars have no patience for that. “We see them actually pursuing hosts, which is really disconcerting,” one entomologist told me. Roden-Reynolds has found lone stars on walking trails and benches, in toolsheds, parking lots, and the yards of hundreds of local homes that he has surveyed. He has heard of them scrambling down dunes and across burning sand to feed on sunbathers. “Oh, they’re relentless,” he said.

Across Oregon during World War II, people from small towns who weren’t drafted to fight in the European or Pacific fronts moved to cities where the defense industry flourished. Portland, a little over thirty miles north of Woodburn, became a hub for shipbuilding, while in Seattle, 175 miles further north, Boeing built bombers. That, combined with the forced internment of people of Japanese ancestry — including U.S. citizens, many of them agricultural workers — meant there weren’t enough laborers to pick the berries that grew there during the spring and summer. Woodburn has so many berries that it used to call itself the Berry Center of the World.

“My grandparents are from Coahuila, Mexico,” Anthony says. “They arrived here in 1943.” They were among the laborers who came to the northwest as part of a 1942 binational agreement between Mexico and the United States called the Bracero Program. More than four million Mexican men, across 24 states, came to help the country’s agricultural industry survive.

“We now have five, six generations of Mexicanos, Mexican Americans, Latinos,” Anthony says of Woodburn. Over time, the laborers’ personal roots grew into Woodburn’s fertile soil. The Bracero Program ended in 1964, but many Mexican workers remained, or returned with their families, ready to make home and community out of a place that needed them. Today, 61.4% of the town’s 31,000-plus residents are Latino.

From the beginning, the Braceros played soccer when they weren’t working in fields and forests. It helped close the distance between their new home and the one they left behind.

In “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes dreamed of this moment. He wrote in 1930, “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem: how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure.” Hobbymaxxing is born from an innocent desire for an enriching life offline and outside of work. But Gen Z’s hobbying obsession may have evolved too far, so that these activities are no longer considered leisure but additional jobs.

Before the industrial revolution, the great outdoors was most people’s workplace. They were out there from dawn to dusk in all kinds of weather, doing grueling manual labor, or else they starved. It was only the richest of the rich who could stay inside and partake in such hedonistic extravagances as eating a varied diet or learning how to read. Today we can enjoy the great outdoors because we do it on our own terms.

But back then, wandering around outside could be dangerous. The medieval Norse word skóggangr, a formal punishment for very serious crimes, translates to “going to the woods.” People who received that sentence were cut off from Norse society, leaving them with nowhere to go but the forest, where they eventually died.

Fear of the woods is also evident in old fairy tales, where the forest was commonly portrayed as a scary place because the rules of society didn’t apply there. Now, with the professional management of park services and the aid of mass-produced gear, people can enjoy a break from society even with small children in tow.

As for walking, for most of human history, it wasn’t recreation. It was the primary mode of transportation.

We lead lives of unimaginable leisure.