In a recent report, we measured class using constant, inflation-adjusted thresholds. The “core” middle class shrank, but so did the classes below the middle — the poor, the near-poor and the lower middle class.

In 1979, 36 percent of families were in the middle class. At first, it looks ominous that by 2024, a smaller number — 31 percent — could claim that status. But it’s only worrisome if you overlook that over the same period, the upper middle class grew to 31 percent of families from 10 percent. Meanwhile, the number of Americans falling short of the middle class — once more than half — dropped to 35 percent of all families.

The traditional middle class shrank because so many families became better off over time, not because more people fell short. At the same time, inequality rose, too. The higher up the income ladder a family reached, the more disproportionate the improvement. Rather than the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, rich and poor alike grew richer — albeit at much different rates.

You know you’re self-aware, but that’s about it — you aren’t telepathic, so you have no way of seeing into anyone else’s mind and knowing what it’s like to be them. Actually, it gets worse — you don’t even know if you were really self-aware five minutes ago. For all you know, you could have been created by a powerful computer and given a complete set of false memories.1 The past version of you is just as alien to your currently self-aware self as any of the people around you.

This is known in philosophy as the “problem of other minds”. It’s closely related to the “hard problem of consciousness” — the question of how physical processes give rise to subjective experience. The problem of other minds means that the hard problem of consciousness will never fully be solved. Since you’ll never know whether other people are really conscious, you’ll never be able to get hard scientific evidence about why they’re conscious. You can never explain something if you don’t know if it’s true or not.

Similarly, you’ll never know what it’s really like to be someone else — whether the color red looks to you like it looks to them, whether they feel pain the same way you do, and so on. In fact, you’ll never even know what it was like to be you in the past. Subjective experience is incommensurable.

Sympathy is ample.

Globally, more people are satisfied with their freedom to choose what they do with their lives than were satisfied two decades ago, with gains driven largely by countries where those satisfied with this freedom were once in the minority.

I have been thinking lately about the grace of ordinary things. Not the grand gestures or the great events, but the small, steady, faithful routines that hold our lives together. The kettle boiling at exactly the same time each morning. The robin that sings from the same branch of the apple tree. The way a well-oiled gate swings shut without a squeak. These things ask nothing of us but attention. And in return, they give us something precious: the quiet assurance that the world still works, still turns, still offers its small mercies to anyone with eyes to see.

The countryside teaches this lesson better than any sermon.

Ukraine has already been capitalizing on the Iran war by cultivating closer military ties with Gulf states. When Iran attacked neighboring countries with Shahed-136 kamikazes, the same drones that Russia has used in Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky quickly sought to leverage Ukraine’s experience, dispatching air defense teams to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Turkey, which has strong military ties with the Gulf, sees Ukraine’s growing role as a complement to Ankara’s relationships that will allow it to expand what it’s offering. For Russia, which has spent years developing closer economic and security ties with Gulf monarchies, the shift is yet another setback. [….]

It’s clear that Ankara is no longer balancing between Moscow and NATO and is tilting the field against Mr. Putin. Russia’s decline has given Turkey, after a decade of deference to Moscow, the freedom to pursue its interests. Ukraine is the beneficiary.

In the long run, battery technology is emerging as one of the most important factors shaping the future of aerial mobility. Su noted that solid-state batteries will play a central role in enabling the next generation of flying cars by delivering both the energy density required for longer flight ranges and the safety standards needed for commercial operations.

So here are some ways the narcissistic self is expressed today.

Authenticity

The person seeks their true self within themselves not from without. “Be yourself.” “Find your truth.” “Live authentically.” Lionel Trilling, in Sincerity and Authenticity, observed that authenticity has come to mean moving against the current of conventional moral authority rather than with it. To do what is expected is insincere; to transgress is to be truly oneself. Part of this is the effect of Critical Theory, which views even self-expression through the lens of power dynamics. The self as authentic interior dominates conversations around gender and identity — the true self is hidden within and needs to be expressed outward.

The entirety of morality consists of suppressing the authentic self.

What unites parts of the American left and segments of the American right is skepticism about the American Founding. Many on the left seem unable to think about the Founding, save in terms of race and class. Some American conservative commentators regard the Founding as part of the broader eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement that, in their view, is directly responsible for many of America’s contemporary woes.

These pressures, however, make it more urgent than ever for those who care about Western civilization, and who want to save it from being buried under a wave of bureaucracy, technocracy, quasi-authoritarianism, and endless professions of guilt, to remind both elite and popular audiences of the power of the American Founding to serve as a model for what that civilization is ultimately about.

By “the Founding,” I mean not only specific documents like the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, or even some of the powerful personalities of the period. These are all important reference points and will surely remain so. Instead, I have primarily in mind the specific combination of ideas that animated the period in which there was an effort to establish a republican form of government that upheld and promoted certain principles which have deep roots in the broader and deeper cultural patrimony of the West. If this admixture of ideas can be maintained and even magnified in the United States, I think we can have some confidence in its ability to animate other parts of the West.

What, then, is the nature of this set of ideas that characterized the Founding? Broadly speaking, it amounts to a mixture of the thought of Greece and Rome, the religions of Judaism and Christianity, the heritage of England and its institutional expressions of liberty, and the various Enlightenment movements that assumed prominence in the eighteenth century. In America’s case, we are really referring to the “moderate Enlightenment” associated with minds like Adam Smith and Montesquieu. All these things came together to different degrees and in varying ways to shape the principles and emphases of the American Revolution and the constitutional framework that, in fits and starts, gradually formed in the revolution’s wake.

HOMER IS BACK in the discourse on account of Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film, The Odyssey. The latest controversy began with Elon Musk, among others, protesting the supposed inaccuracy of casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, a fictional character, who among other fantastic elements is the daughter of the god Zeus and was laid as an egg by her human mother. On X, the debate has spiraled to include renewed criticism of Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation of the Odyssey, attacked for being “ideological,” which is to say that it attempted to more clearly portray the perspectives of the women in the narrative, as compared to earlier translations.

While it might seem unexpected that a 2,750-year-old poem (and a nearly decade-old translation of it) would become such a flashpoint in the culture wars of 2026, for scholars engaged in public education in the classics, it is all too unsurprising. Instead, the fight over Homer represents just another skirmish in the campaign mounted by bigoted very-online right-wing self-described “chuds” to claim Greek and Roman culture for their own fascist, or at least fascist-adjacent, ideology, which demands the exclusion of minorities, women, and LGBTQ people. […]

This type of traditionalism and pining for the past that is married to a kind of thick anti-intellectualism and a worship of action and violence for its own sake is hardly new. Indeed, as the Italian scholar Umberto Eco noted in his famous essay “Ur-Fascism,” the rejection of modernity for the sake of an imagined past, necessarily paired with irrationalism and a “distrust of the intellectual world,” is a core component of fascist ideology. In turn, that anti-intellectualism serves an ideology that, as Eco notes, valorizes violence for its own sake and can only understand heroism through the prism of violence. Once we realize this, it no longer surprises us that many of the followers of these accounts appear to believe that the Homeric hero Achilles was a real historical person or that they become enraged by any suggestion that he wasn’t. These accounts and their followers have a version of antiquity, an angry child’s version, simplified and flattened down, and they are profoundly hostile to learning anything that might disconfirm their ideological beliefs.

And the ideology, it turns out, is rancid. Here it is necessary to be blunt: Many of the accounts in this space are frequently misogynistic or racist bigots, intent on using the Greek and Roman past to justify that bigotry. Learn Latin, with 187,000 followers, asks, “Can the Latin language be used as an instrument of Western supremacy?” agreeing with those who answered in the affirmative. Roman Helmet Guy, with 120,000 followers, riffed off a scene from the Lord of the Rings films and declared it “Authoritarian. Ethnic Nationalist. Romanticization of the past.” Enlisting the heroic Gondorian king in the ranks of the chuds, he added, “If Aragorn were alive today, he’d be posting ‘Look what they took from you,’” using a far-right, if not white nationalist, slogan. They are hardly alone. When user The Hellenist told his more than 30,000 followers that “Blacks should support slavery” and “Christians and Jews are who tore us apart,” he faced little criticism or repercussions within the community; Daily Roman Updates, with 266,000 followers, responded, with nihilistic irony, that The Hellenist is “one of the best posters on this app.” And when Daily Roman Updates’ own followers told him that he was “not racist enough,” Daily Roman Updates cheerfully agreed, echoing the website’s owner, Elon Musk: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei.”

While not every account goes mask-off like this regularly, the less openly bigoted accounts in the ecosystem regularly follow, repost, and link to the more bigoted ones. The result is a radicalization pipeline in which users coming to X looking for information about antiquity are rapidly steered towards alt-right misogyny, racism, and authoritarianism.

Excluding homosexuality while idolizing Alexander and Caesar is sublime.

Despite his advocacy for American independence, Adams remained an admirer of British constitutionalism, and the structures he recommended appear to mirror features of the British model. John Adams’s relationship with the British constitution has led to several different assessments from various commentators, including from his own contemporaries.

The recommendations that Adams made in Thoughts should be familiar to us. Adams recommended a bicameral legislature, with an executive who could exercise a veto power over the legislature as a check. He also recommended annual elections as a way to maintain popular participation. Adams contrasted this with his recommendations for an independent judiciary, consisting of learned jurists rather than laymen, who should receive lifetime appointments and have their salaries set by law. These basic structures remain influential and resemble the current model of government of the U.S. and many state constitutions.

Additionally, though Thoughts was not written specifically to debunk or critique Common Sense, it is apparent that Adams was wary of Paine’s influence. In fact, Adams devotes an entire section to criticizing unicameralism, arguing that unicameral legislatures are prone to individual vices, avarice, ambition, and a lack of expertise to exercise executive or judicial powers. He was concerned that such a system would create self-serving laws.

But the next act in the drama over Black representation will be driven in part by Democratic leaders, some of them Black, who face a difficult decision. Do they preserve the majority-Black, overwhelmingly Democratic districts in blue states like New York, Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey? Or do they maximize Democratic representation in the House by diluting urban districts dominated by Black voters and expanding their boundaries into the suburbs. Doing the latter would allow them to target Republican House members in those states.

Those new districts would remain Democratic, though less so, but they may no longer be majority-Black. So Black voters could lose power in two ways — by losing the number of districts they dominate and by losing the number of Black voices in Congress.

Did President Obama only speak for Black Americans?

Defying Republican leaders, the House voted on Wednesday to take up a bill to impose sweeping new sanctions on Russia and provide additional aid to Ukraine, after a bloc of G.O.P. defectors joined Democrats in an effort to ratchet up pressure on Moscow more than four years into the war.

Hurlburt claims that, in fifty years of experience sampling, his most important finding is simply how little we’re actually aware of the details of our inner experiences. Pollan supplements this with an elegant passage on William James’s magnificent lecture “The Stream of Thought,” in which James attempts to draw attention to the strange, swirling, constantly half-forming and half-dissolving nature of our conscious experiences: the both-there-and-not sensation of trying to remember a forgotten name; the protolinguistic feeling of intending to say something before you do; the “auras,” “halos,” “accentuations,” “associations,” “suffusions,” “feelings of tendency,” “premonitions,” and “psychic overtones” that accompany all our more code-like, sentence-friendly, and determinate thoughts. Pollan writes:

To read James’s heroic attempt to limn the stream of consciousness in all its nuance, strangeness, and paradox is to realize how much violence is done to the experience in the name of consciousness science…. How could we ever accept the idea that consciousness is reducible to information, to computable bits or pixels? How could the concept of information ever capture or convey something like the aura or halo of a thought, or its familiarity, or the “fringe of unarticulated affinities” linking two thoughts, or the afterglow of a thought and its coloring of a thought to come?

Indeed. All of this is reinforced by Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, a Bulgarian-born psychologist who specializes in “spontaneous thought”: mind-wandering, daydreaming, creative thinking, and the mysterious thoughts that seem to come to us from nowhere. As she points out, almost all consciousness science is focused only on our most explicitly conscious thoughts. But these are rare, discrete moments extracted from a vast, nebulous background—like tiny raindrops condensing inside a huge amorphous cloud of vapor. This background, Christoff Hadjiilieva estimates, accounts for something like half of what the mind is doing at any one moment. This highlights the absurdity of trying to produce thinking machines by focusing only on surface material like language and perception.

Everything then culminates in a kind of psychedelic punchline. Pollan meets Christof Koch, an American cognitive scientist and one of the true giants in the world of consciousness research, most famous for espousing integrated information theory—which posits, rather abstrusely, that consciousness arises in any physical system sufficiently interconnected and recursive. Back in 1998, Koch famously bet the philosopher David Chalmers that scientists would find neural correlates of consciousness within twenty-five years. In 2023, Koch graciously conceded, and gave Chalmers, the man who coined the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness,” his promised case of Madeira.

In the years since, Koch has become increasingly suspicious of purely physical accounts of consciousness, his skepticism reinforced by recent experiments with psychedelics. Pollan quotes from a conversation with Koch after his return from an ayahuasca retreat in Brazil: “It was extraordinary…. I accessed this universal mind…. It was what Aldous Huxley described in The Doors of Perception. There was no self. There was Mind at Large.”

Koch is not the only scientist Pollan talks with who admits to a drug-induced revelation. A little earlier, the neuroscientist Kingson Man describes his experiences with a psychedelic called 5-MeO-DMT:

I disappeared, fell out of time, and then came back with the realization that everything in the world is love. I know, ridiculous! As a scientist, there’s no reasoning about it. But I understood for the first time that everything is connected by the same substance, and that substance is love…. And I realized there’s more going on in consciousness than I can hope to build with my dinky little machine. A robot can act like it’s in love, but it’s still a puppet being pulled by strings.

Of course, there’s something funny about these drug-induced breakthroughs, and it should all be taken with a hefty pinch of salt. Nonetheless, I found it striking that what these trips offer scientists—setting aside the wilder flights of fancy—are often simple reminders of something that was always there. In an email to Pollan, Koch likens his experience to a famous philosophical thought experiment in which someone who is colorblind is able to see color for the first time. A reductionist explanation involving photons and receptors wouldn’t be enough. “Wouldn’t you go around for the rest of your life with the certainty that you had experienced something utterly real that demanded an explanation? So it is with me and my mystical experience.”

Even Kingson Man’s more stereotypically hippie-style revelation could be seen as a reminder of something we forget only because it’s ever-present: love really is real, and irreducible to any physical mechanism. This is particularly easy to forget when you’re professionally trained to filter out the familiar—but remarkable and mysterious—experiences we have every second of our waking lives, and to think only in terms of the theoretical grids we place on top of them.

It’s all just footnotes to Hume

Morally, tribalistic ideologies impede individuals’ moral reasoning primarily by representing politics as a zero-sum struggle of life and death on which one’s existence and identity depend (52-53). By representing politics as a condition of high-stakes group conflict, such ideologies are supposed to motivate transgression of what would otherwise be seen as moral norms in one’s behavior toward those that one views as Other.

Cognitively, tribalistic ideologies undermine our ability to reason about and with persons perceived as Other because such ideologies represent the other in terms of rigid stereotypes which obscure differences among persons falling within that category (36-37), impede one’s ability to take the perspective of persons deemed Other (45-47), and impede uptake of testimony from persons regarded as Other (80-81). Tribalistic ideologies’ effects on our moral reasoning compound with those cognitive effects, transforming what should be truth-seeking discourse into interactions aimed at defensive scorekeeping against opposition criticism (rather than fair consideration of and response to such criticism) and exercises in signaling one’s group affiliation and sorting one’s interactions to take place with one’s group (62-5).

Tribalism, then, is that way of thinking and feeling, of seeing and desiring and reacting, that is the driving force behind the antagonism observed in contemporary politics.

The courts continue to let the White House know how this democracy works. It’s become hard to keep track of all of Trump’s losses in court as they continue to add up.

Here are the details on some of the newest ones…

Donald who?

In 1936, Alan Dunn was paid $25 for his first cartoon in Architectural Record. The drawing shows a scene from American suburbia, with two single-family houses side by side. On the right, we see a modern, geometrically abstract abode with large windows set into very slim walls, a flat roof, bright metal parapets, and no traces of decoration. In short, a work of architecture aligned with the new avant-garde style spreading across the country.

Gabriele Neri is the author of “Alan Dunn,” from which this article is adapted.
But to the left, another house appears — one with much bolder features. It is composed of a post set into the ground on which two bare slabs are wedged, which constitute the entire living space on their own. The elevated living space is reached via steps with a curved handrail that rises from the ground to the top. There are no other pillars, not even walls, a roof, or windows. The house, in its sculptural incompleteness, is an exercise in absolute radicalism. Looking perfectly at ease, its inhabitant reads the paper, lounging on a futuristic chair, seemingly unperturbed by issues of privacy or climate control. This display gets on the nerves of his modernist neighbors, irritated by such extreme modernity.

“Well, we’re dated!” the wife complains to her husband. “That abstractionist next door built his house in space-time.”

It is a typical setup by Dunn, then a mainstay of The New Yorker’s graphic humor, notorious for satirizing the transformations of 20th-century American architecture. Trained at the National Academy of Design and the American Academy in Rome, Dunn was a shrewd visual critic who brilliantly juxtaposed everyday aesthetic banality with surreal disruption. He showed that, rather than a matter of substance, the modernity seeping into Americans’ lives was, above all, a phenomenon of form — a passing fashion soon to be supplanted by new trends and convictions.

When we hear “narcissism,” we picture the grandiose type: the swaggering, self-promoting, attention-hungry performer. But in a study with Joshua Miller, W. Keith Campbell, and Brandon Weiss, my colleagues and I mapped how narcissism actually breaks apart into different faces. There’s grandiose narcissism: antagonistic, dominant, status-seeking. And there’s vulnerable narcissism: neurotic, hypersensitive, easily wounded, perpetually aggrieved, convinced the world has failed to grant the recognition it owes. The antagonism is the thread the two share.

Both feed the second anti-woke intellectual, but in different ways. Grandiose narcissism builds the brand: the crusader who discovers that being The Person Who Fights This Thing brings a following, a revenue stream, a standing ovation, and who needs the enemy to stay enormous because the enemy is now load-bearing for the self. Vulnerable narcissismsupplies the wound: the person who was genuinely humiliated—fired, mobbed, exiled, betrayed—and for whom the critique is no longer about the world at all but about settling a score that never closes. A real injury becomes a permanent organizing principle. The crusade is the bandage that never comes off because the cut is never allowed to heal.

And when this goes collective, it gets its own engine. The work of Agnieszka Golec de Zavala on collective narcissism describes groups built around the belief that we are exceptional, that we are not sufficiently recognized, and shows that such groups reliably turn hostile toward whoever they cast as the threat to the in-group’s image. An anti-woke movement organized around shared grievance, rather than shared inquiry, will behave exactly this way: ever-vigilant, ever-aggrieved, retaliating against perceived insults to its own greatness. The truth-seeking recedes; the score-settling takes over.

That’s the distinction I’d draw, and I’d put it as a question anyone in this fight can ask themselves: Am I doing this to make society better, or to repair a narcissistic injury? The two can look identical from the outside. They have very different effects on the world.

And here is the part I find mega-ironic: the second camp talks, almost without exception, from a place of pure victim mindset. The very thing they are most likely to mock in their opponents (the grievance gang, the victimhood culture, the perpetual woundedness group, the “everyone is out to get us” cohort) is the thing they have most thoroughly become. Their accusation becomes a mirror of themselves.

This is the root of the Right’s obsession with manliness: they lack iot.

Thanks largely to robots, Ukraine is now talking about winning, not just surviving: Uncrewed and autonomous systems—and the willingness to adapt to them—have neutered Russian advantages. (Patrick Tucker | June 2, 2026, Defense One)

A small but growing number of European officials and analysts are saying what four years ago was unthinkable: Ukraine isn’t just surviving its grueling war with Russia, it is in some ways thriving and may even be on a path to victory.

This isn’t yet captured in headlines—for example, about last weekend’s barrage of Russian drones and missiles around Ukraine—but in the details, like how some 90 percent were intercepted.

Several long-term trends have shifted in Ukraine’s favor, and the core reason is its fierce focus on AI and robotics.

In the crucible of war, Ukraine has developed drones and ground robots that can hold territory—even take it back.

Violence is easily recognized when it takes the form of bullets or bombs. The causality is indisputable, the human impact immediately visible. But economic violence works very differently. Deprivation does not kill or maim directly. Rather, it creates the conditions that bring suffering and hardship. When these are severe, infant and child mortality rates increase, illnesses and injuries are more likely to be fatal, and life expectancy decreases. We know that sanctions may have all those results. Unilateral sanctions, which the United States has imposed on numerous countries and thousands of individuals, have a massive impact on mortality, causing more than five hundred thousand deaths every year.

Folks don’t care to acknowledge that W ended the Iraq War, rather than starting it. Regime change makes ending sanctions acceptable.

So it is worth asking why Taiwan itself seems comparatively relaxed about the potential implications of the Trump-Xi summits. This may help us separate the noise that inevitably surrounds these summits from the true strategic signals that both sides are conveying.

One reason why Taiwan is less concerned than others is a simple one: it has had to learn to live with its geopolitically anomalous status for nearly 80 years now. If it got nervous every time the Chinese and American leaders talked, even ones like Xi and Trump, it would soon have a nervous breakdown.

Moreover, while certainly the People’s Republic of China has become vastly stronger in economic, military and political terms, especially over the past two decades, so has Taiwan. The Taiwanese know that they could not defeat China in a head-on conflict but they also know that they are strong enough to impose huge costs and pose high risks for China.

Ukraine’s success in resisting Russia’s invasion since February 2022 serves as an inspiration for Taiwan but most of all as a warning to China.

What matters to Taiwan is that it can keep on strengthening its defenses sufficiently to help deter an invasion.

Taiwan actually could win a head on conflict.