There’s a specific kind of civic monument you find in a lot of American towns: the Carnegie library. The Rockefeller wing of a hospital. The Ford Foundation grant that funded the new playground. Whatever you think of the men behind those names, they left something behind that a community could point to and say: that’s ours, because they were here.

Now ask yourself a harder question. Thousands of American towns have a Walmart. Many of them have had one for thirty years. Walmart is, in a real sense, the economic center of gravity for thousands of small and mid-sized towns — often the largest employer, almost always the largest single collector of local consumer spending. So where’s the Walmart wing of the library? Where are the Walmart-endowed teachers, the Walmart Little League fields, the Walmart scholarship funds that show up with the same regularity as the Christmas bonus checks used to at the old five-and-dime downtown?

Before you accuse me of setting up a straw man: Walmart does give. A lot, in fact. The company reported nearly $2 billion in global cash and in-kind donations last fiscal year, including tens of millions of dollars in local facility grants distributed across the U.S. and Canada through its Spark Good program. That’s real, and it’s fair to say so up front.

In light of the ongoing debate over whether a $7 oat milk latte can derail an entire hiring pipeline, we decided to settle the matter once and for all. Below, a rigorous taxonomy of what your iced coffee order reveals about your character, your work ethic, and — most importantly — your fundamental worthiness to be extended an offer letter by someone who has been doing this for sixteen years and therefore knows things.

1. The plain iced coffee, black.

You respect the meritocracy. You understand that suffering builds character, and that character is what gets you promoted, not, say, your quarterly output. Bold, humorless, correct.

A commenter showed up under a post about women and the church with what he clearly considered a mic drop. The Old Testament, he said, “doesn’t help the cause of women either.” He then gave three examples from the Law and the narratives. He closed by telling anyone who “begs for equality” and treats 1 Timothy 2-3 as the only obstacle in Scripture that they are “sadly mistaken.”

Most of his facts are correct. I’m saying that up front because the lazy reply to a comment like this is to wave it away, and that’s how you lose an argument you didn’t need to lose. The trouble is the leap he makes after the facts. Once you’ve found one real asymmetry, it’s tempting to treat every difference as more evidence, every silence as a verdict, and every “I can’t see the reason” as proof that there isn’t one. Find one specific sexism and you’re licensed to invent more.

So let’s take his examples one at a time.

Let me introduce you to the Daily Nationalist.

It doesn’t exist. I invented it about ten minutes ago, and I’m already fond of it. The Daily Nationalist has a White House correspondent with a permanent pass, a front-row seat, and one reliable question: “Mr. President, how do you stay so humble?” The president answers at length every time. No one from the Daily Nationalist has ever been asked to leave the room, because no one from the Daily Nationalist has ever given anyone a reason to.

By the standard Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders offered on Friday, the Daily Nationalist is a shining monument to press freedom. Its reporters are standing in the Oval Office, asking questions of the president of the United States. What more could you want?

On September 18, Fox News reported that the University of Texas at Austin will stop enrolling new students in three majors: Women’s and Gender Studies, Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, and African and African Diaspora Studies. Students already in the programs can finish. The comment section did what comment sections do. One reader was glad students would be spared loan debt for a “worthless degree.” Another suggested they might now be steered toward a major with value to them and to society.

Notice how easily those two ideas slid together. Worthless meant low-paying. Valuable to society meant valuable to an employer. That equation is so familiar that we rarely notice it is an assumption. It is the assumption I want to examine.

This piece does three things. It looks at where these majors came from and what they were meant to do. It looks at what their graduates actually do for work, because “worthless” is a factual claim and facts can be checked. And it asks the harder question: even if the paychecks were lower, should a wage be the yardstick for a degree, and what follows if it shouldn’t be?

I watched a response video this week that re-ran an old fight: does the Bible endorse slavery, or only regulate it? One side says regulation is a way of holding on to slavery under God’s supervision. The other points to the humane rules. Both sides argue over a label, so I’d rather ask a narrower question. When the law lists the ways a person can end up serving someone else, who is on the list, and does American slavery fit any entry?

Explaining what a law says isn’t defending it, and reading Leviticus 25 isn’t defending the antebellum South. The reverse also holds: pointing to humane regulations doesn’t make an institution good.

My claim is narrower than “the Bible bans slavery,” and I think that makes it harder to knock down. Leviticus 25:44-46 permits owning foreigners and passing them to your children. It does not say that kidnapping creates lawful title, that buying a kidnapped person cures the kidnapping, or that everyone a foreign market offers may be lawfully kept.

I walked into (well, sat down to research) The Uprising assuming I was about to get a Robin Hood prequel. The marketing certainly wanted me to think that — Focus Features spent the weeks before release quietly rebranding the U.S. release as The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood, over the visible irritation of the U.K. distributor, who insisted the film “does not make any reference to Robin Hood.”

Both of those things are true at once, which tells you something about the movie itself: it’s a real historical drama about the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt that also, in its last five minutes, decides to become a Robin Hood movie — built out of a rebel crowd speaking in signifiers borrowed from both sides of America’s current populist divide, in a story that ends up meaning something its own star doesn’t seem to have fully reckoned with.

Paul Greengrass’s film is “inspired by” the Great Rising, England’s first large-scale popular revolt, and for most of its runtime it earns that description. Here’s the real sequence:

There’s a genre of writing that gets a free pass most other genres don’t: the “I visited a bad neighborhood and now I have Opinions” column. Christianity Today just ran a fresh entry from editor-in-chief Marvin Olasky, and it’s worth pulling apart — not because it’s poorly written, but because it’s well written in service of an argument that falls apart the moment you check it against the research the author didn’t bother to cite.

The piece is framed as an indictment of “harm reduction” — the public health approach that includes needle exchanges, naloxone distribution, and tolerance of drug use in public health settings as an alternative to demanding abstinence up front. Olasky’s argument, in short: harm reduction is a euphemism for giving up on people, San Francisco proved it, and the city’s recent political swing toward crackdown policy vindicates the old-school “tough love” model.

It’s a tidy story. It also leaves out almost everything that would complicate it.

Mitch McConnell was elected to a position, not to do anything. No Senate seat comes with a job description that requires consciousness. The position pays whether he shows up or not, whether he casts a vote or not, whether he can perform the ordinary functions of the office or not. There’s no ordinary employment mechanism by which a senator loses the office for taking an extended medical absence — no manager who can decide the job isn’t waiting for him, no clock running out on his right to come back to it.

That’s not really a scandal. It’s a design choice, and a defensible one: the office was built so that no one short of the voters, or the Senate itself, can push a senator out mid-term. Otherwise you’d get senators pressured to resign the moment they got sick, which is its own kind of abuse.

McConnell was hospitalized in mid-June after a fall, treated for pneumonia, and spent weeks in rehabilitation before returning to the Capitol and casting a vote on September 14 — an absence multiple outlets counted at roughly three months, 92 days by one tally. Through all of it, his salary, his seat, his staff, and his committee assignments sat exactly where he left them.

A recent piece making the rounds — The Destruction of Marriage – Just a Bonus — argues that Satan’s real target isn’t marriage at all. Marriage’s collapse is, per the title, just a side effect. The real prize is souls: get women to reject submission, get men to abandon headship, and you get a church too compliant to resist false teaching and too fractured to keep people out of hell.

It’s a serious piece, argued with real structure. But when you pull on the threads, most of what looks like reasoning turns out to be curtains hung around one load-bearing claim that never actually gets defended: that God has delegated husbands an authority over their wives broad enough that, within ordinary marital decisions, refusing a husband’s authority can constitute disobedience to God.

That claim is worth examining on its own, because it’s doing more work than the rest of the article combined. Which decisions does that authority cover? What are its limits? How do the passages cited actually establish either?

A clip from an old John Lennon interview has been making the rounds on TikTok lately — the one where he defends “Woman Is the N***** of the World,” the 1972 song he wrote with Yoko Ono. People are arguing about it the way people always argue about it: is this a bold feminist statement, or an offensive appropriation of a word that carries a specific, singular history?

That argument isn’t actually the interesting one. The interesting one is buried underneath it, in a phrase Lennon himself pointed to when he was asked to explain the song. He didn’t say he made the comparison up. He said he got it from Yoko, and Yoko traced it back further, to an Irish revolutionary named James Connolly, who in 1915 wrote a line that’s much less quotable but much more precise: the worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.

Slave of the slave. Not slave of the master. Of the slave.

Right now, a grieving person can upload photos, voice memos, and old texts from someone they lost and get back a chatbot that talks like them. It’s marketed as comfort — a way to ask one more question, hear one more goodnight, finish a conversation death cut off mid-sentence. The instinct behind that isn’t crazy. It’s the same instinct behind hired mourners, seances, and every reason Israel had to be told, directly, to knock it off: people don’t want the relationship to be over.

But notice what the griefbot is actually trying to solve. Its whole premise is that the relationship has to keep running in the present tense, right now, or it’s lost — so you manufacture more of it. That’s a reasonable thing to want if you don’t believe there’s anything on the other side of the pause. It’s the wrong thing to want if you do.

That’s the whole point of this title. “Ta ta for now” isn’t a shrug, and it isn’t flippant. It’s what you can only say if you actually believe there’s a later. And believing there’s a later is what frees you from needing to keep manufacturing now with someone who currently isn’t available for it — so you can put that energy into the people who currently are. This isn’t really an essay about whether there’s an afterlife. It’s about what happens to your grief, and to your attention, once you actually believe death doesn’t revoke belonging.

If the afterlife worked the way most fire-and-brimstone preaching assumes it does, near-death experience research should be boring. Good people should report light. Bad people should report fire. Case closed, sermon illustration secured.

That is not what the data does.

I want to build a grid — good people and bad people, crossed with good NDEs and bad NDEs — and then fill in the cells with actual documented cases, not hypotheticals. What ends up in each box, and especially what refuses to show up in one particular box, tells you something. Then I want to run the same people through a second grid: what happened to them afterward. And then I want to hold both grids up next to three things Jesus and Paul said about debt, fire, and the thing actually worth fearing.

A few weeks ago an email landed in my inbox from Tuttle Twins, selling a new “Mindset” course bundle for their homeschool Academy. The pitch opens with Toto Wolff — the billionaire boss of Mercedes’ Formula 1 team — whose father died of brain cancer when he was a teenager, plunging the family into financial trouble. Young Toto sold candles and torches at outdoor gatherings in Vienna. He wore a golden cape and handed out flyers for an electronics shop. He started an economics degree and dropped out.

“That’s it,” the email says. “That’s the ‘official’ education of Toto Wolff — the origin of a two-and-a-half-billion-dollar fortune.”

Three more names get the same treatment — Sara Blakely, Richard Branson, David Karp — each one a hardship-to-fortune story, each one proof, the email argues, that the one skill separating billionaires from everyone else is mindset: the ability to get knocked down and keep moving. Luckily, mindset “can be taught.” Theirs, for $499 lifetime or $269 a year.

There’s a phrase that gets tossed around in certain corners of church culture: “worm theology.” It’s shorthand for a way of talking about human nature — depraved, worthless, crawling — that shows up in old hymns, in fire-and-brimstone sermons, and in the quieter but more corrosive language of spiritually abusive groups. Isaac Watts, in 1707, put it into one of the most sung lines in English hymnody: wondering at the cross, “would He devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?”

It’s worth remembering, before going further, that Watts doesn’t leave the singer there. The hymn moves through astonishment at grace, into repentance, and closes with the singer giving himself away in response to love, not curling up in permanent self-disgust. Even the hymn most responsible for popularizing “worm” language in devotional English doesn’t treat the worm as a resting place. That’s a pattern worth watching for, because it shows up again and again in the biblical texts themselves — and it’s exactly the pattern that gets dropped when “worm theology” turns into a tool for control.

Strip out the verses where “worm” just means a worm — the ones that ruined the manna overnight (Exodus 16), the ones that will eat Israel’s vineyards if the nation breaks covenant (Deuteronomy 28), the ones crawling over a corpse (Isaiah 66:24, Mark 9:48) — and four passages stand out as especially relevant, where “worm” is applied figuratively to a person. (The underlying Hebrew uses more than one word translated “worm” or “maggot,” so this isn’t offered as an exhaustive concordance count — just the passages that matter for the question at hand.)

A new Andrew Garfield movie, The Uprising, is being sold with a simple moral: it “warns of what happens when we dispense the wrath of God.”

It’s a good line, and it’s not a strawman — it’s the review’s own framing. Christianity Today’s review invokes Romans 12:19 and argues the film shows the “cross-class danger of claiming divine authority,” insisting that “whether we’re powerful or oppressed,” our sense of justice gets clouded by sin. That’s a deliberate choice to place both categories inside a single moral “we.” And there is a truth inside it: equal moral accountability does not change with social class. Vengeance is as wrong for the powerful as for the powerless. But equal moral accountability is not the same thing as equal power.

I think that’s the wrong question, and the pronoun is doing most of the damage. “We” implies a single actor, weighing a single choice, with a single amount of power to misuse. But the events behind The Uprising — England’s Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 — involved actors who were not standing on anything like equal ground. Before asking what happens when “we” dispense divine wrath, it’s worth asking who “we” actually were, and what each of them wanted badly enough to invoke God for it.

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t show up in the unemployment rate. It belongs to the person working 22 hours a week at one job and 14 at another, neither of them offering enough hours to count as full-time, neither of them willing to guarantee a schedule more than a few days out, both of them expecting total availability anyway. On paper, this person is employed. Twice, even. In practice, they are stitching together a living out of scraps that two different managers keep rearranging without asking.

This is not a fringe case. It’s close to the default experience of low-wage service work in America, and it’s worth being specific about why, because the specifics point toward an argument that’s less comfortable than “we need better labor law.” The specifics point toward a culture that has decided dignity is a line item to be minimized, and that no bargaining structure by itself is going to fix that.

Start with the schedule itself. Surveys of service-sector workers — retail, food service, hospitality — find that something like a third are working part-time involuntarily: they want more hours and can’t get them. A large share of the workforce gets less than a week’s notice of their schedule. Around half report working “clopenings” — closing the store at 11 p.m. and opening it again at 5 or 6 a.m., with barely enough time in between to drive home, sleep, and drive back. Researchers who’ve studied this have found that unpredictability isn’t just an inconvenience; workers exposed to unstable, last-minute scheduling are significantly more likely to experience hunger, missed rent, and utility shutoffs than workers earning the same wage on a stable schedule. The instability itself is the hardship, independent of the paycheck.

You don’t always have to choose between two competing accounts of a relationship. Sometimes it’s worth listening closely to what the denial itself reveals.

This week, Aaron Rodgers sat down with his Steelers teammate Cam Heyward and revisited his relationship with Danica Patrick, who ended things with him in 2020. Patrick had already put her version on the record a year earlier, on Sage Steele’s podcast, calling the relationship “emotionally abusive” and saying Rodgers left “a trail of blood” behind him when it ended.

Rodgers’ response was meant to be a rebuttal. Parts of it sound strangely compatible with the allegation.

On April 9, 1944, a church choir from Trinity Lutheran drove through a gap in a barbed-wire fence in Algona, Iowa, to lead an Easter service for German prisoners of war. It’s a striking scene, and Christianity Today recently ran a piece on it — the choir director recalled that the prisoners sang beautifully, that many wept during the Lord’s Prayer, that there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. The essay’s argument, drawing on theologian Jeremy Begbie, is that corporate worship “retimes” us: it forces people who disagree, even people who were shooting at each other months earlier, to sit in the same duration together, and that this can cultivate empathy where nothing else will.

It’s a good essay, as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go very far.

Read the piece carefully and you’ll notice what it never says. It never says the word “Holocaust.” It never asks what regime these men had served, or who that regime was simultaneously murdering in the camps a continent away while Iowa farmers were setting out extra plates at Christmas. It gives us crooked teeth and broken bootlaces and homesick tears — the sensory texture of ordinary humanity — but never asks the harder question sitting right underneath the anecdote: what does it mean that people can seem this human and still have served a regime doing what theirs was doing?

A Texas congressman gave a Republican convention crowd exactly what it wanted this week: a land acknowledgment with the punchline flipped.

Rep. Brandon Gill opened his speech at the RNC Midterm Convention in Dallas by “acknowledging” — not Indigenous nations, but American settlers. “I’d like to acknowledge that we stand here today in the great state of Texas,” he said, “and the United States of America is the ancestral homeland of great American patriots, pioneers and explorers who put down roots, fight for freedom all over the globe and bled and died to build the greatest civilization ever known to man.” The crowd roared. Fox News ran it as a straight-up win: a firebrand “flipping the script” on Democrats’ “bizarre” latest trend, unapologetic to the end.

It’s a good applause line. It is also, on inspection, a category error dressed up as a rebuttal — and it’s worth taking seriously enough to actually check the history it’s leaning on.