You know the trolley problem. A runaway trolley is barreling down the track. Ahead of it, people are tied to the rails. You’re standing next to a switch. Pull it, and the trolley goes down the other track instead. What do you do?

Philosophy professors have gotten decades of mileage out of that question, because the classic version is hard. There’s a person on the other track too. Pulling the lever means choosing someone.

But that’s not the version we’re voting on this November.

Whenever prices climb, you hear the same story. The economy is “overheating.” The labor market is “too tight.” Workers have too much leverage, wages are rising too fast, and all that extra money is chasing too few goods. The remedy follows: raise interest rates, slow hiring, push unemployment up until things “cool off.”

Notice who pays for that remedy. It isn’t the companies that set the prices. It’s the people who lose their jobs, the people who don’t get raises, and the people whose savings run out while they wait for the economy to “rebalance.”

The idea behind that story has a name in economics: the Phillips curve. It deserves a closer look. Not because the curve is a lie, but because of what gets built on top of it.

A pastor pointed something out in a sermon recently that I couldn’t shake. In the parable of the wedding feast, the king walks up to the man who isn’t wearing wedding clothes and says, “Friend, how did you get in here?” And in Gethsemane, when Judas arrives with a mob and a kiss, Jesus says, “Friend, do what you came to do.”

Friend. To the guest about to be thrown into outer darkness. To the man selling him for silver.

I’ll admit my first thought was “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” Not as a serious complaint about the hymn, just a moment of grim humor. If those are the people Jesus calls “friend,” you could be forgiven for singing that line and wondering: Am I a friend, or a friend friend?

I got banned from a subreddit this weekend.

Not for spamming. Not for trolling. I got a three-day “cool-off period” from a self-publishing community for AI-assisted writers because I defended human artists.

Someone posted in r/selfpublishForAI with the title “You should not pay for book covers.” The argument: AI image generators have gotten so good that AI covers now beat anything on r/BookCovers, a community where people share and critique cover art, much of it made by working designers. So if you’re paying for covers, you’re throwing your money away.

This week ABC News published a story saying that companies backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump had pulled in more than $6 billion in government contracts since the brothers invested. Less than a day later, the story vanished. There was no editor’s note and no explanation. On Friday it came back with a new headline, a new byline that just says “ABC News,” and a correction admitting errors in “company investments, government contracts and event chronologies.”

Fox News covered the reappearance under the headline that ABC had “quietly republished a gutted version.” Don Jr. posted that the story was deleted “because it’s false.” Bill Ackman said a quiet withdrawal isn’t a real correction. On that point, he’s right.

So let’s do the fact-check first. Then let’s talk about what everybody is missing.

David Murray, better known as The 8-Bit Guy, makes videos about old computers and writes new games for them. His audience is about as AI-skeptical as audiences get. So when he posted a video explaining that he’d spent three months sick in bed, and that during that stretch he’d spent about three weeks turning a superhero screenplay he wrote fourteen years ago into a full AI-generated movie, he opened with a disclaimer. This was a one-time thing. If you hate AI, stop watching now. He put the movie on its own channel so it wouldn’t contaminate the main one.

Then he did something most AI showcase videos never do. He told the truth about how it went.

A post from Hannah Cox crossed my feed this week. She argued that Western values are superior because they built ethical ways of handling wrongdoing: due process, trial by jury, and humane standards for even the guilty. She wrote that the West has a respect for human life “not found in other cultures.” Then she turned on the MAGA crowd, calling them “spiritually third world” and “animalistic.”

I agree with part of that. Due process matters. Trial by jury matters. How a society treats the people it accuses tells you most of what you need to know about it.

But the history doesn’t support the idea that the West invented these things, or that it extended them to everyone. When you look at who actually got due process, a pattern shows up fast. The protections were real. They were also fenced. Across Western history, the boundaries kept changing: citizenship, freedom, religion, property, race, sex. But the pattern of unequal protection remained. Someone was always inside the fence, and someone was always outside it.

The New Evangelicals ran a piece this week by Eric LeBoeuf called “Submission in Marriage.” He spent a few days falling down the YouTube Shorts hole of right-wing marriage influencers and came back with a diagnosis. Underneath all the talk about submission, picky women, and trad wives sits one question: What’s in it for men?

He’s right about the question. He’s right that it’s the wrong place to start. But I think the reason it’s wrong runs deeper than a misread verse in Ephesians. It has to do with where that question comes from, and where most of us already spend forty hours a week answering it.

Where do you normally hear “what’s in it for me?”

I recently watched one of Joshua Fluke’s “resume roast” videos, where he goes through real resumes and points out the red flags. The first resume belongs to an art director who also lists freelance graphic design work, ongoing since 2018.

His verdict: delete it. From the hiring manager’s point of view, this person is “overemployed.” They’re shopping for a third job. Fluke doesn’t pretend this is fair. He says outright that employers “want 100% control over your paycheck,” calls that BS, and then tells you to play the game anyway.

He’s probably right about how a lot of hiring managers react. But look closely at the objection, because it doesn’t make much sense on its own terms.

Fox News ran its coverage of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Athens speech with a short video at the top. It tells the story of 480 BC, when a handful of Athenians refused to flee the Persian king Xerxes and barricaded themselves on the Acropolis for a heroic last stand.

It’s a good story, and it fits the speech. Rubio’s message was that decline is a choice, that the West must stop retreating, and that the time has come to hold the line.

There’s a problem, though. The Athenians in that video lost. Herodotus tells us what happened. The Persians found an unguarded route up the steep face of the rock and came over the top. Some defenders threw themselves off the walls. The rest were killed in the temple where they had taken refuge. Then the Persians burned the Acropolis.

⚠️ Spoiler notice: This article discusses the entire plot of Digger (2026), including the twist. If you plan to see it and want to go in clean, stop here and come back after.

Anthony Watts has a new piece up at Watts Up With That? called “Digger Digs Its Own Grave,” and it’s a fun read. The puns land, the box office numbers are carefully sourced, and the “shovel-ready” running gag gets more mileage than it deserves. If you want a breezy account of how a Tom Cruise movie with a nine-figure budget opened to about $8 million domestically, it delivers.

But I saw Digger last night, and I came away convinced of something odd: Watts didn’t review the movie. He auditioned for it.

This week Fox News ran an op-ed by E.J. Antoni of the Heritage Foundation and Daniel Turner of Power The Future under the headline “Eco-warriors want to turn up the heat on your wallet to fund their climate agenda.” The argument is simple. Cities, states, and members of Congress are trying to make oil and gas companies pay for climate damages. They’re using lawsuits, state “climate superfund” laws, and a federal bill. The companies will pass every dollar on to you. The authors put the tab at about $194 billion a year, or roughly $1,465 per household. They close by calling it a tax on households that no one voted for.

The timing is deliberate. On October 5 the Supreme Court heard Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, which asks whether federal law blocks state-law climate claims like Boulder’s. The ruling could determine whether many of these suits survive. So it’s worth looking closely at what the op-ed gets right, what it stretches, and what it leaves out. The thing it leaves out is the part of your electric bill that’s actually going up right now.

The number comes from a report the same two authors released last month. It examined more than 300 pending lawsuits, three state superfund laws, 12 proposed state bills, and one federal bill. The $194 billion figure is what they call a “full-success scenario.” It assumes all of the following happen:

On Monday, after a campaign stop in Alaska, Vice President JD Vance told Reuters what it would take to end the war with Iran. Iran doesn’t get to promise future reductions. It has to actually reduce its enrichment capacity now.

His argument was simple. If you don’t want a nuclear weapon, why do you need 60% enriched fuel? If Iran wants to show it isn’t building a bomb, he said, it should “do something meaningful on their enrichment capacity.”

As far as it goes, that’s a fair point. The rest of this piece explains why it’s fair, how we got here, and what the conversation consistently leaves out.

Jacobin just ran an interview with Vivek Chibber, an NYU sociologist and editor of Catalyst, under the title “What Makes Somebody a Marxist?” His answer is refreshingly short. Forget the labor theory of value, forget dialectics, forget the arguments over which dead revolutionary had the correct reading of Capital Volume II. What makes you a Marxist, he says, is believing three things: that class is the foundation of modern society, that class is defined by one group exploiting another, and that the way out is for working people to organize as a class.

I think Chibber is right about something important. I also think he’s looking in the wrong place for the fix.

The best idea in the interview isn’t about workers at all. It’s about owners. Chibber points out that capitalists are as boxed in as the people they employ: they have to compete, they have to squeeze out a profit, and if they don’t, someone else will take their place. In his words, capitalists are “no less prisoner to the market than workers are.”

“These were more fair-minded than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness, and searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so.” (Acts 17:11)

The Bereans got a compliment in Scripture for checking the apostle Paul’s work. Not for trusting him. Not for being impressed by his credentials, his miracles, or his résumé as a former Pharisee trained under Gamaliel. They listened eagerly, then went home and opened the Scriptures to see whether he was right.

That is the posture I want to bring to three things that have been on my mind: where authority actually comes from, what happens when powerful men mistake their own weapons for God’s judgment, and the one fire on this earth that no one, not a scientist, not a general, not a president, can call down or hold back.

There are two sentences you hear constantly in American politics, often from the same people, sometimes in the same breath.

The first one goes: You have to pay well to attract the best people. We hear it about CEOs. We hear it about bank executives. We hear it about school district administrators, whose salaries have to be competitive, we’re told, or the talent will go elsewhere.

The second one goes: Teachers are the problem. They’re not smart enough. They’re not rigorous enough. The schools are failing, and look who’s in front of the classroom.

Trump’s TIME interview threw out more claims than anyone could check in real time. Under the noise, three questions matter: Did he offer anything that would fix the economy? Did his answers hold together? And where did his energy actually go?

There’s a debate tactic called the Gish gallop. The name comes from creationist debater Duane Gish. The idea is simple: throw out claims faster than your opponent can answer them. Some claims are true, some are half-true, some are invented. It doesn’t matter. Debunking a claim takes ten times longer than making it. By the time anyone has untangled the third one, you’re on the twentieth.

On October 1, TIME published the transcript of its 75-minute Oval Office interview with President Trump, alongside a fact-check. Reading it straight through is exhausting. Whether intentional or not, the effect resembles a Gish gallop. In a single answer he can go from a golf tournament to the Iranian navy to gas prices in Iowa to California. When asked about the national debt, he went to Biden’s border policy, then to job numbers, then to the Fed, then to undisclosed “other means,” then to murder rates.

A young atheist creator recently posted a video reacting to a response from William Lane Craig, one of the best-known Christian apologists alive. She had asked a simple question: if God proved to her that he was real, why would that take away her free will? Christians kept telling her that God stays hidden to protect our freedom. She didn’t buy it. In no other part of life, she said, does gaining information destroy your ability to choose.

Craig answered on his podcast in about two minutes. He pushed back on her claim that information never takes away freedom, since you can’t freely believe you don’t have a heart once you know you do. Then he conceded something important. Even if God gave evidence so compelling that everyone believed he existed, he said, people would still have to choose whether to love and worship him. Finally, he suggested that God’s hiddenness might stir up a deeper longing for him, and might produce more love than clear proof would.

Her reaction to that concession was essentially: yes, that’s my whole point. If proof doesn’t remove the choice, why withhold the proof?

A recent Holy Post episode discussed an Atlantic piece by Elizabeth Bruenig on what she calls a growing “anti-empathy” movement on the right. It started with Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy and Allie Beth Stuckey’s Toxic Empathy. It has now reached Gad Saad’s “suicidal empathy,” the claim that compassion for outsiders will be the death of Western civilization.

Bruenig’s argument, and the hosts’ agreement with it, is that these books work as permission slips. They help conservatives quiet a conscience that feels uneasy about cutting food aid or deporting people to countries they’ve never lived in. The rebuttal from the other side is just as familiar: the left uses emotional images to push policies that don’t hold up to “sober analysis.”

So one side says, you’d agree with me if you had a heart. The other side says, you’d agree with me if you used your head. Nobody in the conversation is doing the obvious Christian thing, which is to ask what the text actually says.

Last week, RealClearPolicy ran an op-ed by Chris Abbott, the CEO of Pivot Bio, a company that sells microbial nitrogen to corn and wheat farmers. The headline was “Farm Families Plan in Decades,” and the pitch was warm: farmers think generationally, so the companies that serve them should too. His company’s way of doing that is a grant program that deposits $1,000 to $5,000 a year into Trump Accounts for the children of employees and qualifying farmer customers.

The line that stuck with me was this one: eighteen investments of $1,000 can grow to over $4 million by age 65.

That number is technically possible. It’s also the kind of number that only works if you don’t look at it too closely. So let’s look at it closely.