Lindsey Graham died this weekend after 23 years in the Senate, and the tributes are already writing him into legend: dealmaker, foreign policy hawk, the president’s golf buddy and confidant. What they won’t say plainly is the thing that actually defined his career — a near-perfect record of saying one thing when it cost him nothing, and doing the opposite the moment it cost him something.

That’s worth examining now, not because the dead deserve cruelty, but because the pattern he modeled is still being copied by the living. And there’s an old, unfashionable framework for thinking about it that modern politics has mostly discarded: the idea that God notices the gap between what a leader claims to believe and how he actually treats the people under his power — and that “it’s just politics” was never a defense that held up in front of Him.

Graham’s national career was launched, more or less, by playing prosecutor. As a House impeachment manager during Bill Clinton’s 1998–99 trial, Graham built his early national brand on a simple, morally confident premise: character counts, private conduct has public consequences, and a president who lies about his personal life forfeits the public’s trust. It was a good story, and it worked. It vaulted a little-known South Carolina congressman into a Senate seat in 2003 and, eventually, a national platform.

There’s a phrase people reach for at almost every funeral, every eulogy, every awkward moment when someone’s obituary needs softening: “You shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.” Somebody’s cousin will invoke it like it’s Exodus 21. It isn’t. It’s Sparta.

This is the latest entry in a series I keep stumbling into by accident: sayings that feel biblical, get quoted like they’re biblical, and turn out to have absolutely nothing to do with the Bible.

The idea traces back to Chilon of Sparta, one of the semi-legendary Seven Sages of Greece, writing in the 6th century BCE. His original line, preserved in Greek, was blunt: τὸν τεθνηκóτα μὴ κακολογεῖν — “Of the dead, do not speak ill.”

Last week I walked into a Best Buy to get my daughter a laptop for college. We found one for $650 — fast processor, plenty of memory, everything she needs for coursework. The only problem: it wouldn’t run Fortnite.

So the salesperson steered us toward an $800 “gaming” laptop instead. Except it wasn’t actually a gaming laptop — it was a bait-and-switch dressed up as an upgrade. It had 8GB of RAM, half of what the $650 homework machine had, and an RTX 3050, a graphics card that was already several years old. In other words: slower for everyday work than the cheaper computer, while only barely capable of modern gaming. The real gaming PCs in the store started at $1,000. My own laptop, which handles AAA titles without issue, cost around $1,200. The $800 model wasn’t a gaming laptop at all — it was a worse laptop with a gaming label stapled on, priced to sit exactly in the gap between what we’d already found acceptable and what we’d need to spend to get what we were actually being sold.

Before we could leave, the salesperson tried to hand us a “needs assessment” survey to find us the “right” laptop. I already knew the right laptop. I’d found it. His actual job, in that moment, was to persuade me that spending another $150 was reasonable. Nobody in that store was tasked with persuading Best Buy that earning $150 less on the sale was reasonable, or that paying their employees $150 more per week or month was reasonable. Every conversation happening in that store assumed my budget was flexible. None of them assumed the company’s profit target was, or that the people working there might deserve a share of it.

Seven years ago, my boss got my girlfriend’s name wrong. He thought it was Veronica. It wasn’t — her name was Victoria — but he called her “Ronny” anyway, confidently, like a man who’d never once been corrected in his life. It stuck as a joke between us for years.

More recently, I was in a car with someone whose friends call her Nessa. I call her Vanessa. I asked what name she liked to be called and joked, “My friends call me Nessa, but he calls me Vanessa, because he’s an asshole.” I was quoting my own bit back at her, except the joke had traveled seven years and rearranged itself into something new. She told me she actually likes being called Vanessa. So I kept it.

That’s where my book, My Name is Veronica, came from. Not from a prompt. From a wrong name in an office seven years ago, and a right answer in a car a few weeks ago, and a decade of paying attention to the way people’s names bend depending on who’s saying them and why. Ronny is a joke that means “I never really knew you.” Vanessa, chosen on purpose, is a name that means “I asked.”

There’s a new federal policy, effective this month, that cuts off student loans to college programs whose graduates earn less than the average high school diploma holder four years out. The Department of Education now compares graduates’ earnings against the median earnings of workers whose education stopped with a high school diploma — the logic being that if a degree doesn’t outperform not having one, the loan program shouldn’t be underwriting it. Over 800 programs got flagged. Juilliard music. Cooper Union fine arts. Bard’s liberal arts track. The framing in the press has been triumphant — finally, some accountability, some rigor, some grown-up math applied to a system that’s spent decades burying teenagers in debt for degrees that don’t pay off.

Here’s the part nobody’s saying out loud: the “average high school graduate” baseline they’re measuring against is also often not enough to afford a home in most of the country anymore. So the policy isn’t asking “does this degree clear the bar for a dignified, stable adult life.” It’s asking “does this degree beat a bar that’s already broken.” And when you build a rigorous-sounding accountability system on top of a broken baseline, you get something that looks like discipline and functions like a shell game — reshuffling which 22-year-olds get to be disappointed, without touching why so many of them are disappointed in the first place.

Somewhere in the last two generations, American life quietly organized itself around a deal. Nobody signed anything. Nobody voted on it. But the deal was everywhere — in guidance counselor offices, in parents’ voices, in every graduation speech: do the right things, in the right order, and the outcome takes care of itself.

Servings: 4
Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 1 hour
Total Time: 1 hour 5 minutes

4 sweet potatoes (about 6 ounces each), washed

1/2 cup butter, softened

Every Fourth of July, someone reposts a graphic claiming America was “founded on biblical principles” and the Ten Commandments are “the basis of our legal system.” It’s a comforting story. It’s also mostly wrong — or at least much thinner than the graphic suggests.

That doesn’t mean the Bible was irrelevant to the founding era. It was everywhere, culturally. Founding-era Americans quoted it constantly, preached from it, and absorbed its language into their political vocabulary. But there’s a difference between a text being culturally ambient and a text being the source of a nation’s laws. When you actually trace the documents, the debates, and the court records, the specifically biblical foundation turns out to be a lot thinner than “Judeo-Christian nation” rhetoric implies.

Start with the most-quoted line in American political history: “all men are created equal... endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” People hear “Creator” and assume Genesis. But Thomas Jefferson, who wrote it, rejected many core Christian doctrines — the Trinity, biblical miracles, the divinity of Christ — and is commonly described by historians as a Deist or “theistic rationalist,” terms for someone who believed in a distant, providential God without much use for revelation or scripture as authoritative. Similar heterodox labels get applied to Franklin, Madison, and arguably Washington.

Russell Moore had a line in Christianity Today this week that I can’t stop turning over: Christians can love America, he wrote, “with all of its flaws and failures,” precisely because we don’t expect it to be the Kingdom of God. He goes on to warn against both Christian nationalism and progressive utopianism, and to argue for a kingdom-first faith that frees people to love God and country without confusing the two.

I don’t think Moore is trying to excuse anything. I think he’s trying to protect something real: a way to stay engaged without either despairing or deifying the state, a guardrail against exactly the utopian politics — left or right — that treats a government as the vehicle of ultimate salvation. That’s a legitimate worry and he’s right to have it. But I want to sit with the word he reached for, “flaws,” because I think it’s doing something it was never built to do, and that thing is worth naming before we go any further.

“Flaws and failures” is a phrase built for a nation that sometimes falls short of its ideals. It is not built for a nation that is, today, conducting lethal military strikes on people who were never charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime. It is not built for a detention system where more people died last year than in the previous four combined. Once “flaws and failures” is asked to cover both categories — the ordinary shortfalls of a real country and the specific, chosen, ongoing infliction of death — something has quietly gone wrong. You’ve confused the ultimate and the proximate, the very move Moore warns against, just run in the other direction: not by treating the nation as holy, but by making its conduct sound mild enough that loving it “anyway” requires no reckoning at all.

A few days ago, Christianity Today ran a piece comparing George Washington’s Farewell Address to Moses’ final words to Israel. The pairing makes intuitive sense: both are addressed to a people about to be tested by their own success, both warn that the real danger isn’t an outside enemy but internal rot, and both lean hard on a single load-bearing idea — that a nation cannot govern itself by law alone. It needs a moral floor underneath the law, or the law eventually gives way.

It’s a good argument. It’s also one Americans have been making about their own country since before there was a country, and it’s worth actually sitting with what these men meant by “moral,” because I don’t think we do. We like quoting the warning. We’re much less interested in the content of the thing we were warned to keep.

Deuteronomy is framed as Moses’ farewell — his final address to Israel on the plains of Moab, delivered knowing he would die before crossing into the land he’d spent forty years walking toward. The core of it, chapters 28 through 30, lays out blessing and curse in stark, almost legal terms: obedience brings prosperity, unfaithfulness brings exile. “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life.”

Stephen A. Smith spent part of this week telling his audience that the Los Angeles Lakers cannot win a championship with three White stars atop the roster, because — in his words — no team has ever done it. He didn’t stop there. He extended the logic to golf. He said it “had to be said.” When the backlash came, he didn’t walk it back. He doubled down, calling it “just facts.”

It is worth taking the claim seriously enough to actually check it, because Smith didn’t, and neither did the columnist who wrote the outraged response to him. Both of them skipped the part where you look at the data.

So let’s look at it.

There is a very specific kind of American genius on display this week in Washington, D.C., and it has nothing to do with fireworks. It’s the genius of taking an event that has been on the calendar since roughly the Obama administration and still finding a way to turn it into a scramble.

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was never a surprise. Congress chartered a bipartisan commission — America250 — a full decade ago to plan it. Ten years. That’s enough time to plan a moon landing, build a stadium, or raise a child through most of grade school. It is, in theory, more than enough time to plan a birthday party for a 250-year-old country that, last anyone checked, was not going to sneak up on anybody.

And yet here we are, 48 hours out, with a rebranded, White House-aligned rival organization called Freedom 250 running the actual show; a fireworks display delayed past 10 p.m. to make room for a speech; a heat advisory; a pollution advisory; and a felony indictment against a retired Olympic athlete for allegedly touching some peeling paint.

There’s a version of evangelism that looks a lot like a courtroom. Someone makes a claim, the other side pushes back, and both parties dig in — reloading arguments, waiting for their turn to speak rather than actually listening. We tell ourselves that if we just find the right logic, the right verse, the right emotional appeal, the walls will come down and the person will believe.

Maybe sometimes they do. But I don’t think that’s actually what we were called to.

To be clear up front: the New Testament is full of preaching, teaching, and reasoned persuasion. Jesus reasoned with the Pharisees. Paul reasoned in the synagogues. Peter preached at Pentecost and three thousand believed that day. Words matter, and the apostles used plenty of them. The question isn’t whether arguments have a place. It’s whether winning them is the thing Jesus actually says will mark his people. I don’t think it is — and a few passages make the case better than I can.

There’s a genre of evangelical think-piece that’s become its own subgenre lately: the branding exercise. First it was “patriot vs. nationalist” — as if the distinction between those two words was the load-bearing wall keeping American Christianity from collapsing into idolatry. Now Russell Moore and others have moved on to “faithful citizen,” a term meant to signal something like: engaged, but not captured. Present in the public square, but not owned by it.

I want to push on the premise underneath all three terms, because I don’t think it holds. The premise is that the Christian’s job is to find the correct posture toward the state — the right dial setting between disengagement and idolatry. But when you actually go looking for Jesus’s own pattern, you don’t find a dial. You find a man who never appears especially interested in being regarded as a good citizen of anything Rome would recognize as a state — while remaining fully embedded in something else entirely: the covenant community of Israel, under Torah.

That distinction matters more than it looks like it does, and it’s the one I want to hold onto carefully here. Jesus’s relationship to Torah and Jewish communal life is not the same question as Jesus’s relationship to Rome. Collapsing them is how these arguments usually go wrong. He’s fully embedded in the first. He is remarkably unconcerned with civic legitimacy in the second sense — not indifferent to Roman oppression itself, but consistently refusing to pursue Roman political solutions to it — except when Rome tries to make a claim on him directly, at which point something sharper than unconcern shows up.

There’s an old saying: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. B.P.J. is a hammer. It was swung at a nail that, on closer inspection, isn’t really shaped like a nail at all — it’s more like a dozen different fasteners, each requiring a different tool, that the Court decided to treat as one problem because treating them separately was inconvenient.

The ruling holds that states may bar transgender girls from girls’ school sports categorically — no case-by-case review, no individualized assessment, no accounting for whether a specific athlete actually poses the safety or fairness risk the state claims to be solving. One rule. Every sport. Every athlete. Forever, unless a legislature says otherwise.

That’s the part that should trouble anyone who cares about how the law is supposed to work, regardless of what you believe about the underlying question of transgender athletic participation.

Every kid who ever broke a vase learned the same lesson at the same age: “I didn’t mean to” is a magic phrase. Say it fast enough, mean it enough, and the crime changes shape. The vase is still broken. Nothing about the world is different. But you are.

We’re right to teach this to children. A kid who trips and shatters something is not the same as a kid who smashes it in a rage, and treating them identically would be its own kind of injustice. Intent is one of the oldest and most defensible ideas in moral life — arguably one of the few things every serious legal tradition agrees on.

Which is exactly why it’s such a good thing to hide behind.

There’s a stat rattling around right now that’s easy to skim past: the rise of large language models roughly tripled the number of new book releases between 2022 and 2025, and more than half of everything published in 2025 now contains AI-generated text somewhere in it. Average quality, measured by how much people actually use what they buy, went down over that same period. Researchers Imke Reimers and Joel Waldfogel tracked this in a recent NBER working paper, and the causal story they tell is narrower than “AI makes books worse.” It’s this: the books that mix in AI content score lower on average, and since those books now make up the majority of new releases, they drag the average down. Strip out the AI-containing books, and the human-only average barely moved.

That’s a strange, ambiguous fact to build a moral panic on. So naturally, we built one anyway — and the shape the panic has taken tells you more about labor than about literature.

Here’s the sentence doing the most work in this whole debate, in one form or another: prompting isn’t real labor, so it shouldn’t be rewarded like real labor.

In 1852, Frederick Douglass stood before the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and asked a question no one in that room could answer comfortably: What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? He built his answer carefully. First he praised the framers — called them brave, great, statesmen, patriots, heroes, men who believed justice and liberty were final, not slavery and oppression. He let his audience nod along, let them feel the warm agreement of shared reverence. And then he turned it: You may well cherish the memory of such men... as we contrast it with these degenerate times. The trap closed. If the framers were what you say they were, then look at what you have made of their work.

I want to ask a version of that question today, aimed somewhere Douglass didn’t quite aim it. Not at the nation. At the Christians inside it.

What, to a Christian, is your Fourth of July?

There’s a claim that circulates with depressing regularity, usually dressed up in the language of “just asking questions” or “just looking at the data”: Black people earn less because Black people have lower IQs, and IQ is fixed at birth. It sounds clinical. It sounds like it’s just reporting numbers. It is, in fact, a chain of bad inferences wearing a lab coat.

The test-score gap it points to is real. Almost everything built on top of that fact is not — at least not according to the weight of evidence currently available.

Average IQ test scores in the U.S. do differ by racial group, with Black test-takers historically scoring lower than white test-takers by something in the range of 10 to 15 points. That’s not in dispute. What’s in dispute is what that gap means — and on that question, the weight of evidence now supports a fairly specific answer.

On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Trump v. Barbara, the case testing whether President Trump’s executive order denying automatic citizenship to children of undocumented or temporarily present parents could survive contact with the Fourteenth Amendment. By a 6–3 vote, it could not. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for a majority that included both liberal justices and Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett, traced the right of birthright citizenship back through English common law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Court’s own 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and concluded that a child born on American soil to parents living here — even unlawfully, even temporarily — is a citizen at birth.

It’s worth being precise about what the executive order actually proposed, because it shapes how seriously to take the dissent that would have upheld it. The order did not ask for a case-by-case determination of whether a given child would otherwise be left without any nationality. It imposed a blanket rule: if a parent was undocumented or here on a temporary basis, the child simply did not qualify for citizenship, full stop, regardless of whether the child had any claim to citizenship anywhere else. There was no statelessness test built into the policy — no mechanism to ask, before stripping citizenship, “does this particular baby actually have another country to belong to?” That absence matters for everything that follows.

Three justices disagreed, and their argument turns on a single idea: that a baby can be born somewhere without yet having a home there. Citizenship, in their reading, isn’t just a place of birth — it’s a legal bond that has to be built, not merely arrived at by accident of geography. Whether you find that persuasive or not, it’s worth taking seriously, because it’s not going away.

There’s a particular kind of fluorescent-lit nostalgia attached to the American mall: the food court, the arcade in the basement, the kid behind the Orange Julius counter who was your friend’s older brother. For about forty years, the mall was the default place American teenagers existed in public. Now it’s increasingly a place they’re escorted out of by security guards checking IDs at the door. Understanding how we got from one to the other says less about retail real estate than it does about what happened to teenage life itself.

The enclosed American mall traces back to Southdale Center in suburban Minneapolis, which opened in 1956. Its architect, Victor Gruen, was trying to recreate something he missed from prewar Europe: the bustling town square, climate-controlled and relocated to the American suburb. It worked almost too well. By the 1980s there were roughly 2,500 enclosed malls across the country, and they had become the default third place for an entire generation — somewhere between home and school, with none of the supervision of either.

What made the mall function as a teen habitat rather than just a shopping venue wasn’t any single feature — it was the density of ongoing relationships it forced on you. It employed teenagers directly: the food court counters, the mall-chain clothing stores, the movie theater, the arcade — classic first jobs, the place a 16-year-old learned what a paycheck and a dress code felt like, answerable to a manager who’d remember their name. It was where you ran into the same friend group every weekend, where the security guard recognized you from last month, where the kid working the pretzel stand was someone you went to school with, where you might be trying to impress someone you had a crush on and would see again next Saturday whether it went well or not. None of these relationships were especially deep on their own. But stacked together, they meant a teenager at the mall was rarely anonymous. Someone was going to remember how you behaved, and you were going to be back. The mall wasn’t well-behaved because teenagers were inherently better-behaved in 1985 — it was well-behaved because almost everyone there had something to lose by acting badly in front of people they’d see again.