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.

A note before we start: everything described below about the night in question comes from a civil complaint. None of it has been proven in court. At least one of the accused men denies it through his attorney. I’m going to be careful about that, because part of the point of this piece is how hard it is to know what happened after the fact.

At 1:42 in the morning on October 20, 2024, according to a lawsuit filed this month, a member of Cornell’s Chi Phi fraternity posted a message to a Snapchat group called “Chi Phi Actives.” It told his brothers there was “free pussy” upstairs.

Upstairs, according to the complaint, was a 20-year-old student. She had arrived at the house visibly drunk after a sorority event, and two members had pressured her into snorting what they told her was ketamine. She alleges that she was sexually assaulted by multiple men over several hours, until around 5:45 a.m.

Kendall Kotzmacher lost a softball game, and she was heartbroken. Then she wrote a story about why. The story says one player beat her. The scoreboard says something a little different.

On September 27, Fox News ran an opinion piece by Kendall Kotzmacher, now a softball player at Colorado Christian University. In 2025 she was a senior at White Bear Lake High School in Minnesota. Her team made the state tournament and lost in the semifinals to Champlin Park, a team with a transgender pitcher. Champlin Park went on to win the state title.

Her essay says her season ended because of that pitcher. It is a sincere piece, and her tears were real. But “why did we lose?” is a question with an answer written down in numbers. So let’s read those numbers slowly and simply, one turn at a time, the way you’d walk a kid through a game from the bleachers.

A question has been making the rounds on Facebook: how do you prove AI “art” doesn’t involve mindfulness to someone who thinks prompting is mindful?

You can’t. That’s the honest answer. Mindfulness happens inside a person, and you can’t audit someone else’s attention from the outside. You can’t prove a painter wasn’t daydreaming about lunch while laying down a sky, either.

Somebody can type a prompt with total focus. Somebody else can paint on autopilot. The activity doesn’t tell you what was going on in the head.

I recently watched a video from a working artist who sells paintings at art fairs. She’d just come off a show that went badly, and then she scrolled through social media and saw post after post from other artists at the same show thanking the organizers, the volunteers, the wonderful patrons. Best weekend ever. Can’t wait for next year.

That wasn’t what she saw from her booth.

She gave real numbers, which I respect. For the two previous years she’d made about $5,100 to $5,200 at this show. This year she made $3,600, down about 30 percent. Booth fees ran from $500 to just under $700. She was paying an assistant by the hour. Some vendors had hotel bills on top of that. It was 95 degrees with a heat index of 102, and she and her assistant took turns going to a nearby Barnes & Noble to cool off because they were getting dizzy. On Saturday afternoon, which should be the busiest stretch of the whole weekend, the aisles were close to empty. The show had also been scheduled on the same weekend as the zoo’s biggest fundraiser and the opening of the Kansas State Fair.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to figure out that a rice cooker isn’t just for rice.

I’m not talking about the old kind, the pot with a glass lid, a hole in it, and a single switch that clicks off when the water runs out. I mean the small “portable” models: a sealed, hinged lid with a gasket, a carry handle, a locking latch, and a little computer chip that manages the heat in stages. They run around $40. They are not pressure cookers, whatever the lid makes you think, but the sealed lid holds heat and moisture far better than the old style, and the chip keeps things from scorching or drying out.

Once you realize what goes in them, it’s hard to go back. And once you own more than one, something even better happens: your kitchen starts working like the counter at a burrito-bowl chain.

On September 24, Fox News ran an opinion piece by Horace Cooper, a legal commentator and former counsel to House Majority Leader Dick Armey, arguing that “lawsuit abuse” has become an affordability crisis. The hook is the Supreme Court’s new term, which opens October 5 with Suncor Energy v. Boulder County, a case over whether federal law blocks local governments from suing oil companies for climate damages. From there Cooper widens the lens: nuclear verdicts, antitrust suits against fire-truck makers, mass torts over ultra-processed food and infant formula. His conclusion is that America’s tort system imposes a hidden “tort tax” on every household, and that reform is overdue.

I checked his numbers. Most of them are real. The problem is what they’re counting.

Cooper’s central statistic is that U.S. tort costs hit $529 billion in 2022, about 2.1% of GDP, and could approach $1 trillion by 2030. Those figures are accurate. He doesn’t say where they come from: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform, the business lobby’s tort-reform arm. That doesn’t make them false, but readers deserve to know the estimate comes from the side that wants the estimate to be big.

Last Friday, Texas state Sen. Angela Paxton spoke to the Texas Federation of Republican Women. Her speech was titled “The Elephant in the Room.”

The elephant was her husband.

Technically, her estranged husband. In July 2025, after 38 years of marriage, she filed for divorce “on biblical grounds.” Her filing alleged that Ken Paxton had committed adultery. In a public statement, she said marriage is “a sacred covenant,” that she had earnestly pursued reconciliation, and that staying in the marriage would not honor God.

Holy Post recently gathered its whole bench for a panel: Phil Vischer, Skye Jethani, Kaitlyn Schiess, and Esau McCaulley. They were responding to two books released on back-to-back weeks. One was Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s follow-up to Jesus and John Wayne. The other was Bonnie Kristian’s defense of evangelicalism. On paper, those books disagree. Du Mez argues the problems are baked into the movement. Kristian argues the problems come from the surrounding culture, and evangelicalism is getting blamed for them.

The best moment in the episode wasn’t about either book. It was about a bookstore.

Skye brought up a passage from Du Mez’s work. In it, a Christian bookstore owner from the 1980s or ‘90s explains the business model: find out what customers want and give it to them. A store that tries to change what its customers want will go bankrupt.

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.