There’s a piece making the rounds from the Institute of Art and Ideas, where philosopher Kathryn Lawson argues that Christopher Nolan made a “dangerous mistake” in his new Odyssey. Her complaint: Nolan gave Odysseus a conscience. Homer didn’t. Homer’s Odysseus lies, kills, and manipulates his way home without anything resembling Nolan’s sustained moral reckoning — and Lawson, drawing on Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas, and Simone Weil, argues that this guiltlessness is the point. It’s a warning. Power doesn’t examine itself. It doesn’t need to. Give the audience a hero who feels bad about what he’s done, she says, and you hand them a comforting lie: that the powerful will change themselves once they understand the damage they’ve caused.

It’s a genuinely interesting argument. Arendt watched a man help run a genocide and testify, apparently sincerely, that he was just doing his job. That’s not a monster wracked with guilt. That’s a bureaucrat with a permission slip. Lawson’s not wrong that this is a real and underappreciated shape of evil — the kind that doesn’t require anyone to feel like a villain.

But the “external enforcement” model Lawson builds on Arendt, Levinas, and Weil is worth pressing on its own terms, not just at the level of how modern audiences receive it. Her argument is that Homeric ethics ran on a different architecture than ours: enforced by hospitality codes, by the gods, by force and defeat, rather than by the internal, guilt-based conscience of a modern subject. Give Odysseus a modern conscience, on this account, and you’re smuggling in an ethical machinery that world never had.

There’s a moment that happens to almost everyone now. Something goes wrong — a fight with a partner, a mistake at work, a scary symptom, a legal question you don’t want to say out loud to another human — and instead of calling someone, you open a chat window and start typing. It feels private. It feels like journaling. It is not journaling, and it is not privileged.

A recent Washington Post investigation traced a dozen court cases over the last two years where private chatbot conversations ended up as evidence — in divorce filings, in criminal prosecutions, in a wrongful-termination lawsuit. A teenager’s confused questions about his parents’ divorce. A college student asking ChatGPT at 4 a.m. whether police could trace vandalized cars back to him. A man’s private threats against an ex-girlfriend, forwarded by the AI company itself to the FBI. In one case, a financial executive under federal investigation asked Claude for help thinking through his defense — and a judge ruled the conversation wasn’t protected, because Claude isn’t a lawyer and no attorney had directed him to use it.

That last case is the whole article in miniature. So it’s worth being precise about the two different things people confuse when they talk about this.

Every few years, someone important writes an essay warning us that a new technology is about to reorganize the economy, and every few years the essay makes the same mistake: it treats the technology as the variable that matters. Bill Gates just wrote one of these essays about AI. He’s right that the disruption is coming fast. He’s right that we need a plan. But he’s aiming at the wrong target, and so is almost everyone else having this conversation.

The problem was never the machine. The problem has never been the machine. The problem is who captures the value the machine creates, and what they do with it.

Start with the claim, made constantly right now, that AI is somehow categorically different from every other labor-saving technology in history — that this time the disruption will be faster, broader, and harder to absorb than anything that came before it.

When Michelle Obama told Jon Stewart she doesn’t miss having her daughters at home, the internet did what the internet does. Critics called it cold. One commentator called her a narcissist. Another said the remark showed contempt for family life itself. Buried under the outrage was a two-word sentence that should have been unremarkable: “I’m good.”

It’s worth asking why that sentence landed as scandalous. And it’s worth asking what it actually tells us — about her marriage, about parenting, and about the assumption, so often treated as self-evident, that a good parent is supposed to ache when the house goes quiet.

On the podcast IMO, Stewart asked Obama whether she missed the daily work of parenting now that Malia and Sasha are grown. She said no. She followed it immediately with the things a two-word answer can’t carry on its own: that she loves her daughters, that she was seeing them for dinner that night, that she had “so much quality time” with them over the years. Then she drew a contrast — Barack cried when the girls left for college. She didn’t. Her Friday nights, she said, are no longer “wrecked with terror and fear” about where her daughters were.

A tweet has been making the rounds claiming Krispy Kreme stock has crashed more than 90%, and that the reason is simple: a private equity firm bought the company in 2016, decided to stop making doughnuts fresh in every store, and started shipping them from a single central location instead.

It’s a satisfying story. It’s also not quite right. The real story is messier, more interesting, and honestly more damning — it’s a story about debt, real estate, and a decade-long bet that you could turn an experience into a commodity without anyone noticing the difference.

In May 2016, JAB Holding Company — the private investment vehicle of Germany’s Reimann family — agreed to take Krispy Kreme private for $21 a share, about $1.35 billion total. JAB isn’t a traditional private equity fund with outside limited partners; it’s closer to a family holding company. But its acquisition strategy shared important features with private equity: JAB was in the middle of a multi-year buying spree that already included Keurig Green Mountain, Peet’s Coffee, Caribou Coffee, and Einstein Bros. Bagels, and it financed these deals the way PE firms typically do — with a lot of borrowed money.

My town — Rochelle, Illinois — has an ordinance that reads almost like a puzzle:

“The selling to the general public of new or used personal property in an area zoned residential shall be limited to no longer than three consecutive days with no more than three such sales per calendar year and at least one month between such three-day selling period.”

Three days. Three times a year. A month of cooldown in between. Nine total days out of 365 where a resident is allowed to sell things — new or used — to walk-up customers from their own property.

In January 2023, Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts labor and delivery nurse, strangled her three young children — five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan — at the family’s home in Duxbury. She then attempted to take her own life by jumping from a second-story window, an attempt that left her permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

Her husband at the time, Patrick Clancy, had left the house roughly 25 minutes earlier to pick up takeout and stop at a pharmacy. When he returned, the house was silent. He found the bedroom door locked, blood near the window, and Lindsay outside in the yard, seriously injured. He called 911. Only after he went looking for the children did the full scope of what happened become clear.

Since then, the case has moved through a lengthy pretrial process — including fights over medical records, a subpoena aimed at The New Yorker for reporter notes, and procedural questions unique to insanity defense cases — before finally going to trial in 2026 in Plymouth County Superior Court. The trial has drawn an unusually large, unusually online audience, complete with amateur “trial commentators,” TikTok theorists, and a devoted true-crime fandom dissecting testimony in near real time.

I was listening to a recent Holy Post episode where Skye Jethani made a point I hear often in Christian discourse about economics: Catholic social teaching, going back to Rerum Novarum, holds together two legitimate insights. Socialism is right that wealth distribution can be unjust. Capitalism is right that people deserve to keep what they build, rather than having it redistributed without their say.

It’s a tidy synthesis. It’s also built on a category error that’s common enough to pass unnoticed — one worth pulling apart, because getting it wrong misidentifies what socialism actually objects to, what capitalism actually defends, and — as it turns out — what Catholic social teaching itself actually says.

Start with the socialist side, since it’s the one most often flattened into a cartoon. The standard critique — running from Marx through market socialism, mutualism, and various strands of democratic socialism, though you don’t need to accept any one of these wholesale to find the underlying point useful — was never simply an objection to owning things. Nobody serious is proposing to seize your toothbrush, or the guitar you built by hand and sell at a farmers market.

There’s a scene playing out in California right now that deserves more attention than it’s getting, not because of who’s right, but because of what it reveals about how election-integrity concerns should — and shouldn’t — be pursued, even when the underlying concern is legitimate.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco has spent the better part of this year in possession of roughly 650,000 ballots from November 2025’s special election on Proposition 50, the measure that redrew California’s congressional maps. His department obtained search warrants and seized about 1,000 boxes of ballot materials from the Riverside County Registrar of Voters, launching a criminal investigation based on a claim from a local citizens’ group, the Riverside Election Integrity Team, that its own informal audit had turned up a gap of roughly 45,000 ballots between what was cast and what was counted.

That claim has been rejected by California election officials, including Secretary of State Shirley Weber, as lacking credible evidence. Attorney General Rob Bonta ordered Bianco to stand down. Bianco refused. The dispute has now landed in front of the California Supreme Court, which heard arguments this week on whether he has to return the ballots — and separately, whether the AG even has the statutory authority to shut an investigation like this down. Neither question has been resolved yet.

There’s a genre of commentary that’s become depressingly familiar: someone documents a president trading stocks ahead of policy announcements, or licensing the presidency to a stablecoin, or accepting a $400 million jet from a foreign government, and then a second someone arrives to explain, calmly and with citations, why none of it is technically corruption. Not under McDonnell v. United States. Not without a provable quid pro quo. Not unless you can produce the envelope of cash changing hands in a parking garage.

It’s a neat trick, and it’s not even a new one. Politics has always had access to lawyers, and lawyers have always been good at finding the seam between what’s wrong and what’s illegal. But it’s worth asking a much older question than “does this survive the McDonnell standard”: is it corrupt in the sense that the people who invented the word — long before America, long before the Constitution — would have recognized?

For that, you don’t need a law review article. You need Exodus.

Week four of Compass Church’s Foundations series is called “Serve in Teams.” It’s built around Mark 1:29–31 — Peter’s mother-in-law, healed of a fever, gets up and makes a meal for the disciples. From that single verse, the sermon extracts four “motivations” for service: gifting, community, significance, and gratitude. It’s a warm message, well-illustrated, and it closes on its strongest note — gratitude as “the Titan of motivations,” anchored in 2 Corinthians 5:15.

But sit with one number the sermon offers almost in passing: 2,662 volunteers serve at this church every year, unpaid. The preacher marvels at this. “That’s mindblowing,” he says. “These are thousands of people who work, who give the best of who they are, time and energy and expertise, and they don’t get paid.” He calls it “puzzling” in “a self-centered culture where it’s normally about... you better pay me.”

Here’s the thing nobody in the room says out loud: the person saying this is being paid. So is the other pastor on stage. So are the worship directors, the campus pastors, the executive staff. The sermon spends real energy marveling at the spiritual impressiveness of not being compensated for kingdom work — while being delivered by two people compensated for exactly that.

There’s a real and biblical argument buried in the idea that Christianity’s shrinking cultural footprint isn’t evidence of God’s absence. Israel was never more than a sliver of the ancient world’s population. Elijah once thought he was the last faithful man on earth and was wrong by exactly 7,000 people (1 Kings 19:18). Jesus said plainly that the way is narrow and few find it (Matthew 7:13-14). A Christian-majority West was always closer to a historical exception than a birthright, and its erosion doesn’t, by itself, mean God has withdrawn.

That much is worth saying, and worth hearing by anyone grieving the visible decline of American church culture.

But a recent piece making that argument — “Don’t Be Afraid, Jesus Is For The Few” — pairs a solid premise with a much shakier conclusion: that the shrinking numbers are best explained by a world that “hates the true God,” that emphasizing love and acceptance over repentance is a subtle capitulation to that hatred, and that the people leaving are, in effect, rejecting truth because they’d rather have comfort. It’s a clean story. It’s just not the story the evidence — or the text it’s built on — actually supports.

There’s a particular kind of religion writer who has spent the last year very worried about AI. Not worried the way you’d worry about a tool that might be used badly — worried the way you worry about a rival. John Piper has used part of his retirement to publicly campaign against pastors touching ChatGPT. The Gospel Coalition announced it won’t accept AI-written or AI-assisted submissions, on the theory that no computer program can determine truth. A recent podcast I listened to spent seven minutes theorizing about why evangelicals are unusually “AI-pilled” — political reasons, theological reasons, and, the panel’s favorite, a psychological craving for certainty that a computer can supposedly satisfy and a church full of denominations can’t.

Not one of the three hosts, despite having laptops open in front of them, typed a theological question into the AI they were discussing and looked at what came back.

That’s not a minor oversight. It’s the whole pattern.

There’s a story that gets passed around Christian social media like a mic drop. A believer asks a skeptic where human rights come from, if not from God. The skeptic says “natural law.” The believer asks, “and that comes from...?” The skeptic has no answer. Everyone in the comments nods. Case closed: without God, ethics is just vibes.

I don’t find it the mic drop people think it is, and here’s the argument for why.

The whole story rests on a single move: someone couldn’t articulate a foundation for their ethics on the spot, in casual conversation, so therefore no foundation exists. That doesn’t follow. Ask most Christians to give a non-circular defense of why God’s commands are good rather than just arbitrary — instead of good because God said so, which makes “good” meaningless — and you’ll get the same stammering. This isn’t a new problem; philosophers have been poking at it since Plato. Not being able to defend your position in the moment isn’t evidence the position is indefensible. It’s evidence that most people, regardless of what they believe, haven’t rehearsed metaethics at the dinner table.

There’s a version of the Gary, Indiana blackout story that’s gotten a lot of traction this week: socialism did this. Government-run utilities, chasing wind turbines instead of keeping the grid up, left one of America’s poorest cities baking in the dark. It’s a clean story. It has a villain, a moral, and a policy prescription. It is also, when you look at who actually runs the power grid in northwest Indiana, almost entirely beside the point.

Here’s what actually happened. On August 11th, a derecho tore through the region with winds up to 99 miles per hour. It snapped roughly 300 utility poles and 44 transmission poles, and knocked out 27 substations. It was, by the utility’s own account, the largest outage in its 137-year history — more than 300,000 customers lost power at the peak. Nine days later, tens of thousands of people in Gary were still sitting in the dark, and full restoration wasn’t targeted until nearly two weeks after the storm.

Notice what’s missing from that paragraph: any mention of solar, wind, gas, coal, or “the energy mix” at all. No sun. No solar. No wind. No turbines. No heat. No gas. No coal. What went down was wood and steel — poles and transmission towers, snapped by hurricane-force wind and falling trees. A distribution grid built on 1950s-era infrastructure, sitting under a summer canopy of mature oaks and maples, in a region that just got hit by one of the more violent wind events in its recorded history. That’s the whole story of why Gary lost power. It would have been exactly as true if every electron on that grid came from a coal plant, a nuclear reactor, or a bank of solar panels — wind doesn’t care what generates the electricity it’s about to disconnect from your house.

A study crossed my timeline recently, packaged into a tidy, inspirational tweet from Adam Grant: a single quotable line distilling four studies’ worth of psychology. “Leisure is not a bug. It’s a feature of a good life.” The stat was real — in about 1 of every 7 leisure moments, people feel guilty for not being “productive.” Grant doesn’t say much beyond that; the tweet is short, and it isn’t making an explicit argument about causes. But that’s exactly the problem. In the absence of an explanation, the post leaves readers with the easiest one to reach for: guilt is a mindset, and the fix is to stop feeling it. That’s less a claim Grant is making than a vibe the format defaults to — the whole inspirational-tweet genre runs on compressing research into permission-slip one-liners, and this is what gets lost every time.

Read past the headline number, and the study (Ding & Bench, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science) tells a much more specific story. Leisure guilt isn’t evenly distributed. It clusters — higher among women, people with lower socioeconomic status, and younger adults. That’s not a mindset problem. It’s a pattern, and patterns like this usually point to something structural rather than something personal.

Start with money, because it’s the most concrete thread. The study found that people with lower socioeconomic status report more leisure guilt. That tracks with something anyone who has lived paycheck to paycheck already knows in their body: when your hours are precarious, your schedule is not your own, and every dollar has already been spent before it arrives, “free time” doesn’t feel free. It feels like time you’re not being paid for, time that isn’t solving anything, time you’ll pay for later when the bill comes due and you didn’t pick up the extra shift.

A woman named Monique called into The Ramsey Show recently with a problem. She’s a self-made millionaire. She’s spent half a million dollars putting her two daughters through college. And now she doesn’t want to leave them a dime, because — and I’m quoting her directly here — “they’ve turned into socialists.”

Dave laughed. Of course he laughed. It’s a good bit. Rich lady, poor kids, culture war, twelve minutes, done.

But here’s the detail that got skipped past on air, the one nobody on the show seemed interested in sitting with: both daughters are socialists. Not just the one making $50,000 a year, the one you’d expect to have opinions about the distribution of wealth because she’s on the wrong end of it. The other daughter too — the one in the top 1% of earners, married, doing great, by every metric Dave Ramsey has ever used to measure a human life, winning.

There’s a moment in the third installment of Compass Church’s “Foundations” series where the pastor reads the same verse twice, almost like he knows it’s the key to the whole thing, and then walks right past what it’s actually saying.

The text is Mark 1:35–38:

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!” Jesus replied, “Let us go somewhere else — to the nearby villages — so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.”

Imagine your company announces a new remote-work policy. You can work from anywhere. There’s just one catch: if you move to Bangalore, your salary drops 50%.

Nobody would accept that framing at face value. You’d ask the obvious question: did my work get worse? Same output, same hours, same skill, same laptop. The only thing that changed is the price of rent on the other side of the world. And yet this is, functionally, the policy a large and growing share of remote-first companies already run — just calibrated in smaller, more digestible increments. A 2025 LinkedIn Workforce Report found that 68% of fully remote companies now apply some form of location-based pay adjustment, up from 41% just three years earlier. Move somewhere cheaper, and your ability suddenly seems to be worth less. Move somewhere expensive, and it’s worth more. Nothing about your ability moved. Only your address did.

We’ve absorbed this as normal because it’s dressed up in the neutral, technocratic language of HR: “cost of living adjustment.” “Geographic pay differential.” “Location-based compensation.” But strip away the spreadsheet language and ask a simple question: if I can move to India tomorrow and do precisely the same work, at the same standard, for the same company — why does my employer suddenly deserve to keep half my salary?

Jubilee’s “Face Off” format is built for viral clips, not footnotes — sixteen minutes per topic, no time to slow down and check a citation. Which is a shame, because both Allie Beth Stuckey and Monte Mater throw a lot of citations: Augustine, the Southern Baptist Convention, Ephesians 6, Randall Balmer, Matthew 19. Some of it holds up perfectly. Some of it doesn’t. And on the genuinely contested questions — abortion, gender roles, same-sex marriage — both sides are doing real interpretive work that Scripture doesn’t settle on its own, which is exactly why sincere Christians land in different places on them.

Here’s a claim-by-claim accounting: what’s textually solid, what’s overstated, what’s flatly disputed by historians, and what neither debater actually addressed.

The real exegetical fight buried under this debate is nephesh/ruach versus imago Dei — and both sides are pulling from real texts, not inventing them.