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.

There is an argument made frequently in certain Christian circles that goes something like this: because Adam was created before Eve, men have a God-given authority over women. It is presented as though it were simply there in the text, obvious to anyone who reads it. The creation order, the argument goes, establishes the hierarchy.

But spend some time actually reading the Genesis creation accounts — slowly, in sequence, paying attention to what the text says and what it conspicuously does not say — and a very different picture emerges. Not just a neutral picture. An almost inverted one.

Genesis 1 moves through the days of creation with a drumbeat of divine approval. Light — good. Sky and sea — good. Land and vegetation — good. Sun, moon, stars — good. Birds and sea creatures — good. Land animals — good. And at the end of Day Six, after humanity is created male and female in the image of God — very good.

When you sit down with a book, you’re holding the finished object. The cover, the weight of it, the first sentence — everything has been compressed into a clean, presentable artifact. What you can’t see is the two years of walks, false starts, abandoned chapters, and 3am realizations that preceded it.

That gap — between the messy human process of making a book and the polished thing readers actually encounter — is the part that matters. And it’s the part the publishing world’s current argument about AI keeps skipping over.

Every book worth reading starts long before the first word is typed.

There is an image most of us carry of the court jester: a grinning man in a bells-and-motley hat, somersaulting across a stone floor for the amusement of a fat king. It is a caricature, and like most caricatures, it flattens something far more complicated.

The real history of court jesters runs from ancient Egypt to the Aztec Empire, from the slave markets of Rome to the literary salons of Tudor England. It encompasses genuinely powerful figures who bent the ears of monarchs, scholars who wrote the only insider accounts we have of their profession, and — in its darker chapters — people with disabilities and unusual physical appearances who were purchased, collected, and put on display with no say in the matter.

The jester’s story is two stories, running in parallel for centuries, and it’s worth telling both.

There’s a particular kind of stupidity that doesn’t look like stupidity at all. It looks like efficiency. It looks like optimization. It looks like shareholder value and quarterly earnings and the disciplined elimination of anything that doesn’t immediately contribute to the bottom line.

It is the stupidity of a man who burns his house down for warmth.

Over the last fifty years, the dominant logic of American business increasingly made exactly this trade — systematically dismantling the educational and industrial pipeline that created economic dominance, in pursuit of profits that depended on that pipeline existing. We offshored the factories. We defunded the trade schools. The prevailing message became: making things is for people who couldn’t do anything better. And now we are staring at a shipbuilding gap with China so severe that Senator Tim Sheehy — a former Navy SEAL — recently described it as “quite scary,” noting that China builds ships 230 times faster than we do.

How the Trump administration is cutting food assistance, child care, and health coverage — while waging a billion-dollar war and pledging hundreds of billions more for reconstruction abroad

In early April 2026, President Trump stood before guests at a private White House Easter luncheon and said the quiet part out loud.

“Don’t send any money for day care,” he told his budget director, Russell Vought, as he recounted the conversation to attendees. “The United States can’t take care of day care. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars. We can’t take care of day care.”

Disneyland is an optimized queue disguised as magic. Las Vegas is an optimized casino disguised as a city. Buc-ee’s is an optimized convenience store disguised as a destination.

This is not a criticism, exactly. It is an observation about what Buc-ee’s actually is, underneath the round-cheeked beaver and the cult following and the highway billboards counting down the miles. The chain has 80 to 120 fuel pumps per location, a mascot printed on everything from onesies to throw pillows, and a genuine following that makes grown adults plan highway detours. It also has, at time of writing, an F rating from the Better Business Bureau — because Buc-ee’s has publicly stated it does not respond to complaints forwarded by the BBB. These two facts live comfortably together once you understand what the place actually is.

What it is: a very large store that wants your money and wants you gone, as quickly as possible, having spent as much as possible. What it feels like: a beloved Texas institution, a road trip tradition, a place worth driving out of your way to visit. The distance between those two things is the most impressive feat of branding in American retail.

Every so often, the Sunday tithe sermon rolls around and the pastor lands on Malachi 1. You know the passage. God confronts the priests of Israel for offering blind, lame, and sick animals on the altar. The congregation nods. The point is made: don’t give God your leftovers. The offering plate comes around.

It’s not a wrong reading. But it’s an incomplete one — and the gap between incomplete and complete is where the real richness of the text lives.

When Malachi records God’s rebuke — “When you offer blind animals in sacrifice, is that not evil? And when you offer those that are lame or sick, is that not evil?” (Malachi 1:8) — the immediate point is clear: the offering is dishonoring. You wouldn’t bring a lame animal as a gift to your governor. Why would you bring one to the Lord of hosts?

There is a particular kind of meal that shows up again and again in human history: the meal you eat standing up, bag packed, shoes on, because freedom might come tonight and you need to be ready for it. And there is another kind of meal — the one you eat sitting down, years or centuries later, to remember the first one.

Passover is both of these meals at once. So, in its own way, is Communion. And Juneteenth, though it isn’t a meal in the same liturgical sense, lives in the same family of memory: a day built around the gap between the moment freedom was declared and the moment freedom was known.

Put them side by side and something becomes visible that’s easy to miss when you only look at one.

A piece published this week in American Thinker makes a confident argument: the U.S. economy is healing, the numbers prove it, and if 63% of Americans still disapprove of how Donald Trump is handling the economy, that’s a Republican PR failure. The solution, the author concludes, is a sharper messaging machine.

It’s a tidy diagnosis. The problem is that the data it uses to make the argument — and the data it leaves out — tell a more complicated story. Public frustration with the economy isn’t primarily a perception problem. It’s a math problem.

The article’s opening claim is that “core inflation now sits at 2.9 percent,” which it calls “less than half the 6.0 percent rate recorded at the same point under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”

There is a particular kind of American who believes deeply in self-reliance. He distrusts government handouts. He thinks welfare creates dependency. He has strong opinions about people who take public money for private choices. He voted for every candidate who promised to cut food stamps, reform Medicaid, and make people earn their benefits.

He also just applied for his child’s Empowerment Scholarship Account.

Arizona’s ESA program — a universal, no-income-limit transfer of state tax dollars to families who choose private or home education — is now approaching $1 billion per year in spending. It is, by any straightforward definition, a welfare program. It is a cash transfer from taxpayers to private individuals for a personal consumption choice. It has no means test. It is available to millionaires. And it is overwhelmingly used by people who were already making the choice it subsidizes.

There’s a meme going around. You’ve probably seen it. A man, looking haggard and noble, captioned with something like: I work 60 hours a week, pay for dinner, fix things around the house... The implication being that he is doing his part. That somewhere in a cosmic ledger, the scales are balanced.

There’s a counter-meme too. A new mom listing everything her body has been through — pregnancy, labor, postpartum recovery, breastfeeding at 3am, navigating a hormonal landscape that would level most people — and concluding that she shouldn’t have to pay for dinner.

Both memes have the same disease.

Cynicism has no imagination.

It can diagnose. It can indict. It can predict, with remarkable accuracy, exactly how people will fail you again. What it cannot do — what it is structurally incapable of doing — is picture repentance. And a Christianity that cannot picture repentance has lost something absolutely essential to its identity.

Russell Moore wrote recently that cynicism “filters out not only the genuine danger and fakeness we rightly want to avoid — it filters out everything and everyone.” That’s true as far as it goes. But the deeper problem is what gets filtered out first: the vision of what people could become. Once that’s gone, we stop being prophets and start being prosecutors. We stop calling people toward something and start simply cataloguing their failures.

There’s a conversation happening in Christian circles about ethnicity, cultural identity, and the new creation. It’s an important conversation. But it keeps running into a problem: nobody can answer the most basic question it raises.

What does “culture-transcending worship” actually look like in practice?

Not in theory. Not as a theological abstraction. In practice. On a Sunday morning. With real people who have names and ancestors and foods they grew up eating. What are some specific examples?

On live television Tuesday, JD Vance flatly denied that the Trump administration has removed Black history from public spaces. The documented record — including a federal court ruling issued four days earlier — tells a different story.

When Vice President JD Vance appeared on The View on June 16, 2026, he came prepared with a book to promote and a posture of calm reassurance. But when co-host Whoopi Goldberg pressed him about the Trump administration’s removal of Black history from federal spaces, Vance denied it.

“Black history is not erased from public spaces,” he said.

When UFC heavyweight Josh Hokit finished his post-fight interview on the White House lawn Sunday night, he didn’t reach for something new. He reached for something ancient.

“Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

The crowd at UFC Freedom 250 — an event billed as a celebration of America’s 250th anniversary — responded with a mixture of cheers, laughter, and some boos. Joe Rogan, standing feet away, said nothing. Donald Trump, seated cageside, was seen smiling. And just like that, one of the oldest racist lies in American history was laundered through a sporting event, broadcast on Paramount+, and gifted a national audience.