Somewhere in a transcript archive sits an “Open Line Friday” episode of The Rush Limbaugh Show, recorded right around September 30–October 1, 2011 — the day after a U.S. drone strike killed American-born al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. Nearly three hours of monologue, caller segments, and parody commercials. I went through it and checked the claims that could actually be checked.

The results split cleanly into three buckets: things that turned out to be accurate, things that were opinion or prediction dressed up as commentary, and things that were straightforwardly comedy — fake ads and song parodies that nobody, including Limbaugh, intended anyone to fact-check. Sorting those apart turned out to be the most interesting part of the exercise.

It’s also worth pausing on why that sorting is only easy to do now. In 2011, checking a claim like this meant knowing it existed, tracking down primary sources, and cross-referencing numbers by hand — a task that took real time even for a professional researcher, and that essentially nobody did in real time for a three-hour radio show. To be clear about the mechanism: what changed isn’t that a machine now hands out verified facts — an AI model can be wrong, too, and shouldn’t be trusted as the final word on anything. What changed is AI-assisted search and source retrieval: the ability to pull up the original CNN poll write-up, the original KFF survey, the original news coverage of a specific claim in a couple of minutes instead of an afternoon. The verification still has to happen against a primary source; what’s different is how fast you can find that source. For the entire run of talk radio and cable news as mass media — Limbaugh’s show launched nationally in 1988, Fox News in 1996 — the ordinary listener had no practical way to check most of this at anything resembling the speed at which the claims arrived. The claims got wrapped in enough true and half-true material to feel credible, and moved on before anyone could verify them. The medium was built for an environment where fact-checking was slow and rare; that environment is not the one we’re in anymore.

A post came across my feed the other day predicting that AI collaboration will finally make science fiction good, because now actual scientists — not mere writers — can lead these projects. The theory goes like this: the only people who’ve ever been able to write science fiction are people who happen to be both scientifically literate and gifted prose stylists, and that combination is rare. Large language models remove the prose bottleneck. Now the scientist can be in charge, the AI can supply the sentences, and scientific accuracy — the thing science fiction has supposedly been starving for all these decades — finally gets its due.

I don’t buy the premise. Not because I think AI collaboration is useless, but because it’s solving a problem science fiction doesn’t actually have.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to: we don’t need replicators to be decent people.

There’s a kind of person — maybe you’ve been one, maybe you’re one now — who keeps a running tally without ever deciding to start keeping it. A half-beat late on a response at the office. A basket finished before the bell, entered in your favor, though not heavily. A fault noticed in the dark before sleep, filed and carried forward, uncorrected, the way it’s carried forward every day you can remember. You don’t remember opening the ledger. You just notice, one day, that it’s open, and that it has always been open, and that you’ve never once gone into anything — a room, a relationship, a morning — level.

Spinoza spent four propositions in the Ethics diagnosing exactly this apparatus, and naming the four passions that run it. He didn’t think much of any of them. And it turns out that once you’ve spent enough time inside the ledger yourself, you arrive at his conclusions less by argument than by exhaustion — which may be the more honest way to arrive at them.

Spinoza’s Part IV — “Of Human Bondage” — works through a sequence of propositions that all make the same move on four different emotions:

A few weeks ago, Ryan Burge went on the Holy Post’s Skypod and did what Ryan Burge does: he took a survey that had nothing to do with religion and found religion hiding inside it anyway. FIRE surveys upward of 68,000 college students at more than 400 schools every year about self-censorship on campus. Buried in the data were questions about religious attendance and affiliation, broken out by major. Burge mined it, and the internet did what it does with a spicy chart.

The headline findings weren’t surprising. Fine arts, theater, film, English, environmental studies — low religiosity, high secularism. Finance majors were the most religious and the most conservative students in the entire dataset, sitting alone in the corner of the ideology graph like they’d been assigned there. Nursing students were nearly as religious as finance bros, but nowhere near as conservative — moderate, even.

Skye Jethani, hosting, floated a metaphor: greed is the engine, conservative politics is the first car it pulls, and religious identity is the caboose. Burge, more cautiously, offered a narrower theory — finance students end up religious because their future clients are old, rich, and church-going, and religiosity is good for the client pipeline.

The U.S. added 162,000 jobs in August 2026. That’s the number that makes the headlines. But there’s another number worth putting beside it: $30 an hour.

Thirty dollars isn’t a proposed minimum wage, and it isn’t a scientifically derived poverty line. It’s a benchmark — a round number close to where a reasonably solid full-time income sits right now, and a useful test for what a “job” actually is once you stop counting them and start asking what they pay. A full-time worker earning $30 an hour makes $62,400 a year before taxes. That’s already a little below the current median earnings of full-time American workers. And even at that income, financing two of the standard promises of middle-class life — a child’s college education and one’s own retirement — is genuinely difficult.

So instead of asking only how many jobs America created last month, it’s worth asking a second question: how many of those jobs clear even that modest line?

Every few years, someone rediscovers that an entire generation of American children grew up torturing a purple dinosaur, and someone else turns that into a morality tale. You’ve probably seen the shape of the take: kids are cruel, teenagers especially so, and Barney’s only crime was being too good — too kind, too patient, too earnest — so a culture allergic to sincerity destroyed him for sport. It’s a tidy story. It flatters the person telling it, since it lets them cast themselves as defenders of goodness against a mob of little nihilists. It also happens to be wrong, and you don’t have to dig very deep to find out why.

Ask people who hated Barney why, and one complaint comes up with remarkable consistency: the voice.

Barney’s harshest critics didn’t object to niceness. They objected to a very specific register — the sing-song, treacly, everything-resolves-in-four-minutes tone that talked at children instead of to them. Academic write-ups of the backlash describe critics zeroing in on the “dopey” voice, the fixed toothy smile, a personality read as self-centered rather than warm. The sharper version of the critique wasn’t about tone at all, though — it was about content: Barney’s shows didn’t help kids learn to deal with negative feelings, because along with the giggles and unconditional love, they offered a one-dimensional world where everyone had to be happy and everything had to resolve immediately. That’s not a complaint about excessive goodness. That’s a complaint about dishonesty — a show performing goodness by refusing to admit anything bad exists, which is a different and much emptier thing.

A recent piece made the rounds arguing that anxious, self-condemning thoughts aren’t really us — they’re an attack from an old, sinful nature at war with a new, believing one. Feel like a failure? That’s not your assessment, that’s the enemy talking. Doubt that God will answer a big prayer? Not honest uncertainty — spiritual sabotage.

The framing has real appeal. It gives an uncomfortable thought a face, an enemy, a battle plan. But underneath the metaphor is a much simpler problem, and once you see it, the “war” language stops doing any real work at all.

Suppose you have one of these thoughts:

In the last piece, I looked at the biblical basis for the idea that faithful action can “hasten” the end — and at how vague, undefined invocations of “God’s work” tend to borrow the weight of that idea without ever specifying a mechanism. This one is about a more specific claim that circulates in the same orbit: that a coming war involving Iran and Israel is the fulfillment of Ezekiel 38–39, the “Gog and Magog” invasion, and that it will end the way it’s supposed to — with Israel nearly overrun, and God stepping in at the last moment.

To take that claim seriously, it’s worth doing something people rarely do with it: actually laying the real history of Israel’s wars next to the text, and checking whether the pattern people expect matches either one.

Ancient Israel and Judah were invaded constantly, and the outcomes were genuinely mixed — not the unbroken record of last-second rescue that the Gog-Magog framework implicitly assumes.

Last week, Vice President JD Vance sat down with a 22-year-old Christian podcaster to promote his new memoir about converting to Catholicism, and somewhere past the hour mark the conversation drifted, as these things do, toward the end of the world.

“Do I think we’re in the end times? I don’t know,” Vance said. He admitted he’s been fascinated by end-times prophecy since he was ten or eleven years old, said he wouldn’t be shocked if the Antichrist is “walking among us” right now, and then landed on the line that made the clip travel: “What I’m trying to focus on is doing as much of God’s work as possible right now, and if that leads to the end times, okay.”

The reaction was swift and mostly mocking — “Make Armageddon Glorious Again” was one of the gentler jokes — and it landed at an uncomfortable moment, with the administration bombing targets in Iran and Trump promising an even bigger strike was “waiting in the wings.” Critics weren’t wrong to notice the timing, though the piece that follows won’t make that timing its whole argument.

Across the ancient world, cultures repeatedly told themselves some version of the same story: we occupy a special place in the order of things.

That claim took different shapes. Some cultures claimed unique ancestry — a founding figure who sprang from the local soil itself, unlike everyone else’s ordinary descent. Some claimed sacred land — a homeland singled out by the gods for special favor. Some claimed a providential destiny, a plan unfolding across generations toward some appointed greatness. Some claimed outright election — a god who picked this people, specifically, out of all the others available.

These aren’t identical claims, and it’s worth resisting the temptation to flatten them into one. What unites them is a shared social function: each one locates the storytellers in a privileged relationship to the divine or cosmic order, relative to everyone else. Call it sacred exceptionalism. It’s a remarkably widespread pattern — recurring in widely separated cultures — which means the interesting question isn’t really whether a tradition made this kind of claim. Almost all of them did, in some form. The interesting question is what, if anything, a given tradition did to keep the claim from curdling into permission to mistreat everyone left outside it.

A recent piece at American Greatness used Syracuse University’s budget crisis as a launching pad for a familiar argument: college is losing students because academia — especially the humanities — has become an ideological project rather than an educational one. The essay traces this back through a genuinely interesting piece of intellectual history: Dwight Waldo’s 1948 attack on “value-neutral” public administration, and the 1968 Minnowbrook conference at Syracuse’s own Maxwell School, where a generation of administrators were taught that neutrality was a myth and that process should serve values rather than the other way around. From there, the argument goes, that anti-neutrality ethos leaked out of public administration and into the broader academic bloodstream, and now, seventy-plus years later, it’s why Syracuse can’t fill its freshman class.

It’s a more careful piece than most in this genre — it doesn’t pretend ideology is the only problem, and it does real intellectual history instead of just gesturing at vibes. So let’s grant its premise. Suppose humanities faculties really do skew left, and suppose that skew is exactly as pronounced as the piece assumes. The harder question is the one it never really asks: why should we believe that explains why fewer students are showing up? There’s a much more direct, much more measurable cause sitting right next to it — what it actually costs to go to college right now, and who’s stopped paying their share of it — and that cause doesn’t need Dwight Waldo to do any work at all.

Start with the money, because it’s the more immediate and more measurable problem.

A recent episode of The Holy Post worked its way, as these things do, from Dolly Parton’s death to a book review to a discussion of “covenantal pluralism” — the idea that a healthy pluralistic society needs more than mere tolerance, more than people simply agreeing not to fight. It needs a mutual commitment to each other’s flourishing across genuine religious difference.

In the middle of that conversation, one of the hosts made a claim that’s worth pulling apart: religious repression, she argued, tends to produce the most reactionary religious movements — and then, almost as an aside, she added that America hasn’t done this. “That’s not true,” she said, of the idea that the U.S. has repressed religion.

I think that claim collapses the moment you separate two things Christians have historically treated as distinct: orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Right belief, and right practice. And once you separate them, a fuller and more uncomfortable picture of American religious liberty comes into focus — one where the “repression” question doesn’t have a single answer, because the Constitution itself doesn’t treat belief and practice the same way.

Traditional evangelical theology will object to that title immediately. Nobody is “good,” the argument goes — not really, not on their own. Salvation isn’t a reward for charitable works. Romans 3 says none is righteous, not one. Ephesians 2 says it’s by grace through faith, not of works, so that no one can boast. Fair enough. That’s not actually the claim I’m making.

Here’s the claim: people are not naturally good. Whatever good exists in a person exists because God is working in them — that’s the entire premise of grace. Jesus said you’d know a tree by its fruit. He didn’t say you’d know it by its doctrinal statement.

A sharper critic will stop me right there with a real distinction: common grace. Scripture is comfortable with genuine temporal goodness that isn’t evidence of saving faith — Abimelech acts with “integrity of heart” in Genesis 20 and God restrains him from sin without saving him; rain falls on the just and the unjust in Matthew 5; Gentiles who never heard the law still “by nature do what the law requires” in Romans 2. So an evangelical can say: fine, the goodness is real, it’s even God-sustained in some general providential sense — and still not evidence of regeneration. That’s not a fringe move. It’s the tradition working as designed.

There’s a familiar script for talking about envy. Someone posts a vacation photo, a promotion, a new car, and a bystander mutters “must be nice.” The standard response — you’ve probably heard some version of it — is that this is entitlement dressed up as commentary, that jealousy is a normal emotion but a healthy person converts it into ambition instead of resentment, and that a big part of “falling into socialism” is really just people refusing to go get what they want.

It’s a clean story. This piece isn’t arguing that hard work doesn’t matter, or that effort is worthless. It’s arguing something narrower and harder to dismiss: the relationship between effort and reward is neither automatic nor fully under a worker’s control, so someone’s lack of economic advancement can’t be treated as self-evident proof of laziness, envy, or moral failure. That’s a different, more defensible claim — and once you look at how reward actually gets distributed, it’s the one the evidence supports.

Start with the rhetorical move itself, because it’s doing more work than it looks like. Framing all criticism of concentrated wealth as envy is convenient, because it means you never have to engage with the substance of the criticism — you just diagnose the critic. But greed and envy aren’t opposites sitting on a scale where only one side is a vice. They’re both real human failings, and “you’re just jealous” is frequently a way of excusing the first by accusing people of the second. If someone points out that a company posted record profits and laid off ten thousand people in the same year, “that’s just envy talking” isn’t a rebuttal — it’s a deflection.

There’s a video going around — Adam Conover’s latest — arguing that AI is killing the internet. It’s funny, it’s well produced, and it hits some real notes: Google’s AI Overviews are gutting referral traffic, Pew has the receipts, and The Numbers.com nearly got scraped to death by degenerate gamblers trying to front-run box office data. Fine. All true.

But the video rests on a claim it never actually proves: that there used to be a “human internet,” pure and organic, and that AI showed up and killed it. That claim doesn’t have a leg to stand on. It lacks foundation. And once you pull the thread, most of the argument comes apart with it.

Conover’s nostalgia is for a specific era — Geocities, message boards, bedroom musicians, the “teeming mass of real people” era of the internet. What he skips is that the internet has been consolidating, relentlessly, since roughly the moment it got popular, and every single wave of that consolidation predates AI by fifteen to twenty years.

When Death of the Pastor’s Wife came out, the reaction from a lot of evangelical viewers was some version of shock: how did no one see this? How did a congregation sit under a man for years and not once think, this is abuse?

I don’t think the answer is that the congregation was unusually gullible. The question isn’t whether complementarian theology and coercive control are the same thing. They aren’t. The question is what happens when the warning signs of one can be interpreted through the vocabulary of the other. If control can be called headship, compliance can be called submission, sexual entitlement can be called marital duty, isolation can be called spiritual protection, and dissent can be called divisiveness, a congregation may not need to ignore the warning signs at all. It may simply have been handed a theological framework for misreading them.

The term for what’s being described here comes from forensic social worker Evan Stark, whose research reframed domestic abuse as something broader than physical violence: a sustained pattern aimed at isolating a partner, regulating their daily behavior, and stripping away their independence, of which physical violence is often just the last resort rather than the whole story. That definition matters for this piece, because almost none of what follows is about hitting. It’s about which everyday behaviors — checking in, yielding, staying quiet — get coded as devotion instead of as symptoms.

This piece starts from a video by an ex-evangelical creator, a follow-up to an earlier, harder-edged video about her experience with Christianity. This one lists five things she’s glad to have gained by leaving:

A changed way of interacting with people — no longer sorting others by whether they believe correctly (saved/lost, in-group/out-group).

No longer feeling obligated to save souls — the burden of believing another person’s eternal fate depends on her own persuasive skill.

A few weeks ago I sat through another installment of a sermon series called “Foundations.” This one was about evangelism — reaching people outside the church — and it landed on a tidy acronym: PEARL. Pray for them. Eat with them. Ask questions. Reveal your story. Love them tangibly. It was built around Matthew 9, where Jesus calls Matthew the tax collector and then goes to dinner at his house with “tax collectors and sinners,” to the horror of the watching Pharisees.

It’s a good passage, and most of what the sermon said about it was accurate. But sitting with it afterward, I kept noticing what wasn’t there — both in the text and in the acronym built on top of it. And the more I looked, the more I think the gap says something worth saying out loud: this sermon, like a lot of evangelical talk about “reaching the lost,” asks a great deal relationally and almost nothing materially. That’s not what the Bible actually models.

Matthew 9:13 is Jesus’s answer to the Pharisees’ objection. Here’s the full verse, not the half that got preached:

A pastor stands up and says something like this: don’t give because you think it’ll come back to you. Don’t tithe like it’s a slot machine. Don’t be generous to the community because you’re secretly running a spiritual investment account, expecting God to notice and repay. Give because the community needs it.

It’s a good corrective. It needed to be said. But it also leaves something hanging in the air, unsaid, right next to the thing that was said — and I want to go find it.

This is written from inside the tradition, working with the text on its own terms rather than arguing for or against it from outside — so I’ll assume you’re either sitting in a pew somewhere yourself or at least curious what the Bible actually says, chapter and verse, rather than what it gets summarized as saying. Either way, the texts are the texts, and I’d rather show my work than assert a conclusion.

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.