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.

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.