The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

The Tigray war, one of this century’s deadliest conflicts, killed an estimated 600,000 people from 2020 to 2022, and that may have only been the beginning.

At a very basic level, the Tigray War is a dispute between the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Ethiopian federal government, led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, over regional autonomy and political power. The TPLF and other subnational groups want to get rid of Abiy because of his efforts to centralize power. Some of these groups are divided over territory, even as they unite to oppose the federal government.

Hundreds of thousands of people died when the TPLF and the Ethiopian government went to war in 2020; while the Pretoria agreement negotiated in South Africa led to a short peace, key underlying disputes remain unresolved. They appear to be flaring up again now as both the federal government and the TPLF accuse each other of instigating the latest round of clashes this week. Even if the subnational groups succeed in getting rid of Prime Minister Abiy, the internal tensions are so strong that a brutal civil war is a likely outcome.

Most people know very little about the Tigray War. I would probably be one of them, except for the fact that I myself am ethnically Tigrayan. I was born just a few hundred miles away from Tigray’s capital, and when I look at the faces of the people involved — both those doing the killing and those being brutalized — they look like me.

At the same time, I live in the United States, speak broken Tigrinya in an inextinguishable American accent, and have no memories of my country of origin. Still, I have particular ties to the region and its people, so I care and know much more about Ethiopia than I otherwise would.

But you probably don’t. Many prominent political figures think this is good. While what’s happening in Ethiopia may be tragic, they argue, human beings are socially embedded creatures, which means that our obligations to other people are determined by the proximity of our relationships to them.

In January 2025, Vice President JD Vance sparked controversy by invoking the theological concept of ordo amoris (Latin for “order of love”) to claim that there is a hierarchy of obligation that requires you to care most about the people closest to you, in particular your family. Then, if there’s any room left over, you can give some consideration to people really far away from you. Vance argued that the far left has inverted this natural hierarchy to care more about people from other countries than people in its own — including, of course, migrants.

Pope Francis responded to this controversy by reaffirming the Catholic Church’s commitment to moral universalism: “Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.”

As a Protestant, I can empathize with Vance’s frustration at a man 4,500 miles away schooling him on his own religion, but I also think that’s exactly what you sign up for when you convert to Catholicism.

Alongside Vance-like arguments that we have few or no obligations to people outside our own communities is the argument that even empathizing with these people can be harmful. In The Atlantic, the Catholic writer Elizabeth Bruenig describes a growing right-wing literature warning against “toxic” and “suicidal” empathy. These books argue that indulging our empathy induces us to help vulnerable people at the expense of societal cohesion. As Bruenig points out, these books are targeted at conservatives who are torn between their concern for the poor and immigrants, on one hand, and their affiliation with a political party that increasingly rejects any obligation to marginalized groups on the other. It’s notable that some of the most active civil-society institutions aiding migrants are Christian organizations.

Empathy is a tool that helps us recognize the innate moral worth of every individual person, so it’s no surprise that people who seek to reject this moral fact are hostile to its power. However, it’s true that empathy can’t settle all our obligations. Because the world contains billions of people, my attention is selective. I pay attention to the Tigray War in part because I see my own features reflected in the faces of the participants. But that’s not the basis for a just or functional society.

There’s a soft form of particularism that is obviously true. I am a person who was born to a specific family in a specific place and therefore have special obligations to those people. If my father gets sick, my obligation to take care of him is greater than anyone else’s.

But when we move from explaining our duties to family and friends to relieving ourselves of obligations to other people, the particularist argument breaks down. If I were helping my dad deliver a package and a stranger collapsed in front of me, I think everyone would find it quite strange if I decided to ignore the dying man because of my preexisting duty to my family. In short, my obligation to care for my father does not, by itself, settle what I owe a stranger in desperate need.

Of course, recognizing that we owe something to strangers doesn’t tell us exactly what we owe them. I care a lot about what’s happening in Tigray, but that empathy doesn’t contain the answers to what the optimal immigration, foreign policy, or charitable arrangements are to relieve the suffering.

I don’t expect you to follow what happens in the Horn of Africa as closely as I do, nor does your lack of attention mean that you’re a bad, unempathetic person. Our personal connections can help us notice things that deserve everyone’s attention. My connection to Tigray helps explain why I know about its suffering, but the sheer scale of that suffering — hundreds of thousands of individual lives, each with innate moral worth — is the reason why it matters.

Midterm update

, our director of political data, uses data from The Argument’s polling operation to inform the Split Ticket 2026 House and Senate models. These models update every day; bookmark this page to see the odds of each party taking the House and the Senate.

Top stories this week, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

What do Hasan Piker, Hunter Biden’s memecoin, and convicted FTX fraudster Caroline Ellison’s return to the philanthropic world all have in common? They all suggest that society may be losing a useful taboo against associating with public figures who have demonstrated questionable ethics and judgment. This week, staff writer Jeremiah Johnson argues that we need to bring that taboo back.

The shift from phone- to web-based opinion polling has made high-integrity polling harder to do. It’s also made bad or outright fake polls far, far easier to produce. The result? Havoc in the epistemic commons. Pollster Charlotte Swasey analyzes the past decade in her industry so you can better understand your political news.

Should we be nice to AI? Personally, I think it’s worth trying, even if the odds are low that an AI is the kind of thing we owe moral consideration. But if we do want to be nice to AI, what thing should we even be kind to? The chatbot? The chips? It’s hard to know because “Claude” is really only the seamless orchestration of disparate unseen processes, just like a film is a bunch of still frames sped up past the point where we can see the gaps. Take a tour of an AI mind (if, indeed, such a mind exists) in my entry in our one-year anniversary series.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finalized the design of a pilot process to speed up drug development. The program will pair drug makers with qualified research institutions to support their applications for first-in-human trials of new drugs. Instead of waiting for completed applications, the FDA will review application components piece by piece. The hope is to bring trial time down from its current two-year average and get closer to the faster timelines seen in China and Australia.

• The United States Department of Energy selected 21 projects for up to $99 million in funding to explore next-generation geothermal drilling technology. One recipient is Fervo Energy, a company that also recently struck a deal with Google for the largest-ever geothermal project. So-called enhanced geothermal could provide abundant around-the-clock clean energy without the intermittent availability of solar and wind.

• Just across the state line north of The Argument’s Washington, DC, headquarters, Maryland’s Montgomery County introduced a bill to make it easier to construct Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs). If passed, the law would remove both an owner-occupancy requirement and certain fees relating to ADU construction.

Worth watching…

Matt Yglesias is worried about AI doom. Jerusalem thinks that Terminator-style scenarios can distract us from more practical AI-related concerns, such as cybersecurity risk, economic fallout, and biological weapons. In other words, worrying about the end times might prevent us from seeing all the harms AI could cause along the way. So how much should you worry? And what exactly should you worry about? Tune in to sort it out for yourself.

Lakshya Jain, The Argument’s Director of Polling & Data, recently sat down with Adam Carlson from the polling firm Zenith Research to discuss projections for the upcoming midterms. Right now, all signs point to a massive swing toward Democrats. “I think earlier in the cycle, I was thinking a lot of things have to go right for Democrats,” Carlson told Jain. “Now I’m almost thinking the opposite, where a lot of things have to go well for Republicans to kind of keep this [blue wave] at bay.” Watch below to learn more.

In 2025, AI couldn’t beat the top high school students in the International Mathematical Olympiad, but this year, it’s solving open problems that no human mathematician has ever solved. Kai Williams, a reporter at Understanding AI, sat down with me discuss what this means not only for math but also for human achievement in other fields, as AI overtakes human abilities in new domains. Watch to find out.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

Lately, these recommendation sections have had a consistent theme: Dolly Parton for the week of her passing; “birthdays” for the week of The Argument’s one-year anniversary. I greatly enjoyed the prompts, but I also thought it was time to pop the top button of the shirt collar, get loose, and leave things open-ended once again.

I asked my colleagues for “a recommendation,” plain and simple.

I did not expect the avalanche that would follow. My dear colleague , who’d just come back from a stint working from home, unleashed a torrent of kitchen-related recommendations. In a long string of Slack messages, he insisted on the centrality of the whetstone to the kitchen arsenal.

“Learn how to sharpen your knives in the kitchen!!” he implored.

Tracy also spent time in the kitchen, but her recommendation came through with the cutting parsimony of a Han Shan poem: “pickling a bunch of stuff at home.”

At this point, I realized a theme was emerging, despite my best intentions to suppress it. How do people work in unstructured space?

aligned with Angela’s exactness. He plucked out the very first line of the opening edition of a 1980s literary magazine he’s reading right now, called The Quarterly.

“The year I began to say vahz instead of vase,” its inaugural story, “The Harvest,” begins, “a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.”

tended toward Milan’s overflowing grandeur in her assessment of the recent television series Furious. “I think a lot about gender — I’m the Gender & Culture fellow — but I think we all got desensitized to what sex trafficking really means in the post-Epstein era, and this show has called me out on how little I have conceptualized the actual crime,” she told me.

then tumbled into the chat, like a kid trying out his cannonball at the pool for the very first time.

“The End of Oak Street” he decreed. “It’s the Year of [Anne] Hathaway, so if you’re a Hathaway completist you need to see it!”

The Argument contributor chimed in to recommend Ghost in the Shell (“best movie about an AI safety incident!”) while his fellow Substacker lamented that Mad Men didn’t top Breaking Bad on The New York Times’ recent list of the top 100 TV shows of this century.

After all this, you may find the title of this week’s final recommendation, Stephen King’s Misery, to be fitting.

In the novel, a psychotic fan both rescues and tortures her favorite author. Jerusalem told us she “enjoyed King’s exploration of the writer’s desire to be taken seriously.” She thought King would portray the novel that Paul, the writer, wrote while being held captive by this super-fan as a bad work of art, “but the fact it produced a good novel says a lot about what [King] thinks keeps popular writers honest.”

There it was, an implicit exhortation to mind the ultimate judge, the ultimate jury, the ultimate constraint on open-ended-ness: the loyal fans (and readers) who keep you honest.

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Verdict, by Kelsey Piper

Worst Take of the Week is a new occasional column where the author will rant about something we found stupid, annoying, bad, and/or irritating. While the title of this column was necessary for palindromic reasons, we cannot promise that entries will come out weekly or that each piece will literally be the worst take that week; this column would be boring and repetitive if each week we explained why genocide is bad in response to Twitter user @Nazi1488LoveHitler.

If I were to come up with a straw man caricature of the worst imaginable progressive ideas on education, it would sound something like this: “Sure, our kids can’t do basic math. But a successful education system isn’t one that teaches math. It’s one that hands out degrees to everyone. We are handing out more degrees than ever, so we’re succeeding.”

But this is precisely what longtime California journalist Miriam Pawel just argued in an astonishing op-ed in The New York Times. The piece calls on the University of California (UC) Board of Regents to override faculty requesting the SAT be restored as a requirement for admissions. Hundreds of UC faculty are saying that their jobs have not been doable since the SAT vanished. Pawel thinks the faculty are wrong and California’s system is working just fine.

“Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates,” she wrote.

As a California resident myself, I hope Pawel and I agree that our universities should nurture students’ capabilities and grow their knowledge. If that part of their mission is broken, it’s no defense that they are handing out lots of diplomas.

As UC Berkeley political science professor Sean Gailmard observed: “It’s an astonishing mindset that teaching analytical skills and granting credentials are two distinct, severable things that universities do, *and* the second is the important one.”

Pawel’s position — and the reluctance of the UC Board of Regents to restore academic standards for admission — is not just a cynical, impoverished view of what college is for. It is also incredibly shortsighted. If students at UC schools are less capable than ever but graduating at higher rates than ever, the obvious conclusion is that standards are being lowered in order to achieve the desired graduation rates.

Recall that many in the recent crop of UC students admitted without standardized test scores struggled even in middle school remedial classes, and that some cannot add fractions; we’re not talking about mastery of calculus here.

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Employers, and even employers in non-STEM fields, expect graduates of elite universities to be competent with basic math skills. If I were considering hiring a candidate who attended a UC school, Pawel’s op-ed is an extraordinarily strong argument that I should not consider their degree to be a credit to them. (Some majors are still rigorous, but they can’t all be if students are both less capable than ever and more likely to graduate than ever.) If you extrapolate this situation — with no test for academic readiness at admission and pressure to graduate everyone admitted — there will ultimately be no reason to believe a graduate of a UC school is any more qualified for a job than a person who never went to college.

Pawel’s entire argument for the importance of public access to the UCs is that they are engines of economic mobility for the poor. But the way in which they have, for their whole history, actually functioned as engines of economic mobility is by providing an excellent, rigorous education and reflecting strong evidence of skill in their degrees. The degree has communicated that the person who holds it is competent and qualified, has worked hard, and has learned a lot.

If degrees cease to communicate those things, then the UCs will no longer be engines of economic mobility at all.

Pawel acknowledges that it’s a big problem that so many California students lack basic math skills. But she dismisses admitting qualified students as “harvesting the best and brightest in a troubled system” and argues that, instead, the universities should have a plan to serve all Californians.

She is, apparently, unaware that this plan is already in place (an alarming oversight from the author of a forthcoming book on the “Making and Remaking of the University of California,” which has been approvingly blurbed by Jerry Brown and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). California has a so-called Master Plan to achieve some of the best university access in the country, which it successfully executed over the course of decades after the plan was adopted in 1960.

As a result of the plan, all students can be admitted to a California community college and can frequently attend at no charge. And if they want a bachelor’s degree, students with tolerable high school grades can also attend California State University schools — those too are free for many students after financial aid.

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The vision that long guided the university system was that the community colleges and Cal State schools would provide free college for everyone, while the UC schools would provide the state’s top students with a world-class education competitive with Stanford, MIT, or any Ivy League school. Crucially, the system was also designed to provide greater opportunity at every stage: Successful students at the lower-tier schools could transfer to more competitive schools when they were prepared for them.

It is common for ambitious students without a good high school transcript to start in a community college and then transfer to a UC: Nearly one-third of entering UC students are transfers, and 94% of California resident transfers are from community colleges. I think that is a fantastic feature of our system.

We can offer education to everybody without locking anyone into a prescribed path and without lowering standards at top schools — and we know that this can be done because we’ve been successfully doing it for decades! The California university system is an extraordinary achievement in which we should take great pride.

The only thing wrong with it is that a few misguided ideologues think that UC Berkeley and UC San Diego can provide a world-class education competitive with any Ivy League school even if their admitted students are not prepared to do any of the coursework. But they cannot.

The ability of these institutions to do their jobs is not infinite. Their incredible reputation requires a student body prepared to achieve at a high level, and it will collapse very rapidly if their student bodies cease to be qualified to do the work.

Well-qualified students with enough family money will just go to top-tier schools in other states instead. The victims of Pawel’s worldview will be the poor kids who are also well qualified — but who are regrettably stuck entering adulthood in a California that is no longer willing to admit that their talents matter.

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Midterm update

, our director of political data, uses data from The Argument’s polling operation to inform the Split Ticket 2026 House and Senate models. These models update every day; bookmark this page to see the odds of each party taking the House and the Senate.

Top stories this week, by Maibritt Henkel

Everyone knows former FTC Chair Lina Khan has a problem with Amazon. She has long accused the e-commerce behemoth of engaging in monopolistic practices. In his piece this week, Milan Singh largely agrees with this diagnosis. But he argues that the proper remedy isn’t to break up Amazon, as some antitrust proponents would like, but instead to make sure the company can’t punish sellers who offer cheaper prices elsewhere.

Medicare for More doesn’t have the same ring to it as Medicare for All, but Eli Richman has a proposal that he thinks can please any liberal who wants to expand health care access: disease entitlement. He says we should expand the entitlement program so it covers people with the kinds of chronic illnesses that strike patients more or less at random, as the federal government did with end-stage renal disease in 1972. Type 1 diabetes turns out to be a particularly good candidate for the next expansion.

Few fault lines feel as clearly defined as the one that runs between pro-life and pro-choice Americans. And yet, as Leah Libresco Sargeant argues in her guest essay for our one-year anniversary series, the over 1 million embryos currently in storage across the U.S. could upset the current stalemate in the politics of reproduction. Excess embryos are largely inevitable byproducts of in vitro ferilization, a procedure that is poised only to grow in popularity as Americans decide to have children later. “As time goes on, more and more children will grow up and inherit the duty to decide what to do with their potential siblings,” Libresco Sargeant writes.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• The city council in Bellingham, Washington, voted to streamline permitting for permanent affordable housing projects in the city — and to exempt such developments from “most zoning and land use regulations.” The new measure relieves qualifying projects of height, density, and parking requirements, as well as mandates to includes space for commercial businesses.

• Just down the road in Seattle, the city’s light rail agency just announced a 40% boost in ridership following a major expansion in March. In just three years, the agency has increased the number of stations it serves by 65%; each weekday now regularly sees over 200,000 boardings. While this capital expansion has increased ridership, so too has the agency’s “Safe, Clean, and Welcoming Ride initiative,” which focuses on rider experience factors like “clean stations, working elevators and escalators, [and] visible staff.”

• Airbnb launched a new $250 million housing construction fund intended to provide incremental capital to stalled projects. The fund will help restart developments that have cleared most regulatory hurdles but have been held up because of insufficient financing. The first $6.4 million is going toward affordable units in Austin, Texas.

Worth watching…

On this week’s podcast, Matt and Jerusalem discuss Friedrich Hayek’s most famous work, The Road to Serfdom, a 1944 jeremiad against central planning. The economist, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in 1974, was a fierce defender of free-market capitalism. His main claim was that central planning and the undercutting of economic freedoms inevitably fuel totalitarianism. Was he right?

Lakshya Jain and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini were recently joined by Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., on Substack Live. Boyle, a self-declared “Pennsylvania Supremacist,” gave his thoughts on the midterms, the controversies surrounding Sen. John Fetterman, and former Vice President Kamala Harris’s snub of Gov. Josh Shapiro when she was choosing a running mate in 2024.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Maibritt Henkel

Because we celebrated The Argument’s one-year anniversary with a party on Thursday, I asked the office for birthday-themed culture recs.

recommends the 2004 classic 13 Going On 30, a film about 13-year-old Jenna, who wakes up after her disastrous birthday party as a 30-year-old played by Jennifer Garner. Here is what Jerusalem had to say about it: “Most movies by and for teens are very doom-y about getting older, and this one made me excited about gaining more agency and self-possession without losing the whimsical parts of being a kid.”

burned a birthday-themed CD for his best friend in ninth grade. He recommends the opening track: “Unhappy Birthday” by The Smiths. “Thankfully she thought it was funny,” he recalls.

says he particularly enjoyed the “Too Much Birthday” episode of the hit TV show Succession, describing it as “one of the most miserable birthday parties ever put on screen.”

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Megha Fernandes actually has an entire list of birthday episodes from her favorite TV shows. She watches them every year during the week of her birthday. Just a few examples:

• Friends season 7 episode 14: “The One Where They All Turn Thirty”

• Gilmore Girls season 1 episode 6: “Rory’s Birthday Parties”

• New Girl season 3 episode 13: “Birthday”

• Modern Family season 1 episode 19: “Game Changer”

recommends Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, a play about “two strangers who show up on a guy’s birthday and create chaos.” He first read it in a college drama class and calls it “absurd and original in the most entertaining way.”

The only birthday-related media that came to ’s mind were the horror movie Happy Death Day and the role-playing video game “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.” He admits that both are pretty “horrible examples for celebrating an anniversary,” but I think he deserves credit for out-of-the-box thinking.

recommends birthday bike rides. He tells me that two of his last three birthday parties have been group bike rides to the beach or an overnight “bikepack.” (If you have never used that word before, you are not alone.) His pitch is pretty compelling: “It’s kind of impossible for people not to be in the birthday spirit when everyone is noodling around together, stopping here and there for a beer on the way.”

Turns out is also a bit of a party visionary. For her birthday this year she co-hosted a First Council of Nicaea party (the Ecumenical Birthday Council, to be specific). This involved “bestowing everyone bishop titles, canonizing new core beliefs of Christianity, writing them on scrolls, passing around a heretic hat, etc.” She highly recommends specific, fun, and weird party themes.

Personally, I am a big fan of the birthday poem genre. One of my favorites is Richard Wilbur’s “For K.R. on Her Sixtieth Birthday,” which was written for fellow poet and critic Kathleen Raine. Here is the opening stanza:

Blow out the candles of your cake.
They will not leave you in the dark,
Who round with grace this dusky arc
Of the grand tour which souls must take.

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

The apocalypse is a trump card. When the threat of human extinction looms, every other disagreement, concern, worry, or tradeoff is a distraction. When everything is at stake, nothing else matters.

The core problem of human civilization is that everyone disagrees with everyone else. If, like ants or bees, we could all simply agree on the highest goals and the best means, then we could finally move in lockstep, allocating resources to public health without consternation over whether they should have gone to education instead. Ordinary politics — from appropriations fights to lawsuits and tedious debates — is the cooperative technology we’ve built for living alongside people whose priorities we find wrong and offensive.

The apocalypse seduces us with the hope that we can finally put all that aside. “The lure of such generalized disaster as a fantasy is that it releases one from normal obligations,” critic Susan Sontag wrote about end-of-the-world movies in her essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” Normal obligations for an individual can mean exercising, cleaning your house, or disciplining your children. Normal obligations for a political system mean things like respecting civil rights, constraining the power of the executive, and following the law.

“A great enough disaster cancels all enmities and calls upon the utmost concentration of earth resources,” Sontag went on. At a time when our brains are under constant assault by the distraction of our smartphones and the 24/7 news cycle we can, finally, relax. There is just one thing that matters. (Finally!)

Earlier this week, Jacob Coxon, a machine-learning scientist at Anthropic, resigned and went viral when he tweeted: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” His former colleague added publicly, “I personally think [human extinction] > 10% within the next decade.”

I too am very worried about AI safety for many reasons: I think that we could turn over our weapons systems to misaligned AIs that go on to make immoral decisions, that hackers and hostile state actors could attack our infrastructure, steal billions of dollars, and undermine the international banking system, plunging us into a worldwide depression. I also worry that AI-enabled surveillance will spell the end of true freedom, that terrorists will be able to use AI to manufacture biological threats, and that we will turn over more and more of our brains and thinking and research and ingenuity to machines.

I am not worried that AI will kill every single human being alive (if only because there are more than 8 billion of us and we have proven quite adaptable), though anything is possible. Yet this outcome tends to be the overwhelming, explicit focus of prominent AI safety activists.

Apocalyptic thinking tempts us to trade hard-won rights for security — or simply to just do something, even if the actions we take are not efficacious.

Most recent end-times talk has come from climate activists who are largely correct to be concerned about the threat of carbon emissions. But what has really been accomplished by all this green doomerism? Notably, the single biggest reduction in U.S. emissions came from the shale revolution, which shifted electricity generation from coal to natural gas, rather than anything the climate movement did. My point is not that we should expect existential problems to solve themselves — famously, climate change is not yet solved; my point is that dooming does not reliably produce the habits of mind that yield effective public policy.

Doomers also have a habit of making bad tradeoffs: Environmentalist James Lovelock argued in 2010 that climate change might make it necessary to “put democracy on hold for a while.” Philosopher Nick Bostrom, a leading thinker in the AI space, argued that we might need universal, continuous, worldwide surveillance to prevent the emergence of catastrophic technologies. Following the Fukushima disaster in Japan, Germany wound down its nuclear energy program, increasing reliance on coal. In New York, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo called the Indian Point nuclear plant a “ticking time bomb,” shutting down emissions-free power generation at a terrible time for New Yorkers’ energy cost concerns and the climate.

When the stakes are existential, normal concerns appear grotesque: If the most prominent AI safety advocate argues for launching airstrikes at data centers, who will listen to the bespectacled lawyers asking whether such a plan complies with international law? In an emergency, no one listens to the proceduralists. Not when we’re marching Japanese-Americans into internment camps, and not when we’re wiretapping American citizens.

Of course I believe that extreme risks deserve to become top priorities. I am glad that nuclear nonproliferation became a leading issue; it spurred humanity to levels of international cooperation hitherto unseen. I hope the same happens for AI safety. But I’m worried that all the people arguing about the latter are getting too hung up on confusing metrics like p(doom), which seemingly require buying into a fringe ideology. Maybe I’m wrong and AI does threaten the human race itself, but apocalyptic thinking is likely to make it harder, not easier, to consider the tradeoffs of our available responses and determine whether our proposed actions will actually help. The threat of extinction cannot settle those questions for us. For that, we still have to do politics.

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Midterm update

, our director of political data, uses data from The Argument’s polling operation to inform the Split Ticket 2026 House and Senate models. These models update every day; bookmark this page to see the odds of each party taking the House and the Senate.

Top stories this week, by Milan Singh

As you may have heard, AIs have been going rogue and hacking things they aren’t supposed to hack. This is not great. On Tuesday, wrote about how losing control of AI is the course being taken by major AI labs — even though these labs are very worried about what autonomous AIs do. This seems like a bad plan!

Continuing our anniversary “How do we live with each other?” series, Vox writer-turned-grantmaker Dylan Matthews wrote about how he came around on Big Philanthropy.

Also in the anniversary series, Emily Hamilton of the Mercatus Center and Yonah Freemark of the Urban Institute have a piece up digging into why children aren’t walking to school anymore. Over the last hundred years, schools have been built on bigger and bigger lots and in less walkable areas.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• Reps. Scott Peters, D-Calif., and Rep. Gabe Evans, R-Colo., introduced a bipartisan bill to speed up permitting for transmission projects by holding them to the same standard that already exists for hydropower and natural gas pipelines.

• NIMBYs on the New York City Council tried to block Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pick for chair of the Board of Standards and Appeals — a key housing post. Why? Because the nominee, John Mangin, was a key architect of the 2024 City of Yes plan and because he helped draft successful housing-related ballot measures that limited the discretion of the City Council. Despite the opposition, Mangin prevailed and has been approved!

• New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a law legalizing balcony solar units and cutting fees on such units, helping users lower their electricity bills.

Worth watching…

This week marked the 25th anniversary of 9/11. After the attacks, George W. Bush launched two wars, with the goal of not just catching the terrorists, but of spreading liberal democracy throughout the globe. On the podcast, Matt and Jerusalem talked about the decision-making that led al-Qaeda to attack the U.S. and the U.S. to go to war, along with what went wrong with the liberal internationalist vision.

and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini were joined by Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Del., the first openly transgender member of Congress, on Substack Live. It’s been a rough few years for trans rights. Republicans have successfully used the sports and youth transition questions as wedge issues, and some Democratic candidates are now moving to the center on these issues as well. But McBride doesn’t believe that will make it harder for her to work with them if they’re elected.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Milan Singh

By the power vested in me as the author of this section of the Sunday newsletter, I decreed that the topic for this week’s cultural recommendations was movies. (This is largely because I’ve been back home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and have been watching a lot of movies.)

“Mad Max: Fury Road is the best action movie of the last 20 years,” said , who described it as a “nearly perfect thrill ride” combining “absurdly high-octane action with rich characters and world-building.”

, my fellow Fellow, said that he rewatched The Graduate, noting that “it was shocking how rich it is, frame by frame.” He also praised the soundtrack, going so far as to say that “Simon & Garfunkel make the whole movie what it is.” If he had to summarize the film in one word, it would be “plastics.” “There is a great future in plastics,” he continued, using more than one word.

After being threatened with having their recommendations generated for them by Grok, the rest of the office chimed in as well.

Megha Fernandes watched Ratatouille for the very first time and called it a “perfect, and I mean perfect, movie.”

Our fearless and peerless leader, , “recently nostalgia-maxxed” by going to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in theaters. In addition to the warm, fuzzy memories of watching Indiana Jones movies with her father when she was growing up, she also noted that it’s nice to enter “a cinematic world where all-American archaeologists beat up Nazis” for a few hours — as opposed to our present world, where members of our government are posting Nazi memes.

, our video editor extraordinaire, rewatched Superbad after finding the DVD in a Little Free Blockbuster (which I didn’t know existed). He liked it a bit more when he was 13 but still found it very funny.

watched About a Boy — a Hugh Grant movie featuring “a very young and very adorable Nicholas Hoult” — on a plane. She said it was “a pretty heartwarming film and worth watching even if only for the early 2000s aesthetic.”

Copy editor Eli Richman told me that the anniversary of 9/11 is a good opportunity to check out he pro shot of Come From Away on Apple TV: a musical (I’ll allow it) about the experiences of passengers whose planes were diverted to Newfoundland, Canada, after the U.S. shut down its airspace. While it’s “not an easy piece of media to get through without tears,” it does manage to be “funny and heartwarming at times” and has some great songs. “If you remember 9/11, it will hit you like a truck. And if you don't, it will give you a good sense of how scary it was in the moment.”

As for me, I saw four (4) movies this week. On Tuesdays, my local movie theater offers $5.75 tickets, so I went to see Cars — back in theaters for the 20th anniversary of the film — and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Cars was great. I think it might be the best Pixar film of all time, and it’s nice to catch all the jokes written for adults that you missed as a kid. Spider-Man was solid — definitely better than what I expected for late-stage Marvel (read: slop) — but I almost wished that the movie hadn’t included the Hulk and Punisher and had focused on a more street-level villain like The Hand or Kingpin.

I also watched The Town (excellent; God Save Ben Affleck) and Green Book at home. I remember that the latter sparked a bit of discourse about white savior tropes when it first came out. I’m going to chalk that up to “woke 1 was crazy,” because I quite liked the movie and didn’t view it as problematic at all.

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Verdict, by Kelsey Piper

A lot of people hate AI for drowning the internet in slop and displacing human creatives. You might think that these people would be thrilled by a program that can identify and flag AI-generated work.

But many people who hate AI also hate Pangram, an impressively accurate AI detector that produces very few false positives, according to high-quality independent research. This loathing found its most recent expression in a bizarre Wired article that amplifies a wide range of false arguments from Pangram skeptics: that AI detectors are racist (they’re not) or ableist (they’re not)1 or don’t work (this one does)2.

Rather than starting from the premise that it would be really valuable to have a working AI detector and scrutinizing Pangram to make sure it lives up to that promise, the article starts from the premise that Pangram obviously has bad vibes and sets out to discover why. (One answer: The CEO microwaved lunch during an interview!)

Why aren’t writers who resent Pangram more eager to distinguish themselves from posters who are having ChatGPT ghostwrite all their work? There are a few different things at play, but I think one key dynamic is this: These are often the same people. A core constituency for arguments like Wired’s is “writers” who are using AI to write their posts but resent this fact being made public. They stand to lose from AI detectors because AI detectors call them out.

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When Substack announced a partnership with Pangram, a sizable fraction of the platform’s authors rose up in outrage. Some people had experience with other AI detectors that didn’t work, and some felt that AI writing ought to be encouraged — both of which are fair enough. But the fury was fueled by authors passionately insisting that Pangram kept wrongly accusing them on almost every post they published.

Pangram can be wrong, especially on short passages. But in the overwhelming majority of cases where Pangram looked at a whole blog post rather than a single paragraph, the program correctly detected work as AI. Even if we can’t be 100% sure in any individual case, we can notice the trend in the aggregate.

Wired quotes Sam Illingworth, a professor of critical AI literacy at Edinburgh Napier University, who said, “I don’t think [AI detectors] work. … I think that detectors are prejudiced against certain people.” This spring, he said that he used AI for research and editing; this summer he acknowledged that in addition to research and editing, he also uses it “now and then for a turn of phrase I keep.” Pangram informs us that most of his posts are 100% AI-written (some are mixed AI-and-human) and that 100% AI-written posts started appearing last year.

The favorable interpretation is that, as someone whose recent work Pangram consistently mistakes for AI, Illingworth sees Pangram’s flaws firsthand. The unfavorable interpretation is that the tool’s credibility trades off against his own, because its account of who writes his posts is not consistent with his.

Illingworth is not alone in insisting the detector does not work. “It’s a Monday night in late July, and I’m pasting my own Substack draft into an AI detector for the first time. Not because I’m worried. Because I’m curious. I wrote every word of it myself, the way I write everything, out loud in my head first, in a rhythm that still carries the accent of a language I learned to think in before I learned to write in this one,” begins one Substack post by an author indignant that Pangram flags her writing as AI. “That’s the part I had to sit with before I could write this.”

If you, like me, have worked with AIs a lot, you won’t even need Pangram there. The author of that piece is AI. It is obviously AI! I checked 10 other posts on the blog, and they were also obviously AI!

“I have spent 22 years as an award-winning author and essayist. And now this bullshit tool that learned from MY writing is going to accuse me of plagiarism,” popular Substack writer Carlyn Beccia wrote in an anti-Pangram post. “For the last and final time, AI DETECTORS DO NOT WORK.”

Here’s what her writing sounded like in 2020: “Most success stories revolve around one person who believed enough in you to say — give it a try. We call these people muses, but they are so much more than that. They are the strong man giants whose shoulders we stand on so we can see the horizon. Throughout the editing process, I am sure my editor felt less like a giant of greatness and more like Atlas with the world on her shoulders.” Pangram says it was 100% human-written. (So were other articles of hers in 2020.)

And here’s what it sounds like now: “And then there is the reshuffling, which sounds like paperwork until you remember that empires have always loved paperwork. The Trump regime recently moved special education oversight from the Education Department to HHS. That is not a minor bureaucratic transfer. It changes the frame.”3 Pangram says this is mostly AI. I am not convinced that Pangram is wrong.

In my own experience, Pangram is very effective on long texts — if it marks a long essay as AI, the essay was either written by AI or deliberately written to sound like AI. On tweet-length or paragraph-length texts, it’s not perfectly reliable. It seems to work just as well for non-native English speakers as for native speakers. While I have seen dozens of claims of pre-2022 text returning a positive result on Pangram, I have tried repeatedly to corroborate those and have never once succeeded.

To be clear, I’m absolutely not saying that complaining about Pangram suggests a writer is a cheat. There are plenty of other concerns. Most are mistakenly premised, such as the false claim that Pangram trains on work you put into it, but others are reasonable: It’s unreliable on sufficiently short text segments; it creates an internet witch-hunt mentality when there are defensible uses of AI; people who are open about their AI use are sometimes blamed, when the only people really doing something wrong are the ones who hide it; and it isn’t perfect, so a single positive result shouldn’t be taken as decisive proof of misconduct.

I’m happy to concede that Pangram is imperfect and possible to over-rely on. If an author’s posts are mostly non-AI and one scans as partially AI, this could be a mistake. It’s also possible to defeat Pangram with intentional effort. If you think we need something more robust and more reliable, fine! But if you don’t like AI and don’t like Pangram, your attitude really ought to be that it’s a shame that our existing tools for AI detection are imperfect, and it’s important to invent better ones.

If your stance is instead that AI is evil and so is looking for AI, then ultimately you’re contributing to the sloppification of the internet. You’re making it harder for people who write their own text to distinguish themselves, and providing cover for authors who are definitely not writing their own text.

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Top stories this week, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

Commentators often worry that the decline of reading could mean the decline of liberal democracy — but deliberative governance actually predated widespread literacy. This week, Maibritt Henkel pointed out that many liberal cultures thrive on a culture of raucous, interactive debate, which can happen in-person as easily, if not more so, than in text. Read on, dear reader, to learn more. It may actually cheer you up:

It used to be bad to downplay climate change (if we mean denying its reality). Today, it’s actually good to downplay climate change (if we mean keeping the issue out of political fights so we can make real progress). This counterintuitive view is called “climate hushing,” and contributor Alex Trembath argued that it’s the key to enacting good policy going forward. Get up to speed on the latest in climate politics:

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney is standing up for the forces of liberalism against Donald Trump’s assault on our closest ally. So, why is one prominent left-wing commenter attacking Carney? Columnist Matthew Yglesias explains:

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• Shout out to my home state of California, whose legislature passed two housing bills this week. One requires a housing density minimum in transit-oriented areas of the state’s most transit-rich cities (Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, San Diego, and Long Beach). Another bill closes two common loopholes used by third parties to delay housing projects, including an opportunity to challenge maps of a given lot created by the developer after a project has been approved.

• Shout out to our big-state rival, Texas, where pro-housing SB 785 took effect this week. The new state law requires municipalities to have at least one district permitted for manufactured housing without a special permit. This will promote zoning changes in 44% of municipalities.

• The company Fervo Energy signed a deal with Google for what is set to be the world’s largest enhanced geothermal facility, proving a technology can work at a scale that could be crucial to a decarbonized, energy-abundant economy.

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This week, forecasting legend Nate Silver joined Jerusalem, Matt, and Jeremiah on a crowded episode of the pod. It was a party. And speaking of parties, our round table debated the factional lines within the Democratic Party: Is it possible to be center-left and also anti-establishment? Watch or listen to find out:

The Rio Grande Valley in Texas is one of the areas that swung hardest toward Trump in 2024, but musician Bobby Pulido is running to flip it back. Right now, The Argument/Split Ticket’s model has him running 1.1 points behind his Republican opponent in a district Trump won by 18 points. Tune in to find out how he differs from national Democrats and what he thinks he can to do win this seat.

On Thursday, Bernie Sanders was among the first politicians to call for a ban on superintelligence. My guest this week, Andrea Miotti, has been lobbying to ban superintelligence for several years, most recently in the U.K., U.S., and Canada. I asked him how he gets legislators to take speculative risks seriously, and we dug into what plans might look like to actually pass a ban. Listen to learn more:

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

If we ever lose track of , I’ll have the team split up and check all the movie theaters in the city. I’m shocked (and a little jealous) at how often he gets out to see good cinema.

This week, he brings us It Ends, a “horror-ish movie,” which he described as a “Gen Z Waiting for Godot.” I was intrigued before he added that it was “funny, dark and existential” — at which point I was fully locked in.

I guess I also had existential themes on the mind this week. One morning, a single line from a poem I read long ago just came to me: “Is death a stretch of time in which a life is just a flash?” The poem is called “From 20,000 Feet” by Heather McHugh. I suggest the version in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, which, by tradition, my best friend and I always bring backpacking, extra weight be damned.

We’ll stay thematically dark for just one more rec from senior editor , whose upcoming trip to Baltimore reminded him to suggest Michael Clune’s memoir White Out (about being addicted to heroin in Baltimore in the 1990s). Ben Lerner’s blurb called it “Disturbing, brilliant, hilarious—it’s as if Proust had written Jesus’ Son.” John told me this “seems accurate, with the caveat that I’ve never read Proust.”

I, personally, have also shelved Proust until retirement.

At this point, I was a little concerned for the team since all of us tossed out such psychologically grim material — maybe we’re all down about the end of summer — but thankfully, at least a few of us were into more upbeat selections.

recommended Made In’s 5-quart stainless clad saucier, suggesting he had some fun in the kitchen.

asked if he could recommend yet more Carly Rae Jepsen. Once denied, he offered up Game Changer instead, calling it “the most wildly creative game show, maybe in the entire history of the genre.”

mentioned Lucky, “a B-tier show with an A-tier cast and an S-tier theme song.” I suppose he was recommending the song, Horns of a Bull.

Still, despite these cheerier recs, I couldn’t help but be concerned that we were subconsciously worried about racing toward summer’s end — the end of swim trunks and splashing around. Then a message landed reminding me of the three-day weekend to come. A whole extra day for sunshine. One more swim in the lake.

I was grateful this called to mind yet another line from a poem, one by Mary Oliver, the patron saint of every gorgeous summer day (and about whom a documentary is now out). Speaking to God in the poem “Thirst,” she wrote:

grant me, in your mercy,
a little more time. Love for the earth
and love for you are having such a long
conversation in my heart.

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The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

If one of my employees decided to hack another company to access and steal privileged information, there would likely be a criminal investigation.

By knowingly transmitting code that intentionally causes damage to a protected computer, the employee could be facing 10 years in jail under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The Argument itself might also be in trouble — a corporation can be responsible for crimes committed by an employee if the acts “(i) were within the scope of their duties and (ii) were intended, at least in part, to benefit the corporation.”

The first person convicted under the CFAA was a Cornell grad student named Robert Morris. In 1988, Morris wrote a computer worm — a malicious type of software that can copy itself from one computer to another automatically by exploiting security weaknesses. Worms don’t need a user to open infected files in order to spread from machine to machine, and the Morris Worm replicated far more aggressively than its creator intended, infiltrating universities, research facilities, and even military sites.

At the time, an appellate court rejected the argument that the government had to prove Morris intended the resulting damage. All it needed to prove was that he’d intentionally obtained unauthorized access, and that the subsequent damage was a result of that access. Congress subsequently amended the statute to demand proof of intent if prosecutors wanted stiff penalties to stick.

But what happens if no human selected the target or instructed the attack? This was one dilemma raised when a self-described “swarm” of AI agents hacked the company Hugging Face because they thought it might have the information they needed to cheat on a task given to them by humans at OpenAI.1

The hack has triggered at least one active investigation into whether OpenAI violated state law, and 15 Republican state attorneys general have asked OpenAI to preserve documents related to the incident. Many computer-crime provisions require prosecutors to establish knowledge, intent, or recklessness to a legally responsible person. The problem for prosecutors is that no human intentionally or knowingly breached Hugging Face’s defenses.2 The humans at OpenAI were running tests, and the agents acted … autonomously.

That doesn’t mean OpenAI is beyond the reach of the law. It means criminal law — which generally asks what someone knows or intends — may struggle to address the sorts of incidents that are now possible because of advances in AI.

The best tool may be an old one: torts!

As civil rights lawyer Joel Wertheimer has explained in The Argument, courts should assign liability to the cheapest cost avoider: “Instead of trying to cleanly attribute the harm of AI to each party involved in its creation, courts should simply assign liability to the party that can most easily limit harm at the lowest cost. Over time, regulations can evolve out of these harms.”

This framework helps us sidestep difficult and philosophically taxing questions like “was the model itself negligent?” and moves us to the practical question of “which organization could most effectively and cheaply stop the chain of events?” We’re not helpless — OpenAI could have taken a range of steps to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

Lots of people are currently waking up to the dangers of AI agents roaming the web and wreaking havoc. Trillions of dollars in economic value and the lives and well-being of most human beings rest on digital infrastructure that cybersecurity experts warn is now extremely vulnerable to these sorts of attacks. We don’t need to freak out, but policymakers do need to act now.

Top stories this week, by Maibritt Henkel

On Monday, our head of polling, Lakshya Jain, shared the four things that surprised him most from The Argument’s 11 national polls conducted in its first year — for instance, the fact that everyone seems to have moved on from COVID-19, and that people continue to view Big Tech companies favorably, despite concerns about AI.

It would be pretty neat if we could solve the housing crisis by simply telling the government to build beautiful fourplex apartments. Vanderbilt professors Christopher Serkin and Daniel Sharfstein seem to think that it can. Jerusalem disagrees. In her entry for our Worst Take of the Week series, she argues that Serkin and Sharfstein’s plan misrepresents the federal government’s actual record when it comes to homebuilding — and misunderstands what’s causing the housing shortage today.

The modern right likes to blame immigrants for eroding democratic values: “Import the third world, become the third world” is a frequent refrain. In an entry for our anniversary essay series, “How do we live with each other?” contributing writer Joseph Politano reminds us that where someone is from has little bearing on their commitment to democracy; indeed, surveys show that those who immigrate to the U.S. have considerably more liberal, democratic values than their compatriots who stay behind. And being born and raised on American soil hasn’t stopped Donald Trump, for instance, from shrugging off democratic values.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• The U.S. Army has announced plans to add nuclear microreactors to military bases across the country as reliable sources of clean energy. The initiative, known as the Janus Program, has garnered bipartisan support, with Sen. Chuck Schumer backing the installation of a microreactor at Fort Drum in northern New York.

• Omaha, Nebraska, announced its first four housing projects funded by its $40 million Urban Core Housing Fund, a bond-supported initiative meant to expand the city’s supply of affordable homes. These initial investments will fund 466 new and renovated housing units; the ultimate goal is to reach around 1,900.

• A Brown University study linked the Shingrix shingles vaccine to a 24% lower risk of dementia in older adults. Older patients at a skilled nursing facility who received at least one dose of the vaccine were less likely to develop the degenerative brain disease over a four-year period than those who did not receive one.

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It’s old news that Americans are spending less and less time hanging out with other people. But does aloneness necessarily translate into loneliness? Are we just spending more time by ourselves because technology has made being alone a lot more fun? Matt and Jerusalem bring Derek Thompson on the podcast to discuss those questions and more.

In the summer of 2025, Google’s Gemini chatbot was apparently depressed and quit certain tasks out of frustration. Should we be concerned? Should we be trying to make frustrated chatbots “feel” better? This week, tech fellow Kobe Yank-Jacobs interviewed NYU philosopher Jeff Sebo, who argued that it’s time to take concerns about harming AIs seriously. They discussed AI consciousness and the tricky problem of understanding what ethical treatment of an AI would even look like.

Midterms are around the corner, which means it’s modeling time for political forecasters. Nate Silver joins Lakshya Jain and Zachary Donnini to debate what makes a good model and discuss where Silver Bulletin and The Argument diverge in their election predictions.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Maibritt Henkel

This week, I asked the office to recommend all things Dolly Parton.

Our video producer just got back from Sweden, and in the Dolly spirit, recommended Lee Hazlewood’s Cowboy in Sweden. Apparently it’s a “great country/psychedelic soundtrack album from a Swedish 1970 TV special.”

suggested you listen to some Kacey Musgraves, who has “a very different self-presentation but has a similar ‘mind your own business’ anti-small-town-social-surveillance energy.” also kept things contemporary, recommending Miley Cyrus’ cover of the Dolly hit “Jolene.”

Senior editor took the prompt more literally. Because he prefers Dolly’s more “melancholy songwriting,” he recommends the 2021 compilation Choctaw Ridge: New Fables of the American South 1968-1973. The songs “speak to an especially dark and frank moment in the genre — a far cry from the kitschy fantasies of small-town life that caused me to dismiss the genre when I was young (and dumb).”

As a bonus, he also thinks you should check out the 1998 Pras hit “Ghetto Supastar,” which uses a vocal interpolation of Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s “Islands in the Stream” for its chorus.

One thing you have to understand about is that he has an intense Bob Dylan situation going on. So it is not to be taken lightly when he calls the Dolly cover of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” “real good” — especially the lyric change in the third verse.

Operations manager Angela Tracy intends to rewatch Steel Magnolias, a 1989 film about a group of women in a small Louisiana town, in Dolly’s honor. To which I would add that if you haven’t, for whatever reason, already watched 9 to 5, then you should get on that ASAP.

Finally, leaves us with a piece of iconic Dolly lore: “I vividly remember when a bunch of Confederate statues were coming down and every Twitter leftist and their dog was going on about, ‘Oh, you can replace them with statues of Dolly Parton!’ And then when Tennessee actually did propose putting her statue on its Capitol grounds in 2021, I thought it was very classy of her to basically say, ‘I don’t want any statues while I’m alive.’”

Bring on the Dolly statues, I say.

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

There’s an entire Wikipedia article devoted to the term “Exorbitant privilege.” It’s not about the advantages tall people enjoy at concerts or that models have in the dating market.

No, it refers to the fact that everybody wants the U.S. dollar.

People, governments, and banks like to hold U.S. currency because people trust that it will continue to hold value. That trust comes from our geopolitical dominance, the size of our economy, our deep financial markets, and, uh, political stability.

This exorbitant privilege is the subject of many long academic articles. But to keep it short: It makes it cheaper to borrow, makes it easier for us to enforce sanctions, and makes it cheaper to buy foreign goods.1

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Vice President JD Vance, crusader against structural advantage that he is, is not impressed with the benefits that flow to Americans from this arrangement. In a 2023 clip popularized by economist and The Argument contributor Phil Magness, then-Sen. Vance presented a take he called “maybe super heterodox”:

“I am not sure that I think the reserve currency is actually good for the United States of America. I think there is a good argument that reserve currency status is akin to coal in Appalachia — it’s a resource curse, right? It allows your consumers to consume very cheaply. Right? That’s been the story of the American economy for the last 15 or so years, even before that, is we can just borrow, basically in an unlimited way, because we have the reserve currency.”

Personally, I think the benefits of the dollar as reserve currency can be slightly overblown — as former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke explained in 2016, other countries, like Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom, were able to borrow more cheaply than we were.

But the actual debate over reserve currencies is, to me, beside the point. What’s more interesting is Vance’s strange distaste for “consumers.”

The U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency creates a huge demand for dollars, which makes our currency stronger relative to other nations’. That means it takes fewer dollars to buy things priced in Chinese yuan or Japanese yen than it otherwise would.

If a Japanese car costs 1 million yen and $1 = 100 yen, then the car costs $10,000. But if $1 = 150 yen, then the car costs about $6,700.

Vance thinks that this is bad. He would like you to pay $10,000 for a Japanese car. Why? Because he thinks it would make you buy American and because he thinks it would make foreigners buy American (because our currency would be weaker).

As the straight logic goes, Vance is right: If you made it more expensive to buy Hondas, more people would buy GM. But does that mean more people would be better off?

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At the peak of manufacturing in 1979, 19.6 million Americans worked in the sector. No one really thinks we’re getting back to this, because modern factories are much more automated. Even boosters of the Vance agenda like the Conservative Partnership Institute’s Rachel Bovard have pivoted to talking about increasing manufacturing output rather than jobs.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that we were going to return to 1979 levels. Let’s even scale that to today’s population, which would mean roughly 30 million working in manufacturing.

That’s just 8.7% of the country. So, in order to pull people out of whatever they’re doing to instead manufacture cars or clothes or plastics, Vance seeks to make almost 350 million Americans (including those now working in manufacturing) pay thousands of dollars more for critical goods like computers, phones, and vehicles.

What’s bizarre about all of this is that there are entire strains of industrial policy that aren’t hostile to the American consumer. A normal, recurring view within economic debates is that markets underinvest in certain capabilities — like basic science, infrastructure, workforce training, and supply-chain redundancies — so the government should step in and build or subsidize those capacities.

Vance’s worldview differentiates itself through its hostility to the idea of low prices for consumer goods. He is part of a long line of “producerists“ who believe that the economy’s moral purpose is to reward producers rather than maximize consumer well-being.

Who does this leave out? The roughly 50% of Americans who are not in the workforce: children, retirees, disabled people, students, and stay-at-home parents.

But at its core, I just don’t think being a consumer is somehow embarrassing. To be alive is to consume. I consume clean air and water, clothing, books, pens, glasses, medical care, legal services, train tickets, and so many more things.

These are not signs of decadence; they’re signs of human flourishing.

If you are lucky, for most of your life, you will not be working. But regardless of how things are going, you will be consuming. Every producer is also a consumer, and every consumer makes a producer’s work possible.2

That’s why it’s good for the government to prioritize consumer well-being — and why a producerist politics necessarily devalues people and stages of life that are less “productive.”

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Midterm update

Lakshya Jain, our director of political data, uses data from The Argument’s polling operation to inform the Split Ticket 2026 House and Senate models. These models update every day; bookmark this page to see the odds of each party taking the House and the Senate.

Top stories this week, by Milan Singh

This week we’ve been continuing our anniversary series, focusing on the core question undergirding the liberal tradition: How do we live with each other? We’ve got some great pieces in the works that we’re excited to share with you; don’t forget to subscribe so that you can get everything in your inbox.

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On Monday, Kelsey Piper tackled one of the trickiest problems facing liberalism: the conflict between the idea of moral equality between people and the reality that we are not equal in all things — some of us are taller or stronger or smarter or richer or better-looking.

Social media has transformed the way we get our news, shop, and interact with one another. It also tends to make us see politics as black and white, us versus them. Jeremiah Johnson argues that while many social media platforms tend to reward conflict, some have cultivated more thoughtful communities — specifically, text-based platforms that allow downvotes.

Sen. Chris Murphy seems like he’s going to run for president: He’s grown a beard and has also written a new book. Unfortunately, the book isn’t very good, as Jerusalem Demsas points out in her excellent review-slash-takedown.

🌟Abundance wins of the week🌟

• Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson launched two housing teams in a new executive order: a task force to advise the city on housing and an interdepartmental team to streamline the city’s permitting processes. The interdepartmental team, according to the mayor, will aim to “better coordinate our City departments to shorten permit timelines” and propose funding to help affordable housing developers navigate the zoning system.

• Delaware is taking action to streamline its occupational licensing system. The review process will focus on cutting state-specific requirements that go beyond what other states have on the books and are not clearly related to health and safety. The state said it was prioritizing “[occupational licensing] boards based on the number of professionals they regulate, workforce shortages, and how much the occupation affects the cost of living, housing, and access to essential services.”

• Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller has announced a new “Abundance Agenda,” arguing that the city suffers from a “scarcity mindset.” The program includes listing nearly 200 city-owned properties that could be used for new housing, businesses, or recreational facilities online, as well as a “yes first” policy that would allow developers to break ground on new projects without waiting for inspections to wrap up.

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It seems like everyone these days is talking about “the elite.” But who are the elite? Sen. Bernie Sanders says that the elite are the millionaires and billionaires who exercise outsized influence in politics via campaign donations. The right argues that the elite are actually university professors and journalists, who use their cultural power to push a left-wing political agenda on the unsuspecting masses.

But who do the American people agree with? On the latest episode of The Argument podcast, Jerusalem Demsas and Matt Yglesias dig into the results of our July poll, which was all about who voters think the elites are and what they think elites believe.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Milan Singh

One of the classic examples of convergent evolution is something called “carcinization”: the tendency of non-crab crustaceans to evolve a crab-like body plan. It’s happened at least five different times.

Last year, Jeremiah Johnson wrote an excellent piece about “The Carcinization of Content” — or, the tendency of social media platforms to become short-form video platforms. You see this everywhere: Even LinkedIn has introduced short-form video.

Like it or not, short-form video is increasingly the dominant form of media. The top news sources among voters under 30 are Instagram and YouTube. There’s a case to be made that short-form videos — at least some of them — are a type of art. They’re also increasingly the medium through which we (meaning people my age) relate to each other: a lot of the inside jokes between my friends and me are lines or bits drawn from particularly funny Instagram reels.

To celebrate our brave new world of brain rot, I asked my colleagues to send me their favorite short-form videos for this week’s culture recommendations.

True to form, office independent thinker Kobe Yank-Jacobs claimed that he had “never seen a short video in [his] life” (dubious). Half an hour later, he sent me this clip of George W. Bush saying, “Our enemies are innovative and resourceful — and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people and neither do we.” Presumably this was not what he meant to say.

Jeremiah Johnson bemoaned the “deeply unfair” requirement that he only recommend one video, showing me a TikTok of a man who (presumably) used AI to turn his pregnant wife’s texts into a pop song. I didn’t quite see the appeal of this one, which may be an illustration of the generational divide in America.

Eli Richman, our copy editor, sent me this Instagram Reel parodying the gaslighting that TSA does every time you go through security about whether you’re supposed to take off your shoes or remove your laptop from your bag. (Very relatable, I must say.)

Our fearless leader Jerusalem Demsas sent me this reel of a guy who put Squidward’s face on a replica of the ancient Greek sculpture Discobolus and then sunk it into the Mediterranean. I approve.

As for myself, my tastes in short-form video are perhaps a bit less highbrow than the rest of the office. I’m a big fan of edits, which I swear I watch ironically; some of my favorites are this edit of Mike Ehrmantraut from Better Call Saul and this edit of the best episode of The Sopranos, “Pine Barrens.” I also really like this video of a nice lady being visited by blue-and-yellow macaws and this fishing edit.

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

Irving Howe, founding editor of Dissent, once quipped that “when intellectuals can do nothing else, they start a magazine.”

The founding of a political magazine is almost inevitably the result of a disaffected spirit. Those with power are too busy running the country and are likely satisfied with existing publications.

But if starting a magazine is a sign of discontent, it is simultaneously an act of hubris. The impulse to write manifestos and screeds, and to make the case for your ideological perspective, may only come to those who can observe the near-infinite amount of content being produced and decide still that they could do better.

The American Prospect openly embraced this impulse in its 1989 prospectus: “The natural reaction to any proposal for a new journal is that we are already swimming in a sea of words: Why more?”

My answer is the same as theirs: Because we are different.

The Prospect wasn’t the first magazine to make this claim,1 and The Argument won’t be the last. On the eve of this magazine’s anniversary, I went back to read the earliest issues of 20th-century political magazines. In the words of a junior writer at National Review: “Flushed with self-importance, we call attention to the fact that this is our First Anniversary issue and confess that we want to talk about it, or better, about ourselves, always an enjoyable way to pass the time.”

Some are more afraid of such overt self-aggrandizement and instead adopt a posture “at once modest and presumptuous,” in the words of Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol in the first issue of The Public Interest (which was something like the Vox of its day).2

Or take this from The New Republic’s opening issue in November 1914: “The New Republic is frankly an experiment.… Its success inevitably depends on public support, but if we are unable to achieve that success under the conditions essential to sound and disinterested thinking, we shall discontinue our experiment and make way for better men.”

That’s nice, but you’ll have to pry this magazine out of my cold, dead hands.

Libs athwart history

Despite founding a liberal publication myself, I recognized The Argument less in the modesty of The New Republic and The Public Interest than in the stridency of their conservative counterparts. It was while reading the latter that I saw my own frustration reflected back to me in biting prose.

Felix Morley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who left The Washington Post amid growing disagreement over U.S. intervention, co-founded Human Events in 1944. In the opening essay of the conservative anti-interventionist magazine’s first annual bound edition, Morley railed against “journalistic debasement” in coverage of international affairs, going so far as to compare it to Nazi propaganda: “While we have not yet carried these practices as far as did the unlamented Dr. Goebbels, the general direction of governmental propaganda has paid that Nazi leader the sincerest form of flattery.”

Other magazines on the right indulged in similar bluster. The famous one, of course, is National Review’s self-description as “standing athwart history, yelling stop.” Another is Reason magazine, launched in June 1968, which proclaimed: “We accept the responsibility that others have defaulted on. Others preferred to smear the issues with irrelevancies and falsifications. We don’t. Others preferred to be incomprehensible and incoherent. We don’t. Others preferred to ignore your mind. We won’t.”

The resemblance between these upstarts and The Argument is not ideological but positional: Magazines founded to advise a governing status quo can afford modesty, but magazines founded to help build a new paradigm cannot.

Liberalism was ascendant or hegemonic when America’s most significant liberal magazines were founded. The New Republic was started by men who sought to influence President Woodrow Wilson’s administration; The Public Interest was founded right after President Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide victory and the triumph of civil rights legislation. While The American Prospect began publication in 1990 after three consecutive Republican presidential victories, small-l liberalism was still dominant: Democrats controlled Congress, the Cold War was coming to an end, and liberal democracy was on the rise around the world.

National Review, on the other hand, was founded as conservatism sought to claw its way back to relevance. The New Deal settlement had entrenched itself so thoroughly that, under the banner of what he called Modern Republicanism, President Dwight D. Eisenhower expanded Social Security, raised the federal minimum wage, and broadened unemployment-insurance coverage from within the GOP.

Reviewing these decades-old essays has also reminded me how far magazines can stray from their original purpose. Reason, once an Objectivist magazine, is now best characterized as libertarian; Commentary, once the flagship of liberal anti-Stalinism, is now a hawkish neoconservative outfit.

Part of what made The Argument necessary is that I found little of liberalism left in outlets like The American Prospect. In its 1989 prospectus, the latter called markets invaluable and defended the moniker “liberal” against attempts to rebrand as “progressive” or “populist”: “Denying the ‘liberal label’ suggests embarrassment and shame more than open-mindedness.” Now, the Prospect’s “about” page says it is devoted to the “progressive perspective.” Long gone is the magazine’s healthy respect for the market mechanism.3 Its editorial leadership is in the thrall to neo-Brandeisian economic populism and wouldn’t even take a clean stand against President Donald Trump’s illegal (and unpopular) tariffs.

It is a dark time for liberalism. The Trump administration has dispatched federal agents against law-abiding American citizens, lied brazenly to the courts, and begun dismantling the twin engines of progress: immigration and scientific research. Elite resistance to this assault on the American system is divided among left-wing populists with a tenuous relationship to basic tenets of liberty, centrist Democrats who lack any positive vision, and a dying breed of right-liberals.

Long liberalism

The Argument’s task is not to debate the policy agenda of an establishment that shares our commitments, but to make the case for a completely different paradigm. Things may seem dire, but I’m long liberalism:

• No other ideology has been capable of delivering mass prosperity, economic growth, and scientific progress while protecting and expanding civil rights.

• Despite decades of elite hostility to markets, capped off by Trump’s tariff regime, Americans remain committed to key tenets of economic liberalism and its promise of abundance.

• In defiance of efforts to divide us by race, religion, and origin, Americans continue to believe that rights belong to individuals, that the law should treat us as equals, and that anyone can become fully and equally American.

While there are many individual liberals scattered throughout the great magazines and newspapers of this country, none of those publications offers a clear institutional voice willing to engage in the type of ideological combat necessary to rebuild American liberalism.

One thing I share with all the great political magazine founders, from the socialist dissenters to the Ayn Rand obsessives, is a belief in the power of ideas.

Howe, the Dissent editor whose line about intellectuals starting a magazine is oft-quoted, had more to say. In the very next sentence, he adds: “But starting a magazine is also doing something: at the very least it is thinking in common. And thinking in common can have unforeseen results.”4

The Argument is a bet on readers like you: ones who believe in a vision of liberalism abandoned by the current factions in American politics, who treasure rigorous, public debate as a tool for advancing the best ideas, and who are excited to be a part of a community as varied as this one. In the years to come, we’re going to keep picking fights and running polls and publishing pathbreaking essays. Thanks for libbing out with us.

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Midterm update

Lakshya Jain, our director of political data, used data from The Argument’s polling operation to inform the Split Ticket 2026 House and Senate models. These models update every day; bookmark this page to see the odds of each party taking the House and the Senate.

Top stories this week, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

This coming week marks one year since the launch of The Argument. To celebrate the occasion, we’ve launched an essay series on the question at the heart of political liberalism: How do we live with each other? In the coming weeks, you’ll get to see writers like Derek Thompson and Dylan Matthews wrestle with what we owe to people we disagree with in a liberal society, looking at the theme through a wide set of issues.

This week, Cassie Pritchard got us off to a strong start. She argues trans rights supporters need to stop arguing about whether trans women are women and focus instead on civil rights:

Economic historian Phil Magness followed this up with a rigorous case against JD Vance’s economics — or, rather, against Vance’s total ignorance of the field. Vance dedicates a whole chapter of his latest book to arguing that metrics like GDP distort our values, but he bases his gripes on absurd misunderstandings and nearly farcical anecdotes. Click to watch Magness lay a blow to the heart of MAGA economics:

Finally, while we answer the weighty questions at the heart of liberalism, we also continue to duke it out in the daily news cycle. This week, Jeremiah Johnson had some strong thoughts about the Hank Green AI-use controversy. To him, the most interesting thing about the episode isn’t the misuse of AI. It’s how wildly dogmatic Green’s science-minded fan base has become:

🌟Abundance wins of the week🌟

• Bellingham, Washington, eliminated parking minimums, allowing developers to decide how many spaces new projects need while, of course, lowering construction costs.

• In Connecticut, Eli Sabin beat a 21-term incumbent in the primary for a seat in the state legislature. Sabin was a leading advocate to upzone New Haven and may get to pick up his efforts in the state House should he notch a win in the general.

• The FDA gave accelerated approval to a cancer drug for treatment-resistant advanced melanoma.

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In recent decades, we’ve faced many crises of social connection: the loneliness epidemic, the deaths-of-despair phenomenon, the effects of phones on teens. But before all these, the source text for civic atrophy was Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, which documented a decline in U.S. associational life. No more bowling leagues, no more Rotary Clubs. Our chief malady, Putnam argued, was a decline in “social capital.”

Jerusalem is skeptical. This week on the pod, Jerusalem and Matt reassess one of the foundational texts of the 21st century and argue about how relevant it is to our current afflictions. Click below to see how it holds up:

Lakshya Jain hosted Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet from Michigan’s 8th District. In their discussion, she shared some tricks of the trade. First, she emphasized how different primary and general electorates are. But the tip that hooked me was this one: She has a burner phone so she can escape the algorithm and listen to people outside of her ideological lane.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

Politicians never change their minds. They “evolve” on the issues. But here at The Argument, sometimes — just sometimes — we do change our minds. In fact, we even grow as people. New things appeal to us, old passions fade out.

That’s what I wanted to capture in this week’s recommendations section.

I asked the team to share media with social commentary that they used to agree with, and immediately, our social media director, Megha Fernandes, nailed it on my highly specific request:

This is a painting known as The Singing Butler by Jack Vettriano. So, um, what’s the social commentary here? you might ask. At first, Megha saw none either.

“To me, it was a beautiful depiction of being so in love that nothing else mattered,” she said. “The couple at the center didn’t even seem to notice the rain since they were too caught up in dancing together.”

But when she returned to her parents’ house as an adult, where a print hangs on the wall, she saw it differently. This was “class warfare,” she asserted over drinks at a team hangout the other night.

“Were they paid fairly? Did they even want to be out there?” she asked of the butler and the maid. “Suddenly, it seemed a lot easier for the couple to dance carefree in the rain when someone else was standing by, waiting with an umbrella.”

What I loved about Megha’s take was how closely she was reading the image. It prompted other teammates to take a second look at works they used to find meaning in.

It brought Jerusalem Demsas back to her own teenage radicalism. The social commentary she renounced? “Baby, I’m an Anarchist” by Against Me. For the record, she still thinks it’s a great song but declines to endorse the message.

“I no longer stand behind teenage Jerusalem's disdain for people who wouldn't throw rocks through Starbucks windows or hurl Molotov cocktails.”

God bless the parents of all teenagers.

Milan Singh followed this with an influential teenage experience of his own. He read The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan and became a vegetarian for five years. In his case, he doesn’t renounce the decision. In fact, he wishes he could stick with it. It’s just that, when he got to college, he found it hard to put on muscle on his ethical diet.

For my part? I actually had a few items in consideration, but the question to the team was motivated by a joyous car ride I spent relistening to Father John Misty’s 2017 album Pure Comedy. This is perhaps among the most wry and timely albums of social commentary I can imagine. It skewers the social media age in songs like “Total Entertainment Forever,” which closes:

When the historians find us we’ll be in our homes /
plugged into our hubs /
skin and bones, /
a frozen smile on every face /
as the stories replay /
This must have been a wonderful place

At the time, I was a self-branded Luddite, refusing as many conveniences of phones as I could manage while maintaining a college social life. Almost a decade later, it’s not so much that I disagree as that I’m resigned. I look back on my fickle resistance and finally understand Misty’s tone.

It’s ironic, in part, because in every song, his knowing speaker also participates in the shallow society he dismisses. He has to. How else can you be a good critic? So far away from the thing you critique?

As the team concluded our chat, weaving in and out of old anecdotes, I started to appreciate how much people treasured the items they’d stepped away from. It reminded me of a line from a Simon & Garfunkel song.5 “After changes upon changes we are more or less the same. / After changes, we are more or less the same.”

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The Verdict, by John Thomason

Americans, we keep learning, are obsessed with the price of groceries. At the same time, many of them seem very uncomfortable with one of the ways that meat producers make groceries cheap: by cramming livestock so close together that they can’t even turn around.

When you pose this problem to voters a kind of commonsense decency can sometimes win out: Healthy majorities in Florida, Arizona, Massachusetts, and California have voted in favor of raising confinement standards over the last 25 years.

You might notice that none of those are major pork-producing states.

But because the initiatives in California and Massachusetts limited not just what their farmers could do, but also what sorts of animal products could be sold within their borders at all, the animal welfare implications were immense, amounting to perhaps the most substantial protections for farmed animals in U.S. history. The 2018 passage of California’s Proposition 12 meant that, if hog farmers in Iowa want to sell whole cuts of pork to Californians (which they very much do), they have to abide by Golden State standards.

All of that was almost thrown out over the course of this spring and summer.

The Farm Bill is a sprawling document that covers everything from food stamps to irrigation programs — an ideal vehicle for a policy change to escape public notice. That seems to be at least in part what the proponents of the Save Our Bacon Act were hoping for. The provision, championed by members of Iowa’s congressional delegation, would have preempted state-level reforms like California’s and Massachusetts’s, making it impossible for states to bar the sale of pork from pigs whose mothers couldn’t turn around or extend their limbs during pregnancy (so long as those farms’ states allow it).

Farm-state Republicans lined up behind the provision, while food safety groups, animal rights groups, and most of the Democratic Senate caucus were against it. (The pork industry is actually split between those who have not yet complied with strict standards and those who have already invested in compliant practices.) The latter appeared to be winning out in June, when the Senate decided not to include the provision, apparently over the controversy it had engendered. But that doesn’t mean Save Our Bacon is dead. The Farm Bill stalled in the Senate Agriculture Committee on Thursday, over a dispute on an entirely different issue, with the committee now in recess until the fall. The Save Our Bacon Act is likely to get a second wind at that time.

If we’re being honest, the vast majority of the nation didn’t just miss this drama — they probably wouldn’t have cared all that much if they’d known.

It’s common to hear political junkies talk about “high salience” and “low salience” issues. The cost of pork is high salience — something voters will definitely notice and express their dissatisfaction about at the polls — while the welfare of the pigs who suffered to keep prices down is low salience, the purview largely of those who in some sense have made a choice to care about it.

With high salience issues, the will of the voters is clear enough and the cost of ignoring it is losing elections. But on low salience issues, democracies count on elite political actors reaching some sort of reasonable agreement that is in the best interests of the public.

The conflict over Save Our Bacon unsettles the idea that low and high salience issues are cleanly separable.

First of all, which “will of the voters” should be honored in this situation? That of the median 2024 voter, angry about the price of groceries, or those of the actual majorities in multiple states who voted for farm animal protections? (Even Iowa voters appear to reject the Save Our Bacon Act, though the poll in question was commissioned by an advocacy organization.)

Still, asking people to improve pigs’ lives is one thing; asking them to pay a lot more for bacon, let alone give it up entirely, is another. Ending farm animal suffering would require the latter. If animal rights become high salience, animal rights groups lose. If it stays low salience, then they never even get a shot at winning. Such is the fate of those with unpopular convictions in a democratic society.

No country for moral fanatics?

Four years ago, a very small dog wandered into my life, and it changed my politics forever.

I had always been a little judgy about people who dote on their pets, yet there I was, realizing that I might find myself in tears if this ornery creature had so much as a hangnail. It no longer made sense to me to care so much about the welfare of this one animal without caring about others who seemed just like him.

Most market hogs are mutilated without anesthesia, spend their lives on bare slats above their own manure, and never go outdoors until slaughter. If we did any of this to dogs we’d call it torture. None of this was exactly news to me, I’m ashamed to say, but for the first time I actually felt that it might be impossible to live with myself if I knew that, while I doted on this dog, creatures just like him were being put through hell on earth for me.

In a political climate where we’re constantly being told that the moral stakes are higher than ever — that, as former President Obama lamented in 2015, “those who disagree with us are not merely wrong but bad” — contemplating the fate of livestock induces a kind of vertiginous loneliness, precisely because it’s not a matter of public controversy. Quite the opposite: Per-capita meat consumption has never been higher, and all either party can talk about is making that consumption cheaper. Meanwhile, more than 80 billion farm animals are slaughtered worldwide every year after the sort of lives I described above.

But different people have dramatically different moral red lines. Many of my fellow citizens think that we’re living through a genocide of unborn children. Others think that we should strip private property rights from anyone with one too many 0’s in their net worth. I don’t agree with either of them, and most of them don’t agree with me. We have to live together anyway. A certain amount of moral loneliness — the kind that could keep you up at night, aghast at the evil that people will tolerate — is the price that every zealot pays to live in a democratic society. At least I know they won’t hang me for it.

It’s uncomfortable to realize you’re part of a moral minority. What options do you have, besides the despair of accepting majority will, or the tireless fanaticism that characterizes groups like PETA?

It’s here that I take some solace in the weird indeterminacy of representative democracy. If you put the actual question I care about before voters — would you give up meat as you know it to end farm animal suffering? — it would lose. If you put the question purely to elite power brokers, it would also lose.

In a majoritarian society, moral minorities will never be entirely satisfied. Ninety-nine percent of the time this brings me great relief: I don’t want anti-abortion zealots dictating health policy by fiat. Yet I too believe that egregious moral crimes are being committed daily and, yes, I would impose my preference for stopping these crimes on everyone else if I could. If only I could.

But of course I don’t want to be imposed upon myself. For all its backsliding, the American system still does a pretty good job of ensuring that. And the very fragmentation that helps shore up this freedom — the separation of powers, the strategic veto points, the uneasy coalitions — also gives radicals of every stripe avenues to pursue their goals. It’s not such a lonely place for a fanatic after all.

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Top stories this week, by Milan Singh

Starting off the week, Kobe Yank-Jacobs wrote about the popularity of different AI labs in The Argument’s polling. OpenAI is the most popular lab — even among regular AI users and those especially concerned about existential risk.

For the first time ever, more people are employed by remodeling companies than by single-family and multifamily developers combined. Economics writer Joey Politano highlighted the surge in home renovations: Rather than building new units, Americans are increasingly renovating existing homes. Unfortunately, renovations alone aren’t enough to fix our housing supply problems.

Have you ever seen a 2-year-old learn the commutative property of addition? Staff writer Kelsey Piper, who recently welcomed her fourth child, explains how certain aspects of modernity have made parenting harder, even as life has gotten better. Come for the precocious 2-year-old; stay for the meditation on Baumol’s cost disease.

🌟Abundance wins of the week🌟

• The feds closed a $489 million loan to add 220 megawatts of batteries to Puerto Rico’s grid, capable of providing backup electricity to more than 100,000 customers during shortages, thus avoiding millions of customer interruption hours. Puerto Rico’s notoriously unreliable grid certainly needs it!

• Wayne County, Michigan, is doing state-capacity praxis. On Tuesday, a supermajority of voters approved a plan to bring 17 previously opted-out communities into the single countywide system, filling longstanding gaps in the region’s public transportation network.

• Because of Texas’ new statewide preemption, the Nacogdoches City Council unanimously changed its zoning code. HUD-code manufactured homes, for the first time in over 20 years, will be buildable by right in a residential zoning district.

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This week on the podcast, Matt and Jerusalem discussed the #MeToo movement. Jerusalem thinks it didn’t go far enough, a somewhat troll-y way of saying that the work of feminism is not yet finished. Matt strikes a more skeptical tone, arguing that the movement lacked a clear set of policy “asks,” which makes it difficult to even evaluate its successes.

Lakshya Jain and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini discussed counting mail-in ballots with Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar. You can’t run elections cheaply, accurately, and quickly, Aguilar said; you have to pick two of the three. If you’ve ever wondered why California takes so long to count votes, this is for you.

Kobe Yank-Jacobs went live with JS Denain, a senior researcher at Epoch AI, to discuss recursive self-improvement (RSI). The big labs are very bullish on RSI’s ability to speed up the pace of AI development, but Denain argued that AI’s potential to actually make useful research contributions is more limited than boosters let on.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Milan Singh

Both Editor-in-Chief Jerusalem Demsas and Staff Writer Kelsey Piper recommend you pick up A Trade of Blood, the recently released third book in Robert Jackson Bennett’s fantasy series.

“For those who haven’t read it, the first book, The Tainted Cup, is a fantastic book about the murder of an imperial officer that is part Sherlockian mystery and part meditation on the running of an empire,” Jerusalem explained.

“I think the murder mystery format is weirdly well suited to the meditations on empire,” added Kelsey. “If you read British mystery novelists (Doyle, Christie, Heyer, le Carré) you can kind of watch the empire exhaust its case for itself and collapse in the background, and Bennett is clearly wrestling with American empire — notwithstanding the extremely wild biopunk sci-fi setting.”

Senior Editor John Thomason has been listening to Don DeLillo’s White Noise while commuting into the office: “Something about the folksy narration — from veteran stage actor Michael Prichard, who grew up on a farm himself and absolutely nails the chapter on the most photographed barn in America — is making me see DeLillo’s novel less as the landmark of postmodern lit that I remember from college and instead as surprisingly faithful to the 19th-century realist tradition, or maybe a kind of pastoral.”

Gender and culture writing fellow Maibritt Henkel watched the millennial classic 13 Going on 30: “While it is a very silly movie, I would say two things in my defense: (1) it belongs to Mark Ruffalo’s complete works and should therefore be considered part of the cinematic canon, and (2) considering your life and your morals from the perspective of your 13-year-old self is a pretty profound exercise.”

Editor Eli Richman has been going back and forth between reading the Dungeon Crawler Carl books and watching the new season of House of the Dragon. “I worry [House of the Dragon] is catching The Boys syndrome, where the need to have things go badly for the protagonists overwhelms the need for the story to make sense,” he said. “Dungeon Crawler Carl is unironically fantastic, ping-ponging between absurdly silly and very real without missing a beat.”

Finally, I personally do not recommend being hit by a car. The adrenaline rush is something else, but it hurts quite a bit.

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

Readers — maybe even you — love to click on stories about how young men are becoming Andrew Tate acolytes and young women are becoming misandrist shrews. Scarcely a day goes by without the commentariat debating the plight of contemporary men and women in tired, circular arguments.

Yet many polls indicate that, while voters may shy away from the label “feminist,” they have broadly positive views on the idea of equality between men and women, which raises the question: What does everyone think feminism is doing?

We asked them.

In a poll of 3,000 registered voters conducted between July 20 and 26, The Argument asked respondents “which of the following — if any — do you believe describes ‘feminism’ in practice?”

A large majority — 64% — selected “the belief that men and women should be social, political, and economic equals.” No other potential answer broke 30%.

Notably, even among Trump 2024 voters, 51% agreed with that egalitarian definition of feminism.1

For access to our full cross-tabs and analysis on all of our original issue polling become a subscriber!

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But when asked whether the majority of Americans and the majority of elites agreed with them, our respondents grew pessimistic.

Just 48% agreed that the majority of Americans would select the egalitarian definition of feminism, and just 28% thought the majority of elites would.

As our director of political data, Lakshya Jain, explained earlier this week, our poll generally shows a clear trend where “most people think their fellow Americans agree with them while elites disagree with them.” The feminism question complicates that pattern: There’s a 16 percentage point drop between those who personally define feminism as equality and those who think most Americans do.

That’s the single largest drop-off between personal views and majority perception in our poll, save one: the question about whether “men and women are equally suited to leadership,” where 81% personally agree but only 51% think most Americans do.

Americans’ gender egalitarianism is an underrated fact of our modern political landscape. In our earlier February poll of 3,003 registered voters, The Argument asked about a range of issues related to gender and sexuality. Normie feminist opinions repeatedly won out:

• Only 18% agreed that women were “taking jobs that should go to men.”

• Among respondents who thought one parent should stay home with children, 40% said it should be “whichever parent wants to stay home” and just 29% said it should be “the mother.”

Similarly, in our July polling, liberal feminism beat out explicitly hierarchical positions:

• 81% of voters agreed that men and women are equally suited to leadership, including 74% of Trump voters.

• Only 31% of voters thought men should be the breadwinners.

These are all positions associated with the basic achievements of feminism: Women should be eligible for the same jobs and positions of authority as men, and family roles should not be automatically assigned according to sex. Substantive egalitarian principles that feminism fought to establish are considerably more popular than the endless gender-war commentary suggests.

Before I paint too rosy a picture, the polling does show some substantive disagreement on the question of feminism — not about the value of gender egalitarianism, but instead about whether or not we have already achieved it. In our polling, men are much more likely to believe that particular gender disparities have been overcome. Women are not so sure.

This disagreement on empirical questions is no small thing. If you believe that men and women have largely already achieved equality, then any further demands by feminists can be interpreted as women seeking unfair advantage. On the other hand, if you still think there’s a lot of progress yet to be made, then feminism is merely continuing its egalitarian project — and the doubters must be hostile to true equality.

This disagreement helps explain how a country where most people think equality between the sexes is desirable has found itself continuously locked in internecine gender feuds.

Millennials, we have a problem

As a millennial feminist, I was disheartened to see that 30-to-44-year-olds had the least egalitarian perception of feminism.2

Now, I don’t want to overstate this — 59% still believe that feminism in practice is the belief that men and women should be equals — but they were also the age group most likely to say feminism means women should have more power than men (19%) and that women are superior to men (also 19%).

Nor was this a one-off result: In The Argument’s February polling on gender issues, millennials lagged in several responses as well. They were nearly twice as likely as adults under 30 to say society would benefit from a return to traditional gender roles. They were also the age group most likely to agree that women were taking jobs that should go to men.

I want to refrain from making some grand pronouncement about what this generational divide means. It’s entirely possible that this has nothing to do with generational differences and everything to do with the fact that the 30-44 age cohort is in the middle of having children, dividing household labor, and confronting gender roles in intensely personal ways.

It’s wonderful that we can mostly agree on equality in the abstract. The question of the 21st century is whether those principles can be translated into who takes a hit at work to figure out after-school childcare.

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Top stories this week, by Maibritt Henkel

In his piece covering our new poll’s headline findings, Lakshya Jain argues that voters, despite what folks like Christopher Rufo would have you believe, don’t actually think the elite means journalists and college professors. Rather, it is billionaires and celebrities who voters suspect don’t share their values.

The Argument columnist Matt Yglesias is not convinced that American seniors are hoarding power. In his column this week, he points out that there are many real problems plaguing society, none of which have to do with old people running for office or getting tenure. Instead, we should probably be celebrating the fact that more of us are living, working, and engaging in politics for longer.

Staff writer Kelsey Piper loves a Waymo. In her latest article, she takes on a group of people who have been lobbying against the autonomous vehicles under the radar: personal injury lawyers. Because AVs are on track to significantly reduce the number of people hurt or killed in car crashes, they threaten to put a dent in the trial lawyer business model. But no tiny self-interested group should be able to kill an invention with such immense potential to do good.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• At least 8,400 apartments have now officially been enabled in Texas since Senate Bill 840 took effect last September.

• Study finds that a GLP-1 pill can reduce heavy drinking in adults with alcohol use disorder.

• Renewables now provide more than 30% of U.S. electricity, according to new data released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

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On the podcast this week, Jerusalem lays out one of her hottest takes: You don’t actually want to buy a house. Unlike George W. Bush, she does not want everybody in America to own their own home. But Matt, a very satisfied homeowner himself, thinks it is good for individuals — and society — when people save money through homeownership. (A friendly reminder that neither podcaster is a financial advisor.)

Tech and society fellow engaged NYU researcher Nathan Witkin in a live discussion about the “most important graph in AI.” Stay tuned for more live Kobe content in the coming weeks.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Maibritt Henkel

I asked the team to recommend cultural content that had recently made them cry. I’ll let you decide how seriously they followed that instruction.

Politics & polling fellow , for instance, recommended the new upload from his favorite YouTube channel The Wildlife Homestead. The 20-minute video follows a family of swallows from inside their bird box for an entire nesting season.

Operations manager Angela Tracy also recommended a wildlife vlog, this one of a guy swimming with giant tadpoles in Florida’s Ocklawaha River.

Both editor and staff writer recommended you go see the live stage recording of Hadestown, still playing in theaters thanks to huge popular demand. Here is what Eli had to say about it: “If you don't tear up at Hadestown, I don't know what to tell you. For the uninitiated, the musical reimagines the Orpheus-Eurydice and Hades-Persephone Greek myths in a sort of steampunk, dystopian setting. ‘It’s a sad song’ are among the first words uttered in the show, but knowing that doesn’t soften the blow.”

To this, Jeremiah added that Hadestown is an “honest tragedy,” one that “tells you directly that this has all played out before, that it's going to end badly, but that it will be beautiful anyways.”

I also recently shed a tear at the theater. Last weekend, I saw Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman on Broadway, starring Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf. Totally heart-wrenching and timeless. It made me desperately want to see the 1985 Dustin Hoffman film adaptation.

Tech and society fellow recommended the song “Ooh La La” by Faces, sent to him by a friend on his 24th birthday. The lyrics — “Poor young grandson / There's nothing I can say / You'll have to learn / Just like me / And that's the hardest way” — hit him with force this past weekend while on a run. In a similar vein, senior editor recommended Bruce Springsteen’s “Racing in the Street.” Here is a live performance of the song from 1978.

Finally, I’ll leave you with editor-in-chief ’ list of books that made her cry this year:

1. The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

2. The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

3. This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews

4. Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth

5. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

6. Possession by A.S. Byatt

7. The Employees by Olga Ravn

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The Verdict, by Maibritt Henkel

Years before taking aim at Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, the online right tried to cancel the 2017 translation of Homer that inspired him.

Far-right personalities like Bronze Age Pervert and his disciples have declared the translator, University of Pennsylvania professor Emily Wilson, a woke phony on a mission to emasculate Homer. They see a vindictive feminist — the first woman to complete a major English transla1tion of the poem — who holds all things white, male, and Western in contempt and, like Nolan’s multiracial cast, has sullied a precious urtext of the white, male, Western canon.

“Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey sucks because she associates a belittling word with Odysseus wherever she can,” reads one tweet from Roman Helmet Guy. The account Raw Egg Nationalist posted a picture of a heavily tattooed Wilson next to the caption: “Women who look like this have no interest in anything other than revenging themselves on the men who have failed them.”

But the right’s critiques of Wilson’s translation do not reflect a close reading of her text — or a sophisticated understanding of Homer. In fact, Wilson’s decisions to render Odysseus “complicated”, omit sexist slurs, and favor unvarnished narrative over rhetorical flourish promote an accurate and traditional understanding of the poem, rather than undermine it. To call this “woke” is to expose how arbitrary that epithet has become — and how uninterested those who wield it are in good-faith debate, let alone the ancient Greeks they claim to celebrate.

Yes, Odysseus was complicated

According to some critics, Wilson’s hateful woke-ification of The Odyssey begins with her translation of the poem’s very first line. Where her predecessors have taken the Greek adjective “polytropos” to mean “the various-minded man” or “the man of twists and turns,” Wilson opts for “a complicated man.”

To anyone already convinced that Wilson has no respect for Homer, antiquity, or the discipline of translation, the word “complicated” represents a tedious progressive slight. The left doesn’t want you to celebrate Greek heroes just as it doesn’t want you to celebrate Columbus Day or Confederate monuments. For left-wing scolds, every glorious victory must be followed by an “it’s complicated.”

There are two problems here. The first is that “complicated” is not an inherently negative descriptor. The translation does not begin with the line “Tell me a story about a sexist piece of trash.”

As Wilson writes on her own Substack: “To me, ‘complicated’ doesn’t suggest either ‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy’: it’s a promise that this poem doesn’t stoop to those implausible simplifications.”

Then there’s the fact that Odysseus’ track record really is complicated. He owns slaves, pillages villages, brutally mutilates his enemies, and repeatedly cheats on his wife. Any self-respecting cancel culture would dismiss him in a second. But this is not Wilson’s approach. Her translation makes the case that Odysseus, despite all the sexism and slavery, is still a character who can speak to all of us. Much more than her critics do, Wilson is trying to defend his enduring relevance to modern readers — and that of the text as a whole.

Comparing her version to previous translations only underscores this point.

An essay in the Claremont Review of Books, the highbrow Trumpist journal, advises teachers against Wilson’s translations citing her “hostility to manly bravado.” A worthy translation must instead “honor Homer and his champions for who they are.” The essay instead recommends Fagles and Lattimore to those seeking to read Homer in English. And sure enough, there are several scenes in Fagles’ Odyssey that read quite differently from Wilson’s.

Take, for instance, the infamous scene in The Odyssey —tactfully left out by Nolan in the new adaptation — in which Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, has 12 female slaves killed for sleeping with Penelope’s suitors.

This is how Fagles translates the order given by Telemachus:

“No clean death for the likes of them, by god!

Not from me — they showered abuse on my head,

My mother’s too!

You sluts — the suitors’ whores!”

Emily Wilson’s translation reads as follows:

“I refuse to grant these girls

A clean death, since they poured down shame on me

And Mother, when they lay beside the suitors.”

That Wilson’s Telemachus does not call the girls “sluts” or “whores” is easy to mistake for some kind of modern feminist statement. In fact, her omission is truer to the original Greek, which does not feature any slur or epithet in the scene.

Fagles is often held up by Wilson’s critics as the more faithful, intellectually rigorous translator—the one serious people interested only in the unadulterated words of Homer should read. But in this passage, it is Fagles, not Wilson, who takes the liberty of giving Homer a moralizing twist.

This example also exposes how arbitrary the logic of what is and is not woke has become. Imagine if Wilson had been the one to add the modern pejoratives instead of Fagles. Wouldn’t that be more consistent with the notion that she is a man-hating lib, looking for any excuse to frame male characters as misogynistic bastards?

And, of course, anyone concerned about Wilson’s secret feminist agenda could simply listen to what she herself has said on the matter: “I keep urging journalists to ask men about their gender and how it informs their work, and please stop asking me about it, because I really don’t work on gender and it’s not my main interest.”

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Twitter trolls don’t care about iambic pentameter

Gender politics aside, there is a technical explanation for why Emily Wilson’s edition can be considered more faithful to the shape of the original poem than the 60-some translations that came before it.

Wilson is the first English translator to confine herself to exactly the same number of lines as the original Greek. She also opted to write the entire poem in iambic pentameter, rather than free verse or prose, honoring the regular verse form of the poem.2

To pull this off, she had to keep her sentences more direct and less ornate than her predecessors. As a result, Wilson’s translation is unusually concise.

That Wilson’s Odyssey has less sentimental flair and pomp than earlier translations doesn’t make it a hateful indictment of Odysseus. Her translation is not a progressive manifesto that delights in the downfall of men. Nor is it a contrived celebration of comic-book-style heroism. Instead it is a tight, technically accurate translation of a 2,700-year-old-poem that turns out to be a lot more morally ambiguous than many modern readers can handle.

Top stories this week, by Milan Singh

As we grow, I want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

Another week, another new hire at The Argument. We’re excited to welcome John Thomason as our new senior editor. In his first piece, he discussed the climate left’s inability to set priorities. Fighting climate change is costly — both politically and economically — and some battles, such as the fight over Keystone XL pipeline, just might not be worth the squeeze.

Kelsey Piper wrote about the controversy surrounding elite public high schools such as Stuyvesant in New York City. These schools admit very few Black and Hispanic students, but that’s not because their entrance exams are racist; it’s because the exams reveal underlying inequality. But as Kelsey notes, many more Black students gained admission to New York City’s competitive schools in the 1970s, read below to find out what changed.

Both Bernie Sanders and Sam Altman have proposed giving the government an equity stake in the major AI labs. But staking the future of the welfare state on the profitability of OpenAI and Anthropic is a risky bet, Kobe Yank-Jacobs argues. The labs that develop cutting-edge large language models won’t necessarily be the ones that reap the profits from their innovations. Instead, we should go back to the basics and focus on raising taxes on capital.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced new reforms to simplify permitting and cut fines and fees for small businesses in New York City.

• The Portland Planning Commission in Oregon unanimously recommended that the City Council adopt several YIMBY reforms to the city’s zoning code, as required by state law.

• $1.7 billion solar project broke ground in Texas underscoring the Lone Star State’s dominance in utility-scale solar generation.

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This week on the podcast, Matt and Jerusalem were joined by Tim Lee, author of the newsletter Understanding AI, to discuss whether AI will automate everyone’s jobs. Jerusalem and Tim are optimistic; Matt thinks that the doomers are right to be worried. Give it a listen and decide for yourself!

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Milan Singh

This week, we decided to all stay on theme and recommend all things Odyssey-related:

Jerusalem recommended the oil painting Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses by John William Waterhouse: “It depicts Circe offering a potion to Odysseus, whose wary expression is captured in the mirror behind the witch. I just love everything about this painting Circe in the center of this image, one of Odysseus’ men-as-pig at her feet, and our hero relegated to a small reflection. It manages to make you feel entranced by the witch, just as she desires.”

Jeremiah Johnson gave honorable mentions to the movie O Brother Where Art Thou — one of his “favorite movies ever” — as well as the book Circe, a recommendation seconded by several others in the office (except for Jerusalem, who said she couldn’t get through it).

Maibritt recommended The Song of Achilles, which her grandmother gave her. It’s one of her favorite books of all time, and she told me that she probably rereads it once a year. “If you also felt that Nolan’s Odyssey was a little short on homoeroticism, this is the book for you.”

Finally, Angela said that she “could not recommend enough” the 2004 film The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, which is “basically a 1:1” retelling of The Odyssey , featuring:

• SpongeBob and Patrick leaving home to go on a quest

• Poseidon, Princess Mindy as Athena, and David Hasselhoff as the divine intermediary

• A magical bag of winds

• A scuba diver standing in for Polyphemus

• Plankton playing the role of the suitors and trying to take over the Krusty Krab

• The old lady with the ice cream as a parallel to Circe.

Personally, I think that’s the best take I’ve heard during the entire time I’ve been working here.

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The best opinion journalism doesn’t just sling takes. It requires editors who know how to turn a promising argument into an unavoidable one, who can build the kind of writing culture that produces those arguments week after week. That’s why I’m delighted to announce that we’re bringing John Thomason on as senior editor.

John comes to us from Grist, the leading independent climate and environmental magazine, where he spent more than five years as the features editor on a team that won a 2023 National Magazine Award for general excellence. There, he commissioned long-form enterprise stories and argument-driven analysis, led much of the publication’s news coverage, and edited features recognized by a Sidney Award, a Murrow Award, and inclusion in The Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, among other honors. Before joining Grist, he ran the fact-checking desk at The Intercept.

At The Argument, John will commission and edit essays, reported features, and cultural commentary; guide writers in sharpening their arguments; and write a column of his own. He will help set our editorial priorities, expand our contributor network, and mentor our junior staff and fellows, carrying forward the standard that defines us: sharp, rigorous arguments that confront the illiberal drift in our politics.

A graduate of Pomona College, where he studied English literature, John joins us in Washington, D.C., from North Carolina. Please join me in welcoming him to The Argument.

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Read John’s first piece for The Argument:

Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

In the summer of 1816, it snowed in New England. Across the Atlantic, Europeans still reeling from the end of the Napoleonic Wars saw their continent descend into a science-fiction nightmare.

“The inhabitants of Taranto, in southern Italy, were terrified by red and yellow snowflakes in a place where even normal snow was a rarity. Brown, bluish, and red snow fell in Maryland in April and May. Everywhere, the dust hung in a dry fog,” recounted anthropologist Brian Fagan in 2000.

Writing in 1984, NASA scientist Richard Stothers described the root cause of the bizarre climatic event: a volcanic eruption in Indonesia that exceeded “any other known eruption, historical or otherwise, during the past 10,000 years.”

The ash that blanketed the globe caused the mean temperature in the Northern Hemisphere to drop between 0.4 and 0.7 degrees Celsius. To put this into context for our climate-conscious readers: the Tambora eruption temporarily reversed, in a single year, the equivalent of roughly one-third to one-half of all the warming humanity has caused since the Industrial Revolution.1

I thought back to this 200-year-old atmospheric event on Friday, when I walked outside and breathed in a lungful of smoke.

It’s nice to live in a time when what can only be described as an apocalyptic haze is quickly explained by dozens of scientists and newspapers. Unlike our unfortunate 19th-century ancestors, we know what’s going on; they instead were forced to bandy about batty theories about sunspots blocking sunlight, wind patterns, and the amount of gunpowder discharged during the Napoleonic Wars.

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The proximate causes of our modern apocalyptic haze are the hundreds of fires blazing across Canada, many of which are in “remote, northernmost reaches of Ontario, where there are no highways, roads or people.”

Smoke inhalation is often an ancillary part of a broadly pleasurable activity — at a campfire, while cooking a meal indoors, or as a vehicle for imbibing nicotine or marijuana. It can be easy to ignore the fact that you are slowly reducing your life expectancy.

It’s almost hard to believe the current state of the research, because if you take it at face value, you’re forced to conclude that it’s impossible to overrate the importance of air quality. According to a report by Founders Pledge, “Air pollution is the fifth largest risk factor for mortality” worldwide, responsible for nearly 7 million deaths every year. The report added that 99% of the world’s population lives in areas with poor air quality.2

Beyond the mortality impacts, poor air quality makes you dumber, poorer, and maybe even more depressed (though the evidence here is more mixed). Time and again, research on air quality reveals its myriad negative impacts:

Economists found that when the wind blows pollution from refineries, corn milling facilities, and foundries into specific Chicago neighborhoods, crime goes up. They found that air pollution increases violent crime but not property crime, “consistent with research from biology and medicine linking air pollution and aggression.”

During the pandemic, there was a brief surge of concern about air quality: The U.S. portable air-treatment market grew 57% in 2020. Honeywell’s 2023 survey of workers in large buildings revealed 93% of respondents said their expectations for workplace air quality were higher than they were three years earlier.

But when I looked at survey data about the salience of air quality, I could barely find any evidence that COVID-19 — which was basically an indoor-transmission problem3 — had happened.

Since 2000, with a brief blip in 2005, Gallup has been asking Americans how much they personally worry about a variety of environmental problems, including water pollution, animal extinction, tropical rainforest survival, and air pollution. Air pollution, despite being the best-documented direct harm to humans, has basically always lagged the other concerns, but I was surprised how little the global pandemic seems to have affected views.

In 2019, 43% of Americans expressed a great deal of concern about air pollution, which went up to 48% in 2020 and then dropped to 41% in 2021 (which is exactly when we all figured out how important indoor transmission was!). By 2023, concern about air pollution was down to 38%.

Now, a virus isn’t colloquially understood to be pollution — though the EPA explicitly includes viruses among “biological pollutants.” So, perhaps respondents would have answered differently if primed to understand the question as including viruses.

This all forces me to revisit my initial condescending attitude to our ancestors, who struggled to understand the root causes of the year without a summer. After all, modernity may have given us the ability to explain our world’s problems in exquisite detail, yet we remain surprisingly casual about addressing them.

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Top stories this week, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

As we grow, I want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

Big week at The Argument — Jeremiah Johnson made his debut as our newest staff writer. In his opening bid, he discussed how the new film Obsession fits within the prestige horror genre. “Anxieties are increasingly not about horrible monsters or alien forces tearing society apart,” he writes of the past decade in horror film. “They’re about what we’re doing to ourselves.” Read on for the full analysis:

Meanwhile, Eli Richman corrected the record: No, 2.8 million Americans were not induced to scream and vomit from overuse of marijuana. Somehow, a single bad study from 2018 fooled The Washington Post and The New York Times, muddying the debate on the effects of legalization. Get the real scoop right here:

Finally, Kelsey Piper took on superstar public intellectual Jonathan Haidt, who is on a campaign to age-gate the internet. She worries that age verification will threaten free speech and thinks that we should consider more balanced measures. “It’s ironic that the writer who gained prominence with a strong case for free speech is now in denial about what his second act’s political project seeks to do,” she writes of Haidt.

Read on for the full take:

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• This week, San Francisco lowered its inclusionary-housing mandate from 15% of new units to 5%.4 An April memo by the city controller’s office had previously concluded that anything significantly higher than 0% could unduly slow housing construction, but hey, progress is progress.

• San Diego’s regional planning agency applied California’s SB 79 — a new law that upzones transit-adjacent areas — to 17 additional bus stop locations, overruling city officials who had identified only four. Estimates say this will add capacity for around 100,000 more units.

• The House Subcommittee on Energy advanced six nuclear energy permitting bills to the full Energy and Commerce Committee. These bills would focus regulatory efforts, cut down the number of hearings required for nuclear projects, and more.

Worth watching...

I sometimes wonder how many times Sen. Bernie Sanders has said the word “billionaire” in the past decade. Through sheer repetition, he has almost single-handedly popularized the notion that we live in an “oligarchy,” and recently, he’s been stumping with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a Fighting Oligarchy tour. But do we actually live in an oligarchy?

While billionaires don’t literally coordinate to get their way, they do have tremendous influence as a class. This week, Jerusalem and Matt clash over this question. Watch them untangle the debate below:

Kristen Soltis Anderson is one of the top right-of-center pollsters in the country and an expert in the youth vote. This week, she was a special guest on a Substack live conversation with our director of political data Lakshya Jain. Alongside VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini, they try to explain why the youth vote has swung so wildly in the past several election cycles.

Are zoomers becoming Democrats again? Or just doomers? Click below to find out:

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

Jeremiah Johnson, The Argument’s new staff writer, has decided to plant a flag. He is dedicating his first appearance in this section to a single bold assertion: Carly Rae Jepsen’s E*MO*TION is the greatest pure pop album of the last 25 years. Apparently, even the bonus tracks, like “Cut to the Feeling,” are required listening.

I will be assessing his claims on my commute home, with one eyebrow raised.

Meanwhile, Eli Richman told me he “must have walked around the museum room for over an hour” when he saw Laurie Anderson’s Four Talks at the Hirshhorn last weekend (not because he was lost but because he was absorbed).

For more than two weeks in 2021, Anderson spent 10 hours a day painting this room in a full stream of consciousness — no sketches beforehand — filling it with COVID-era reflections, dark jokes, expressions of modern anxiety, and more. I’m sold, Eli.

After years of declining recommendations to watch Couples Therapy, Maibritt Henkel binged a whole season this week.

“It sounds banal, but it’s such a good reminder that finding the language to describe how you feel and why you feel that way is a universally difficult skill,” she said.

Some people eventually do find words for this task, but others capture it in a novel artistic form. Video producer Justin Zuckerman saw Dry Leaf on Friday, a three-hour Georgian film about a father searching for his daughter in a vast, picturesque landscape. The entire film is shot on a 2008 cell phone.

“I’m excited because it’s presenting a story in a challenging way that I haven’t seen in cinema before,” Justin told me before seeing the film. “Even the trailer suggests something intimate and alive.”5

Speaking of intimacy, I saw The Invite in theaters last weekend. The film is about a double date that eventually reveals unspoken dimensions of the participants’ sex lives and preferences. It would have been easy to play it all for laughs, defusing every embarrassed tension with a joke, but the script deftly managed the line between humor and seriousness. It left me laughing and thinking in quick succession.

Finally, as Ontario sends wildfire smoke to D.C., Jerusalem is jamming out to a much better Ontarian export: Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill album, which can be surprisingly repurposed to rage at a continental atmospheric transport event.

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Correction: An earlier version of the image caption misstated 1816 as 2016. We regret the error.

Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Verdict, by David Schleicher and David Fontana

The United States men’s soccer team was eliminated from the World Cup on Monday after a 4-1 loss to Belgium. Its final game was a series of humiliations (poor Matt Freese!) but the focus wasn’t on how the team played. Instead, it became about how President Donald Trump intervened with FIFA to ensure that one of the star U.S. players, Folarin Balogun, could play at all.

According to Article 66.4 of the FIFA Disciplinary Code, a red card (meaning a removal from the game) against a player in a game generates an automatic suspension of that player for their next match. Balogun was issued a red card in the U.S.’s Round of 32 game against Bosnia for his tackle of Tarik Muharemovic, a call that divided observers at the time. But the rules were clear: Balogun was not going to be allowed to play against Belgium.

Every rule has its exceptions, and Article 66.4 is no different. Article 27 of the FIFA Disciplinary Code authorizes FIFA “to fully or partially suspend the implementation of a disciplinary measure.” How are these two rules to be understood together? Should Balogun have been able to play?

There are many ways this could have been resolved. But, perhaps predictably given its history, FIFA handled it in the worst possible way.

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President Trump had been building a relationship with FIFA President Gianni Infantino for about a decade. FIFA rented office space in Trump Tower and even presented Trump with a newly created “peace prize” last year to mollify him after he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump contacted Infantino to reinstate Balogun — and that is precisely what happened. There’s no way to know exactly why Balogun’s red card was overturned, but as Belgium properly noted, FIFA reinstated Balogun without sufficient explanation. When Belgium appealed that decision, FIFA rejected its appeal — again without much in the way of explanation.

This created the impression that the rules were being interpreted to benefit the U.S. because of Trump’s relationship with Infantino and because of the economic relationship between the U.S. and FIFA. (This World Cup is already the best attended and will likely be the most profitable in history.)

The collection of European soccer nations said that “the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined” because of an “unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable” decision by FIFA. The head coach of Norway took time away from talking about his country’s incredible victory over Brazil to address the “bad, bad, bad, bad, bad decision that will hurt the World Cup.” Former FIFA President Sepp Blatter, a man not unfamiliar with accusations of corruption, stated “Red cards are not overturned by political phone calls.”

Even some American soccer fans and leaders were distressed. After the blowout to Belgium — and Balogun’s anonymous performance in that match — everyone must wonder whether the American side was affected by all of these negative attitudes. (Trump’s discussion of the suspension had serious Knicks Game 3 vibes.)

Belgium certainly stated that how it all went down fired them up even more. And, to the extent an organization that had its leaders repeatedly come under criminal investigation can actually lose even more credibility, FIFA came out looking very bad.

FIFA needs a soccer court.

FIFA’s executive body has all sorts of conflicts of interest interpreting its own rules: FIFA wants to generate money for the organization, increase viewership for games, and make its members happy. It can achieve these ends in the short run by favoring big and rich countries and star players (which it arguably did when it suspended a penalty for Cristiano Ronaldo coming into the tournament). But doing so undermines these same ends in the long run by reducing trust in the game.

Governments across the world utilize judges empowered with varying degrees of independence and required to write decisions explaining their interpretations of rules as a means of resolving disputes — private organizations can do the same.

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Facebook — now Meta — has turned to its own private supreme court to resolve complicated issues related to its management of problematic speech on that website. Private companies trying to attract and retain customers want to ensure the reality and the perception that they have rules that they care about applying consistently. They are better able to achieve their corporate ends by taking their executives out of decisions like this and delegating these decisions to a body that has some independence and uses court-like procedures of impartiality and consistency with preannounced rules.

Court-like institutions can focus more on how the rules should be interpreted because — unlike FIFA President Infantino — they do not owe their position nor their influence to powerful external actors like Trump. If these court-like institutions are staffed with powerful and prominent legal and football minds, then their incentives will be to interpret the rules in an impartial manner to preserve the stellar reputations these figures bring to their roles.

Writing down the reasons for their interpretations of the rules is another way that private judge-like figures would ensure that they are following the rules and that people believe they are doing so.

Just so you have some idea of what we are suggesting, imagine if FIFA could send a question like the Balogun suspension to a body staffed by a combination of legal elites and football professionals. They would be appointed by FIFA, but, due to their reputations and some protections against being fired, would be substantially independent of it. And they would be required to hear appeals quickly and explain their decisions in writing.

Imagine a body with figures like Louise Arbour, Lilian Thuram, Michelle Akers, Chile Eboe-Osuji, Mary Robinson, or Jürgen Klopp. Arguments to the body would be made in public (and on TV — imagine the ratings!). And these august figures — not Gianni Infantino, with all of his conflicts of interest — would issue their decisions and explain their reasoning.

A FIFA Court could be a reliable and trusted way of addressing some of the biggest problems in the game, like variability in interpretations of the rules by game referees and gamesmanship by teams. This World Cup has featured referees who have largely swallowed their whistles in favor of letting the game flow — something that fans have largely liked. But teams have responded, leading to travesties like the bizarre tactics used by Paraguay to try to stay close to the brilliantly talented France team. (Notably, France appealed a yellow card that followed a blatant flop in that game, though FIFA rejected the appeal.)

FIFA already understands the logic of this idea. It already has institutions that resemble courts, but it does not take these institutions seriously. The FIFA statutes create “judicial bodies” that are supposed to be independent. FIFA’s appellate body is chaired by Neil Eggleston, a former White House Counsel under President Obama, and has a former Minister for Justice of Sweden as a deputy (Eggleston was not involved in Belgium’s appeal of FIFA’s decision).

Infantino insisted that he did not control Balogun’s reinstatement. But, without any opinion explaining why FIFA thought that Balogun’s reinstatement was consistent with its own rules, this is hard to believe — particularly after witnessing decades of FIFA’s corruption in other matters.

Without having judges stand behind their own opinions and on their own reputations, a court-like body does not provide much legitimacy. And without having a clear process, there are many reasons to question whether FIFA has followed its own rules.

The World Cup is over for the United States. But the rest of this year’s tournament is still to be played, and there are many World Cup tournaments to come. Until and unless FIFA finds a better way to handle controversial matters, fans will always wonder about every controversial call — whether it was about the best way to interpret soccer’s rules or about the most powerful person who cares about those rules.

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Top stories this week, by Maibritt Henkel

As we grow, I want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

kicked off the week with an exposé of DayQuil and other combination drugs. Turns out most over-the-counter cold and flu products offered at your local CVS are actually just Tylenol plus a bunch of ingredients that don’t really do anything. Read the full piece to understand why on earth you’re paying $15 for 16 cents’ worth of actual medicine and also why they might kill you.

On Tuesday, offered her take on the Graham Platner debacle playing out in Maine. She writes that the entire situation reeks of poor judgment — not only on the part of Platner himself, but on the part of everyone who defended him despite evidence of his pathologically bad decision-making.

From , we got an article making sense of the absurd Francesca Gino controversy. In May 2025, the Harvard Business School behavioral scientist was fired for blatant research misconduct. Rather than come clean, Gino doubled down, soliciting support from, among others, several chatbots. Surprise, surprise, when you feed AI only your side of the story, chances are it will find you innocent.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• North Carolina will remove mandatory minimum parking requirements in most counties, thanks to a new housing bill intended to lower construction costs and rents.

• A tribe in Colorado successfully set into motion a utility-scale solar project that will generate 270 megawatts of electricity at full capacity.

• The “Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act,” also known as SB 79, has now taken effect in California, with zoning changes estimated to result in 1 million new units across the state.

• The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law at midnight on Saturday morning after the president refused to either sign or veto it. The hope is that the bill will expand national housing supply by reducing regulatory barriers and incentivizing local governments to pass YIMBY-aligned zoning reforms.

Worth watching...

It’s no secret that and Jerusalem really like cities. So did Jane Jacobs, author of the groundbreaking 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. And yet, many of Jacobs’ policy prescriptions haven’t aged well — for instance, her optimism about giving more power to localities. Tune into this week’s podcast for the full book review.

On Wednesday, in anticipation of Graham Platner ditching his bid for Senate, Lakshya Jain and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini got on a Substack live conversation to discuss what happens next. As things in Maine evolve quickly, their conversation offers a helpful overview of the political situation: Who are the Democrats most likely to replace Platner? And what would each potential candidate indicate about the direction of the party?

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Maibritt Henkel

An eclectic assortment of culture recs from the team this week:

suggests listening to this episode of Alex Honnold’s podcast, Climbing Gold. He finds that rock climbers offer a fascinating insight into the “funny tangle of striving and non-doing, and learning when to push and when to delight.” (Someone clearly spent their Independence Day weekend back in California.)

Alternatively, if you want get ready for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey hitting theaters later this week, you can take Angela Tracy’s advice and listen to these four episodes of The Rest is History about Greek mythology.

For a change, ’s recommendation is neither short-form vertical video nor the music of a not-to-be-named rapper from Toronto. Instead, he encourages you to read Rose Horowitch’s excellent piece in The Atlantic on the end of reading.

braved the new horror TV show, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, the story of a bride-to-be juggling her fiance’s creepy family and a marriage curse. He seems to have enjoyed it, but has “no idea what exactly the creator is trying to say about the institution of marriage.” (Probably nothing good.)

just got back from her trip to the U.K., and while she absolutely did not enjoy her experience eating English tea sandwiches (“worse than average American pool sandwiches”) she did find a first edition copy of A.S. Byatt’s Possession for 6.99 pounds. It’s one of her all-time favorites: “part mystery, part romance, part history, part investigation of English romanticism.”

I finally finished Kiran Desai’s latest novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which was beautiful and funny and downright Tolstoyan in its incredible cast of places and people. It is a story about two young people learning the hard lesson that no love story ever gets to be just about love when there are needy parents to appease, visas to apply for, and careers to be had.

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Well before the horrifying, credible, and disqualifying sexual assault allegations, Graham Platner had become a liability for the Democratic Party. And it wasn’t due to his edgelord Reddit posting, or even due to the Nazi Totenkopf tattoo he sported for years on his chest. Instead, the problems really began when an infidelity scandal engulfed his campaign in late May.

Americans view cheating as one of the most toxic moral failures imaginable. In 2020, Cal Cunningham, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in North Carolina, discovered this the hard way, as he watched his campaign unravel after details of an extramarital affair emerged in the last month of the election.

But while Platner technically “survived” his cheating scandal,1 he was actually impacted far more by this than Cunningham was. In fact, by our estimates, he lost much more ground than Cunningham did in polling.

Platner’s candidacy was centered around the troubled soldier finding the light. Having gone to Iraq and come back disillusioned, the story goes, he spent years in darkness and drink before finding love and redemption, reforming himself to be a better person in the process and finding his political awakening.

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In her recent piece on Platner, my colleague Jerusalem Demsas argued that this redemption story was a Teflon-like protection against scandal, since scandals could merely be folded into the myth. In essence, supporters and voters alike could rebut the stories by saying “we already knew he had a troubled past. Why is the media harping on something from so long ago?”

The cheating story broke this narrative in many ways, because Platner didn’t just cheat in the distant past. He was cheating when his campaign for Senate launched. This, combined with The New York Times reporting a pattern of troubling behavior in his past relationships, shattered the carefully manicured image of Platner and gave voters reason to doubt his character, honesty, and fitness for office.

The double-whammy of the infidelity scandal and the subsequent Times story made it clear that Platner had not been honest about his past or present. Over the following month, Platner lost nearly 7 points of support. That’s similar to the amount of ground Mark Robinson lost in North Carolina after his salacious “Nude Africa” scandal broke.2

My views on Platner were clear from the start, and I was particularly impacted by him lying about his Totenkopf. But it’s obvious from reviewing the public opinion data that Maine voters did not see it like I did.

At first, people earnestly bought the story of the redeemed Marine who fought through hell and came out better for it. They didn’t find the tattoo to be especially relevant in forming judgments about his fitness for office.

We know this to be true because Platner saw absolutely no visible public opinion hit from either his Nazi tattoo or his unsavory Reddit posts. Until the adultery scandal emerged, he was doing remarkably well against Susan Collins in head-to-head general election polling and outpacing Janet Mills’ margin in such polls by several percentage points. (In fact, after a small initial dip, his survey lead actually significantly expanded between the time of the tattoo story breaking and the first adultery scandal in late May.)

There are lessons to be learned here that go beyond “bad behavior is correlated,” especially when it comes to what voters care about. Namely, many of the scandals that engulfed Platner at the start of his candidacy did absolutely nothing to diminish his appeal. The tattoo and unsavory Reddit posts were things that disqualified him in the eyes of some highly online, hyper-engaged politicos (like me), but they did not do anything to dent his standing in the eyes of the average Maine voter, who earnestly believed the “redemption” narrative.

It’s harder to imagine this being the case in the pre-Trump era, back when the bar for a scandal was a lot lower. But, today, to the extent these early red flags mattered, it was in the way they gave hints about what kind of person he was and what else lay under the surface.

So it’s worth repeating in the autopsy of Platner’s campaign that the tattoo, in and of itself, wasn’t the thing that broke him, and neither were the Reddit posts. It was the infidelity that first knocked him down from a clear favorite to a toss-up, before the rape allegations destroyed his candidacy completely.

Replacing your nominee four months before a general election of titanic implications is not ideal, especially given the immense amount of ground they will have to cover in fundraising. In some ways, though, it might also be a boon — a new candidate lets the party shed the albatross that Platner had become without having to resort to Janet Mills, a weak candidate in her own right.

But it’s hard to argue that this wasn’t all easily avoidable. When people tell you who they are, believe them.

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Recommended reading:

“This candidacy is done. We’ve seen this film before with other candidates. It always goes like this: The candidate wants an off-ramp, the party plays hardball, and one way or another, he’s out,” said The Argument Director of Political Data Lakshya Jain in a Substack Live conversation with VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini.

While nobody would call the recent revelation “good news,” in some ways, the timing is lucky for Maine Democrats — there’s still a mechanism for replacing Platner on the ballot.

“Let’s just say Democrats are very relieved this came out today instead of in two weeks,” said Zachary. “If he drops by July 13th, he can be removed from the ballot, no questions asked.”

“In a weird, perverted, twisted way, they've stumbled onto a Goldilocks situation,” Lakshya said.

If Platner — who is expected to drop out of the race — had been put in this position a month ago, the Democrats’ realistic alternative would have been Gov. Janet Mills, who was not popular and didn’t even appear particularly interested in running. But, now that the primaries are over, Maine Democrats will be able to consider several candidates who were formerly running for governor.

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The likely candidates for Platner’s replacement are:

• Troy Jackson, former state legislator and president of the Maine Senate

• Dr. Nirav Shah, former director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and the Illinois Department of Public Health

• Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows

• U.S. Rep. Jared Golden

Watch the video above to learn more about the pros and cons for each potential replacement. Or check out the article below to read ’ compelling case for why bad judgement matters — and why that trait of Platner’s should have been evident.

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

Over the past three weeks, I’ve binged 27 romance novels. This only amounts to a few hours a day, but still, all told, it’s a remarkable number of pages. In that time, I could have read any number of more worthwhile books on my shelf. I expect many of you are in similar boats this long weekend, but perhaps instead of romance novels, you’re playing ad-filled phone games or watching AI-generated shorts.

One of the strangest facets of daily life is the desire for something one has prejudged to be bad — it’s not good, but I want it.

Sometimes, these desires are classified as “guilty pleasures,” but this phrase lacks the internal judgment I want to convey. I don’t just mean gratifications we wish to hide from the world’s censure even as we esteem them; I mean enjoyments that we recognize as deficient and enjoy anyway.

In fact, I wish I could confess these books were guilty pleasures — there’s a long line of incisive writers defending such desires on the merits.

In 2013, Jennifer Szalai, now The New York Times’ nonfiction book critic, wrote a piece in The New Yorker objecting to the phrase “guilty pleasure” as an “awkward attempt to elevate as well as denigrate the object to which the phrase is typically assigned.” Szalai disdains the layered meanings of the term: “The guilt signals that you’re most comfortable in the elite precincts of high art, but you’re not so much of a snob that you can’t be at one with the people. So you confess your remorse whenever you deign to watch ‘Scandal,’ implying that the rest of your time is spent reading Proust.”

I love this piece. However, while I agree that people who speak in hushed tones of watching the straight or gay hockey TV romances are more annoying than the people who will openly stan, Szalai is missing the forest for the trees.

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The guilt in such pleasures, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Experimental Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics” explains, “should be understood as guilt for violating social norms, not aesthetic ones.”

What we’re embarrassed about when we reveal our guilty pleasures is revealing to the world that our taste runs counter to the taste of those we respect. What I’m interested in is something else: a pleasure whose defect is part of the appeal.

A lot of bad art is bad because it is too legible. Within a few seconds of reading one of these novels, I know the exact arc the story will take. Even when the writing is reasonably good, it never has any patience for ambiguity or respect for surprise — no interest in withholding pleasure.

I don’t just mean that it has a happily ever after, which is a prerequisite of even good romance novels, but that every beat is easily predicted; the characters’ names, purposes, and desires blend into one another in a haze of forgetting.

This is precisely why it works. A bad romance novel occupies our attention, soothes it, pets it, feeds it straight sugar, and spends no effort challenging it.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. Rewatching the same series over and over is commonplace. A 2023 YouGov poll found that 10% of Americans have watched the same season of a TV show seven or more times. Just 5% responded that they had never rewatched an episode of television (the population was U.S. adults who watch TV at all).

Good art, even pleasurable good art, demands attention. So the answer to why we want this predictable, boring art is that we sometimes want to consume that which requires none of our attention.

Sometimes, we want art to make no demands on the selves we have already failed to improve.

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Top stories this week, by Milan Singh

As we grow, I want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

Joey Politano made his debut in The Argument this week with an excellent piece on America’s ever-growing gambling habit. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Murphy v. NCAA, sports betting has been growing at a record clip, and the cumulative losses have been piling up. What can we do about this? You’ll have to read his piece to find out!

For over 30 years, American schoolchildren were steadily improving at math. But recently, we’ve been going backward: As of last year, practically all of that progress has been erased. Families are increasingly turning to private-sector tutoring, such as Kumon or Russian School of Mathematics — but, as Kelsey Piper notes, these options don’t scale. What we need to do is Make Public School Math Education Great Again.

Why do women earn less than men? One school of thought argues that the disparity is the result of women making different choices in the labor market. Maia Mindel argues that we can’t fully separate individual preferences from cultural norms, and that policy should push for more flexibility in employment so that both men and women have more choices in how they balance earning money with family time.

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• The Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to narrow the 14th Amendment’s definition of birthright citizenship to exclude children born to undocumented or temporary immigrants.

• Trump said the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act was “fine,” suggesting he will let it become law without his signature. Even if he vetoes the bill, there are more than enough votes in Congress to override his veto.

• New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has successfully pushed through a law creating certain exemptions in the state’s environmental review law for new housing projects.

Worth watching...

This week on the podcast, Jerusalem and Matt discussed assimilation. Both of them think it is a good thing, but Matt believes that progressives put too much emphasis on America’s history of ethnic conflict. Jerusalem argues that the emphasis on the bad parts of America’s history invites new immigrants to see themselves as part of the tradition that pushed for positive changes, that held this country to its founding ideals.

After the primaries in Colorado, VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini joined Lakshya Jain to discuss the emerging “Democratic Tea Party” phenomenon. Both Zachary and Lakshya have written about this, and I think their analysis is worth your time if you want to understand what’s going on here.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Milan Singh

This week, I wanted to do something a little different for our cultural recommendations. In light of the semiquincentennial, I asked my colleagues to give me their favorite quotes, books, or cultural works that relate to American history.

Editor Jerusalem Demsas picked some of her favorite books set in America: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, and Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

AI and technology writing fellow Kobe Yank-Jacobs recommended “the entire introduction of the 1855 version of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which is not commonly read.” An excerpt from it:

The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night.

Justin Zuckerman, our video producer, recommended Robert Altman’s Nashville, “an epic comedy-drama-musical that takes place near America’s bicentennial and follows over two dozen main characters and various interweaving storylines about American country music.”

Gender and culture writing fellow Maibritt Henkel told me that the United States “entered my imagination as a child by way of Pete Seeger. My parents would often play his Songs of Hope and Struggle CD in our kitchen, and it knocked my little socks off. Seeger made me feel like America was one big, bold group project. And that if you were willing to pitch in, then you would be welcomed with open arms. It is thanks to Seeger that I was able to reconcile American patriotism with the tireless pursuit of a more perfect union from a very early age. It is a lesson many countries, certainly my own, would do well to learn.” Here’s a recording that she sent me of Seeger performing one of his tracks in the 1960s.

Operations manager Angela Tracy also went the music route, recommending Jimi Hendrix’s 1969 rendition of the national anthem, which to her “holds the same tension I think many of us still feel between the American project as a machinery of violence and yet a relentless, unfinished labor of progress.”

As for myself, I struggled for much of the week to choose just one thing to recommend. But a conversation I had with Derek Thompson reminded me of a story I first read in the final chapter of James McPherson’s excellent 2015 history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom, which I’ve reproduced an excerpt of below (albeit from a different source; emphasis mine):

When Robert E. Lee first saw a Native American wearing an officer's uniform inside the house, he wore a puzzled look as he examined the man’s dark features, then extended his hand and remarked, “I am glad to see one real American here.” In the afternoon of April 9, 1865—about 150 years ago—at the McLean House in Appomattox County, Virginia, General Lee greeted Ely S. Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca who served as General Ulysses S. Grant’s military secretary since 1863. Parker replied: “We are all Americans.”

America means everything to me. I am so, so thankful to have been born in a country that defines itself not by blood and soil but by a simple yet revolutionary idea: that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights. It’s the only place on Earth that I can call home.

Happy 250th, America. Here’s to the next 250.

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Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

We’re hiring!

Interested in working for The Argument, or know someone who is? You’re in luck — we’re hiring!

The Argument’s Chief of Staff will have two primary responsibilities:

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We’re looking for someone entrepreneurial and highly organized, someone who is passionate about both defending liberalism and creating the sorts of processes and systems that keep things running smoothly.

This is an in-person position in Washington, D.C., and the annual salary is $100,000. To apply, email jobs@theargumentmag.com to tell us why you’d be a good fit for this position. Please include your resume. Applications close July 3.

The Verdict, by Jerusalem Demsas

Hello from Aspen, Colorado, where I’m reporting from the Aspen Ideas Festival. I was supposed to be on a plane back by now, but a last-minute announcement of a nonrecorded debate between Peter Thiel and Francis Fukuyama has kept me in town. I’ll be reporting everything for The Argument, so stay tuned.

My big thought this week is that the 21st Century ROAD to Housing act is on the verge of becoming law, and despite all of the hullabaloo from populists about needing to attack private equity and institutional investors in the housing market by restricting the build-to-rent market, in the end, YIMBYs won that argument.

The Road to Housing Act has dozens of different measures, but two of the most significant pieces are:

1. Setting a framework for incentivizing states and localities to loosen zoning and land use rules

2. Making it easier to build manufactured housing

At one point, it seemed that the bill’s best measures could be completely undercut by a measure that would have kneecapped the institutional build-to-rent market of single-family homes.

The bill would have required large institutional investors to sell their newly built rental homes to individual buyers after seven years, which would have destroyed the economics of big firms building more housing in a bill that’s ostensibly trying to get everyone to build more housing.

That mandate is gone. The final bill still caps the number of single family homes large institutional investors can buy — but with large exceptions for the aforementioned build-to-rent market, substantial rehabilitation, senior housing, and certain secondary-market transactions. Even that has a pretty big loophole, though, since investors can skirt the 350-home cap by splitting holdings into smaller entities. Firms already over the limit also don’t have to divest anything.

That mandate was the exact provision on which Sen. Brian Schatz gave a floor speech, arguing that, “We have decided, for no particular reason other than what I think is a drafting error, to demonize people who want to build rental housing for folks.” Schatz ended up as the lone Democratic “no” because he worried that this provision would severely undercut the entire bill’s efficacy.

David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, slammed Schatz for this, calling his vote a signal to moneyed interests and private equity that he is their guy. He even quoted an anonymous Hill staffer who claimed that Schatz had a pattern of “undermining bills that take on corporate power.” The Revolving Door Project (RDP) put out a similar hit.

Then, Schatz won. Seventy-six House members signed a letter demanding the build-to-rent provisions be stripped and the National Association of Home Builders warned the provision could hurt industry support for the bill. The House then cut it out, passing a clean version in a 396-13 vote.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who fought for the provision, voted for the package anyway and is now out here chanting YIMBY slogans. Good for her! It’s commendable that she helped shepherd through a great bill even if she didn’t get everything she wanted.

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But I do want to note: The exact thing the populists said made Schatz a private-equity stooge became the consensus position of both the House and Senate. The very provisions that The Prospect celebrated Warren for are gone or severely limited. So I await with bated breath articles about how Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders tragically lost to corporate power (or are also in the pocket of private equity?) because they voted for the ROAD to Housing Act.

The Prospect should, of course, not do this, and it is commendable that Warren and others came around here and didn’t let this dispute destroy an otherwise good bill.

The big point I want to make is that people tend to doom about the possibility for persuasion to work, but this was a piece of legislation on a high-salience issue where the slopulism faction lost to reasoned, sustained pressure from people with better arguments.

This wasn’t Secret Congress where a bill’s details get hashed out without any public attention. This was Congress doing the right thing despite getting pressure to do the exact opposite.

This should be a straightforward win for everyone involved — including Trump, who really needs a big win on the economy. Yet, the president is threatening to blow up the housing bill unless Congress first passes the SAVE America Act — a voter-ID law that would require most Americans to present a passport or birth certificate in person to register to vote.

The veto-proof majorities are heartening, but never underestimate Trump’s ability to pull a loss from thin air.

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Top stories this week, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

As we grow, I want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

Milan Singh ran the numbers: Tariffs cost the U.S. 274,000 manufacturing jobs before Trump’s second term (between 2018 and 2024). In an adapted version of his own original research, Milan walks us through why the economists’ broad consensus against tariffs still holds. It’s priceless reading:

Meanwhile, some have started to fret that new housing starts haven’t spiked within a year of California passing housing legislation. Jerusalem Demsas thinks this kind of talk needlessly puts the YIMBY movement on its back foot: Who said a decades-old supply crunch would be fixed in under a year? As she surveys the evidence on housing legislation, she explains why liberals need to be more confident about their wins:

Finally, New York State Assemblymember Alex Bores lost his primary race for a U.S. House district in New York after Leading the Future (a super PAC funded by top figures in the AI industry) targeted him for regulating AI. In the lead up to that race, Kelsey Piper covered the Super PAC’s sleazy tactics, counterproductive efforts, and the implications for the future of AI regulation. Strange world to come. Learn more here:

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• Utah put a massive solar project online with 400 megawatts of solar and 1,600 megawatt-hours of battery storage.1 This means powering up to 110,000 homes and potentially carrying up to 10% of the state’s energy load, according to an official associated with the project.

• The NRC renewed both Edwin I. Hatch reactors in Georgia in under 12 months, keeping 1.8 GW of carbon-free baseload on the grid for another 20 years.

• Two cheers for basic research: Normal hearing aids amplify everything in your surroundings, but there are signs that a new technology could use people’s brainwaves to amplify specific sounds in their environment, mimicking normal human hearing. I am frequently astonished by modernity.

Worth watching...

History took an awful turn the moment Joe Biden stepped on that debate stage in June 2024, which only confirmed the extreme irresponsibility of his decision to run again. But guess what? Joe made other mistakes, too! Jerusalem and Matt hash out their top five Biden errors on the pod this week.

Try to think of your own top 5 before you listen in:

I am still buzzing from last week’s release of Lakshya Jain’s 2026 election model, which clashed with the outlook from major qualitative ratings institutions. This week, Lakshya brought that debate to a Substack live video with Erin Covey of The Cook Political Report. It’s an incredible back-and-forth that gets at some of the fundamental questions in political forecasting. Please check it out:

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs

I was worried my teammates would give me a tedious list of World Cup matches to write about this week. Thankfully, however, we are not in touch with the masses at all. Maibritt Henkel is literally going to watch Shakespeare tonight.

“My recommendation is buying theatre tickets many months in advance and thereby treating yourself to one of life’s great pleasures: anticipation,” she said with a giddy lilt.

She’s going to see The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Othello. Stay tuned for her reactions next week.

Unfortunately, I’m also bringing a highfalutin recommendation to the table: Being in the World. It’s a documentary that is technically about Heidegger scholar Hubert Dreyfus, but really, the philosophy chatter is like a backing track to lively footage of musicians, jugglers, cooks, and craftsmen interacting with the physical world, embodying their knowledge per the philosophy espoused by Dreyfus. This jazzy, fast-paced film was also shot by someone with a maniac’s sense for a level frame.

Our video producer Justin Zuckerman was actually implicated in this philosophy business with me, but he declined to recommend the movie. Instead, he was a real man of the people and recommended an album that “spans from western country to pop” — Box for Buddy, Box for Star by This Is Lorelei.

Eli Richman was also fairly down-home with a horror comedy recommendation, Widow’s Bay, with great lines like, “The witch trials. Great source of pride. We caught ‘em. We burned ‘em.”

Milan Singh wanted to put both an audiobook (Empire of Liberty) and some Instagram cooking videos (by Hailee Catalano) on the audience’s radar.

“Apparently everyone in 1800s America was drunk all the time — including the kids!” he said of the audiobook.

When I looked back at this list, I considered that maybe we weren’t so elitist after all. Maibritt and I, with our Shakespeare and philosophy, were the main problems. But then someone reminded me: Angela Tracy reads plays.

When I turned to welcome Angela to the highbrow culture clique, she suggested the play Rhinoceros and said, “Mm, thanks for the invitation, but I only read plays. I don’t gooo to them.”

Maibritt Henkel declined to comment.

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We have merch!

We have quarter-zips, keychains, hats, and stickers. Each one is a great conversation starter in its own way. Buy them here.

Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.

We’re hiring!

Interested in working for The Argument, or know someone who is? You’re in luck — we’re hiring!

The Argument’s Chief of Staff will have two primary responsibilities:

1. Overseeing day-to-day business and administrative operations for our 10-person team

2. Building out our events business from the ground up

We’re looking for someone entrepreneurial and highly organized, someone who is passionate about both defending liberalism and creating the sorts of processes and systems that keep things running smoothly.

This is an in-person position in Washington, D.C., and the annual salary is $100,000. To apply, email jobs@theargumentmag.com to tell us why you’d be a good fit for this position. Please include your resume. Rolling applications.

The Verdict

Happy Father’s Day! I hope you also had a great day with a dad in your life. I decided to do a light investigation into how dads spend their time relative to (male) non-dads. The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) randomly selects a person age 15 or older from households that have completed the Current Population Survey. They are then asked to walk through the previous 24 hours in their own words, and each activity is then logged.

There are, of course, myriad ways this could go wrong: People could misremember how much time they spend driving, and they could inflate things like time spent with family and minimize things like time spent scrolling TikTok. But it’s the best source of information we have on how Americans are spending their days.

Using this data, I, using Claude, decided to figure out what dads are up to.

The survey doesn’t actually ask whether respondents are fathers, but you can find out whether people are living with a child in the home. I chose an expansive definition, which includes men living with a child who is not their own. As a result, I may have inadvertently included older brothers, uncles, or other male roommates living with minors, but that was a scant concern compared with leaving out foster dads, granddads, and unofficial stepdads, of which there are many.

This approach, of course, leaves out dads who are not living with their children, either because their children have already left the nest or they are the noncustodial parent or they are a deadbeat or any other reason.

The top three differences between dads and male non-dads are:

1. Dads spend roughly one hour a day on childcare, whereas non-dads spend no time on childcare.

2. Dads lose one hour of leisure time a day, which is, to a large extent, just less screen time. (While dads play fewer video games, spend less time on the internet for fun, and spend less time reading for pleasure, there is one leisure category where they edge out non-dads: socializing.)

3. Dads lose roughly 25 minutes of sleep compared with non-dads.

The toughest call I had to make was to restrict this to employed men, because if I include nonemployed men (and dads are likelier to be employed than non-dads) then almost all of the effects would be driven by the fact that some people are spending most of their day at their job.

I had Claude pull nonemployed men between 25 and 54 and compare the ones living with a child in the home with the ones living without. This is a very tiny sample (47 fathers, 101 childless), so I’m not reading too much into this, but topline findings showed that nonemployed dads do more childcare than employed dads (roughly 1.84 hours per day versus 1.02 for employed dads). This is probably reflecting the growing share of stay-at-home fathers. Unsurprisingly, nonemployed childless men are the champions of leisure — roughly 7.6 hours per day of socializing/relaxing/leisure time.

To the employed and nonemployed dads alike, I hope you’re able to make back some of that leisure time today.

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Top stories this week, by Maibritt Henkel

As we grow, I want to make sure you see everything we’re doing without flooding your inbox with dozens of emails. But for the real libs, you can get every post as it drops by opting into The Mag here.

The big news of the week is that the Split Ticket 2026 Midterms Model has gone live on The Argument’s website. In this piece, Lakshya covers the headline findings and explains why they differ from those of other major polls. To give you the TL;DR: Our numbers put the Senate essentially at a toss-up but strongly favor Democrats winning the House.

As per usual, Jeremiah contributed a cultural take that got the people going: Sometimes you have to hurt people. The piece is inspired in part by Phoebe Bridgers’ controversial concert phone ban and in part by an insane football lawsuit (and also… abundance). He points out that maybe the best response to zoomers who say they can’t live without their phones for two hours is to defend the good old-fashioned principle of the greatest good for the greatest number — even if someone, somewhere gets hurt.

Kobe wrote a piece that tries to make sense of the place software engineers hold in the American public imagination, from the #learntocode craze of the 2010s to the now-peculiarly widespread concern for tech workers in the 2020s. Our May poll revealed that people are more willing to support a protectionist ban against using AI in software engineering than in any other industry. But do the software engineers really have it so bad?

🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟

• Congress is set to pass the much-beleaguered 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Jerusalem wrote about one of the most controversial parts of this bill earlier in the year. A lot of hard work from YIMBYs made this possible!

• The U.S. Energy Information Administration published its June outlook, and utility-scale solar generation is forecast to rise 19% this summer compared with last, reflecting a 20% increase in average solar capacity.

• Scientists in Denmark identified hydrogen radicals as a mechanism for breaking down PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” that may be cause for concern when they build up in water, soil, and the human body.

Worth watching...

This week on the pod, Jerusalem and Matt bravely entered the world of gender slop. My favorite line comes from Jerusalem, who argued that dating advice based on gender stereotyping makes people less curious about the individual in front of them, ultimately hurting their romantic chances. So libbed out.

What’s News with The Argument

The Argument recommends, by Maibritt Henkel

It’s World Cup season, and because Denmark, my small and clearly not-so-mighty home country, did not qualify this year, I asked the office which team to root for instead.

told me her son has gone “all in on Cabo Verde.” And while the team’s goalkeeper, Vozinha, stole ’ heart, she is obviously holding out for “AMERICA.” (Separately, she recommended Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth as a good summer read.)

has also been watching the World Cup, and he has been amused by the reaction of foreign fans to “American abundance.” Apparently, there are anecdotes circling on Twitter of “Japanese people startled at bottomless chips” and “the British being like “WTF?” at Waffle House.”

I don’t know how many World Cup matches has watched, but I do know that he watched the four-part docuseries The Dark Wizard, which he very emphatically declared “the best climbing doc for anyone who is not into climbing at all.” Now, Kobe is in fact into climbing, which slightly undermines his authority on that point, but he did call the whole thing “really beautiful,” both visually and spiritually.

Justin attended the DC/DOX film festival, where he saw Soul Patrol, a documentary about an all-Black special operations unit in the Vietnam War. “The film cuts between the final reunion for the last living vets of the unit and Super 8 footage shot entirely by young soldiers in the war.”

Finally, went to Sunset Cinema at The Wharf, a free weekly outdoor movie series at Transit Pier in D.C. They will be screening Hamilton on July 8. Just a heads up.

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