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:

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