Put three attackers in a straight line and one defender can often block both supporting players. But move one supporting player sideways and the passing lines separate.

The defender must choose which route to close. Press the ball and a pass can go around them. Protect the inside route and the outside may open. If another defender steps across, a Spanish player can attack the space left behind.

A useful football triangle does not need equal sides or 60-degree angles. Its best shape changes with defenders’ positions, body orientation, ball speed and the space available.

A narrow triangle is easy to squeeze because one defender may block both lanes. A wide one makes the pass travel farther, giving an opponent more time to intercept it.

In their semi-final match against France, Spain found the middle ground again and again – close enough for quick combinations, but far enough apart to stretch France’s press.

In economics, there is a concept called revealed preferences. Consumers will tell you what they really like by their actual behavior. What they want is what they buy.

The pundits I discussed above all argue as if they feel that America will be doomed when it becomes majority minority. “Import the third world, become the third world,” has become their slogan de jure. If we have a country full of people from Mexican, Indian, or Haitian ancestral origin, we will transform into those countries and bring all their sociological and economic problems.

But through their revealed preferences, we can see that they may not be so confident in this thesis after all.

Walsh, for instance, lives in the thriving metropolis of Nashville, Tennessee. According to the local chamber of commerce, “over 35% of Nashville’s net in-migration from 2024 to 2025 was due to international migration”; around a third of downtown businesses are owned by minorities. While Walsh has been ranting about Somalis in Minneapolis, he would probably enjoy this Somali-owned tea shop in his city (I visited the last time I drove up). In a moment of clarity, Walsh admitted he loves Indian food.

Hemingway and Davis, meanwhile, are denizens of Metro Washington, D.C. A quarter of Northern Virginia’s residents are foreign-born. Kelly lives in and broadcasts from Houston, which was ranked by one measure as America’s fifth-most diverse city and second-most diverse large city (the top three most diverse cities were all in Maryland, also bordering D.C.). Webbon is in Austin, a very liberal and diverse city. Nick Fuentes, the charismatic racist streamer, lives in predominantly Hispanic suburb of Chicago. Brandon Gill, one of the most vociferous nativists in Congress who wants to stop even legal immigration, is married to an Indian American woman.

Speaking of marriage, it’s ironic that the nativists are led by President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Trump is married to an immigrant and the grandson of one himself. Vance is not only married to an Indian American woman, but he goes out of his way in his memoir to praise her family for its strong bonds.

Recall that while they generally cite which party supported Israel most, much of the Neocon turn to the right was driven by urban crime and racial quotas at elite institutions.

The Wall Street Journal recently profiled a Costco worker named Tony Barzar from Arizona. Barzar never went to college, only taking some community college classes without finishing. Nonetheless, working his entire life in grocery stores and Costco, he has amassed over $1 million in his 401(k) account. He also owns a home with a pool and has traveled to Europe twice in the last decade—all while making just shy of $33 per hour.

He got there not by some great feat, but by slow and steady saving. Costco has a conservative employer retirement savings match program, matching 50 percent of contributions up to $1,000. To amass $1 million over the last four decades, Barzar would have needed to put just over 5 percent of his paycheck plus the Costco match in a standard ETF tracking the S&P500.

This kind of growth is achievable for the vast majority of young people in America today. At age 20, Barzar had a starting annual salary of $35,000 in today’s dollars. Today’s median 20- to 24-year-old full time worker earns over $42,000—nearly 20 percent more.

Hamilton, Madison and Jay responded to these criticisms as a group. Adopting the pen name Publius, they published 85 essays in New York newspapers supporting ratification. In defense of the Constitution’s proposal to increase the powers of the proposed national government, these authors turned to some of the most basic philosophical questions about humanity.

Each argued that the inherent flaws of human nature necessitated a strong government to check political abuse, self-interest and even violence that they saw as inherent in the fabric of human society. They rallied around the position reflected in Madison’s famous statement in the essay known as Federalist 51 that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

The Federalist Papers include proposals for institutional solutions that sought to redirect the destructive drives of individuals toward positive social ends. To the authors, a new constitutional government that controlled both the impulses of the masses and the abuses of their leaders would serve as the means through which the new United States government could accomplish this task.

Each saw human nature as susceptible to corruption by base impulses and self-interest.

In Federalist 10, Madison argued that faction is “sown in the nature of man.”

Similarly, in Federalist 6, Hamilton rejected the commonly held idea that republics were automatically peaceful. Instead, he argued, political leaders and states were driven by ambitions and jealousies, which he saw as a characteristic shortcoming of the government under the Articles of Confederation as well as a law of nature governing relations between nations.

Hamilton wrote that if the states remained disunited, then “the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other.” To argue otherwise, he wrote, would be “to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.”

Consequently, as Hamilton asserted in Federalist 15, governments must have effective coercive authority to enforce laws because they cannot rely solely on the goodwill and civic virtue of their citizens: “If there be no penalty annexed to disobedience, the resolutions or commands which pretend to be laws will, in fact, amount to nothing more than advice or recommendation.”

Ultimately, the defense of the Constitution provided by the Federalist Papers sought to frame the new government in terms of a skeptical view of humanity that recognized what Madison called “a degree of depravity in mankind.”

Man is Fallen.

I came to London in January, 1961, as a boy of thirteen and a half, on my way to boarding school, and accompanied by my father. It was a cold month, with blue skies by day and green fogs by night. We stayed at a huge barracks of a hotel, the Cumberland, at Marble Arch, and after we settled in my father asked if I would like to see a professional soccer game. (In Bombay, where I had grown up, there was no soccer to speak of; the local sports were cricket and field hockey.)

The first game my father took me to see was what I would later learn is called a “friendly” (because the result doesn’t count toward anything) between a North London team called the Arsenal and the champions of Spain, Real Madrid. I did not know that the visitors were rated as perhaps the greatest team ever. Or that they had just won the European Cup five years running. (The European Cup is an annual tournament held to determine the champion of all Europe’s national champions.) Or that among their players were two of the game’s all-time immortals, both foreigners: a Hungarian named Ferenc Puskas, “the little general,” and an Argentine, Alfredo di Stefano.

This is the way I remember the game: in the first half, Real Madrid tore the Arsenal apart. The London team was renowned for its tough defensive style of play—“Boring Arsenal” is a label it was stuck with for years—but Real Madrid went through the Arsenal’s defense almost at will, and at halftime led 3–0. Then, because this was, after all, just a friendly game, Real took off its star players and replaced them with a bunch of kids. Arsenal stubbornly kept all its first-team players on the field, and the game ended up tied, 3–3; but not even the most diehard Arsenal fans could pretend that the result accurately reflected the quality of the two teams.

On the way back to the hotel, my father asked me for my views. “Well, I didn’t think much of that English team,” I told him. “But I liked that Spanish side. Can you find out if there’s an English team that plays like Real Madrid?” Unknown to me, I had asked for the near impossible; as if, in Michael Jordan’s airborne heyday, I had asked, “Can you find out if there’s a team that plays like the Chicago Bulls?” My father, almost as much an innocent in these matters as myself, said, “I’ll ask at the front desk.” What he learned from that long-forgotten hotel clerk changed my life, because a few days later we went to watch the other famous team of North London, Tottenham Hotspur, and I lost my heart.

In the last few weeks, as fans from across Europe and other parts of the world traveled through the United States for the World Cup, following their teams from city to city, they discovered an America that tends not to make it into global news headlines, at least not in recent years. They met friendly strangers who offered rides to and from stadiums, discovered big portion sizes and free refills in American restaurants, and developed an unexpected fondness for ranch dressing, wanting to take it back home as a souvenir. (Sensing an opportunity, the food company Kraft Heinz, in true American fashion, released a “TSA-Compliant Ranch” kit after the Transportation Security Administration repeatedly reminded visitors that full-size bottles could not be carried through airport security.) They felt relief at the near ubiquity of air conditioning in the summer and came face to face with the largesse and abundance of suburban America as they ventured outside the tourist hotspots of New York City, Washington and Los Angeles.

As visitors marveled at America and their reactions went viral, Americans watched them marvel and, in turn, found themselves looking at their country differently, through that foreign prism — recognizing, even celebrating, everyday aspects of life here as uniquely American. This outsider’s gaze offered a version of America that stood in sharp contrast with the one both Americans and people around the world tend to encounter through doomscrolling and the relentless churn of the news cycle.

“This World Cup is significant in terms of how we view America. Not because it changes America but because it illuminates America,” the journalist and author Simon Kuper told our colleague Faisal Al Yafai in a recent episode of the New Lines podcast, The Lede. The World Cup “tells you that America is not just Trump,” Kuper said, noting that from Europe it’s easy to conclude that since Trump was elected twice on a xenophobic platform, it defines all of the United States. But traveling through the country and meeting people, one realizes that even Trump voters “really like the world, they really like having foreigners there,” Kuper said.

This gap between the reel and the real was perhaps best captured in an interview with Sebastian Kraus, a German soccer fan who became teary-eyed while speaking to NBC10 Boston. “I fall in love with this country and this was so emotional, I even cried in the stadium,” he said. Before making the trip, Kraus admitted he had been apprehensive, his perception shaped by news reports about mass shootings and concerns over public safety. But buoyed by the generosity of local Americans, he was bidding goodbye to the country with a heavy heart.

Just do what Joe failed to do: undo all of Trumpism.

The human quest for happiness and virtue is one of the most important themes of Shelley’s Gothic novel. Upon reflecting on his origin and purpose, the creature recognizes that he “was formed for peaceful happiness.” He says, “During my youthful days discontent never visited my mind, and if I was ever overcome by ennui, the sight of what is beautiful in nature or the study of what is excellent and sublime in the productions of man could always interest my heart and communicate elasticity to my spirit.” If you ask anyone if they desire to be happy, they will likely respond with a resounding “yes.” The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas pointed out that “man naturally desires happiness,” but what exactly does it mean to be happy? Shelley does not provide a clear definition of happiness in “Frankenstein,” but she does associate happiness with peace, contentment, and the sense of delight.

The US also channels a higher proportion of its GDP into business investment and research and development than the EU. Europe was spending 270 billion euros less than the US on innovation in 2021, with this spending concentrated on its century-old car industry rather than new technologies.

Since 2025, AI has been the focus of US investment. This has helped the US maintain its hold over global technology and digital platforms. Rapid uptake of AI across US industry has also widened the margin by which its labor productivity growth is outpacing Europe’s.

Output per hour in professional services has increased by over 18% since 2019 in the US compared to just 5% in the EU.

Economy-wide productivity gains have allowed US real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) to edge higher since 2019. This has sustained consumer demand while also enabling the strong profit growth that has lifted US share prices to record levels. In contrast, average real wages in the EU have barely grown over the past 20 years while corporate profits in Europe remain subdued.

The US technological lead could be dented by Donald Trump’s immigration clampdown, which extends to skilled scientists and students. Research suggests annual GDP growth rates in the US could currently be as much as 0.8 percentage points lower than if net unauthorised immigration had stayed on its pre-2025 trend.

Yet, as The Economist points out, both sides also seem to agree on a few things: First, Europe is growing more slowly than America, thanks in large part to the economic dynamism and tech-fueled productivity here. Second, even Krugman’s pro-Europe data (see chart above)—along with many other sources—show Americans to have higher average wages and more disposable income (yes, even after accounting for out-of-pocket healthcare costs) than the average European in most places (yes, there are exceptions), due to our superior labor productivity and their leisure choices. Third, and most importantly, both sides want to support their reading of the data with an “eye test”—i.e., visiting each place and just looking around—that the economists believe will confirm their own American/European wealth story.

Hilariously enough, thousands of European World Cup tourists—along with ones from Japan and other countries, too—have performed just that test, mere days after the economists proposed it. And the result is an absolute rout for Team America:

There are many reasons for the foreigners’ astonishment. (A big one, in my opinion, is that these folks are seeing parts of Real America, especially in the Sun Belt and Midwest, that foreign tourists rarely visit, yet—as we’ve discussed here repeatedly—allow not-rich Americans to live very comfortable lives.) And, to be sure, not all the astonishment is genuine.

But a lot of it obviously is, and at its root lies the Great American Prosperity Machine. Deal with it, haters.

Recently a video went viral showing the inside of a 1958 GE refrigerator. The appliance restorer behind the camera starts the video by declaring that “they don’t build things like they used to.” He then shows off some unusual features, like rotating shelves. Just about all the commenters seemed to think the reason modern refrigerators aren’t as nice as the one in the video is, you guessed it, capitalism.

“They made everything worse while making everything more expensive,” reads one comment with more than 46,000 likes. Another comment with thousands of likes declared that “capitalism is literally built on the premise that things are not reliable.”

This couldn’t be more wrong. This particular fridge was almost certainly far more expensive than a comparable appliance today. While I couldn’t track down the price for that exact model, I did find an ad for a similar-looking refrigerator in a 1958 Sears catalog. That refrigerator is listed at $399.95, around $4,600 today. A quick internet search reveals that most refrigerators today are much less expensive than that. When Wirecutter, a product-review website, made a list of the best refrigerators on the market earlier this year, only one of them came within $1,000 of the 1958 refrigerator’s price tag.

If you’re looking to drop $4,600 on a fridge for some reason, you’ll end up buying a luxury product. A similarly priced smart fridge is nearly 10 cubic feet larger than the 1958 one. It has a built-in ice maker (including a setting for making clear cocktail spheres), a special viewing window and a drawer with a “chilled wine” setting.

If that doesn’t convince you that appliances today are better than their midcentury counterparts, modern refrigerators are also much more energy efficient. And contrary to complaints that modern appliances are built to break, the longevity of our refrigerators has barely budged in 30 years. In 1990, 38.2% of family refrigerators were more than 10 years old. In 2020, it was 35.1%.

Researchers who followed patients for 10 years after they received either the actual procedure, arthroscopic knee surgery to trim degenerative cartilage tears, or merely “sham surgery” — a skin incision — for knee pain, found that the surgery provided little or no benefit and was, in fact, associated with accelerated osteoarthritis and higher rates of reoperation. That generally meant a total knee replacement.

“I don’t know how I would defend this procedure at all,” said one of the study’s authors, Teppo Järvinen, an orthopedist and head of the Finnish Centre for Evidence-Based Orthopaedics.

If one theme unites the Roberts Court’s work in administrative law, it is a counter-reformation that recenters the Constitution’s basic architecture for the administrative state. Congress is to legislate; the president and his subordinates are to execute within a hierarchical, accountable executive; and courts are to exercise independent judgment in interpreting the laws. That settlement, grounded in the Constitution’s Vesting Clauses, animates a series of linked doctrines returning power to the institutions to which the Court believes the Constitution originally entrusted it.

The Roberts Court’s vision for the separation of powers points toward a stricter nondelegation doctrine. Delegation is Congress’s practice of permitting agencies to regulate conduct under broad authorizations that allow the executive substantial policy choice. These delegations have included authority to regulate in the “public interest” without further defining that term or directions to an agency to pursue an objective stated at a high level of generality, such as promoting public health, without indicating how much harm is consistent with protecting the public health. Such broad delegation threatens to make the executive the lawmaker by giving over to that branch the essential policy choices the Constitution entrusts to Congress. […]

The Framers recognized that the legislative power was the most important of all the powers delegated in the Constitution, because it was the only federal authority that could directly affect their domestic liberty. Legislative power—prescribing rules that bind private conduct—belongs only to Congress, and for good reasons. That assignment channels lawmaking through a deliberative, laborious, publicly accountable process. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s dissent in Gundy v. United States articulates this structure crisply: Congress must make the policy decisions; the executive may “fill up the details” or find facts that trigger rules Congress has created. That is the Constitution’s path to stable rules, fair notice, and political accountability.

I am editor-in-chief of a magazine with a great Jewish legacy, and I have never once in my life used the terms Zionist or anti-Zionist to describe myself or anyone else. Why? When I use a word, I want to know where it’s been and how it’s going to be understood, and with anything Zionism-related, that’s a nearly impossible task.

And so I am going to propose something that may sound radical. It is beyond time to strike the words Zionist and Zionism from modern political discourse and relegate them to history, where they belong. They have outlived their usefulness both as concepts and as terms. This means we must immediately cease labeling ourselves and others as Zionists and anti-Zionists, and use the word Zionism only when referring to the historical political movement. […]

If we believe in the right of people to form nations, which at this point of human development most of us do, then Zionism has long been a moot point. Given Israel’s right to exist, I would go a step further and say that the label Zionism has become outright dangerous. The use of the term by its very nature keeps the question of existence unnecessarily alive. It’s like a scab that keeps forming and reforming and never heals. The Zionist family of terms has increasingly become polarizing for the American public, and even worse, it is unnecessarily splintering the American Jewish community, all at a time of rising antisemitism. Wherever I go, and I travel in many circles, I hear the words Zionist and anti-Zionist invoked and hurled with equal God-like certainty, terrifying self-righteousness and perilous imprecision.

The American Jewish community is as mystified by the meaning of Zionist and Zionism as the broader public. Look at the 2026 survey conducted by the Jewish Federations of North America: Only one-third of American Jews said they identified as Zionist. At the same time, nearly nine out of ten said they supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.

A Zionism that does not intellectually make the case for Palestinian self-determination is not worth honoring.

Indeed, Mattie’s moral inheritance on the open road is one of grit—and I will pause here, as English professors are often apt to do, to invoke the Oxford English Dictionary definition of the word itself. One 1874 definition, appearing almost precisely during the period in which the novel is set, defines “grit” as “coarse material such as gravel, sand, etc., that is spread on roads to improve traction.” In other words, grit is not merely toughness. It is the very thing that allows one to continue forward movement across unstable ground. What Mattie seeks throughout the novel is precisely this kind of moral traction amid grief, violence, uncertainty, and the lawlessness of the frontier. Unlike Huckleberry Finn, who vacillates morally and spiritually throughout his journey, or even Dorothy Gale, whose central longing is simply to return home, Mattie is governed above all by a stern sense of justice. She values duty, competence, self-command, and moral clarity. Her journey across the frontier is therefore not one of self-discovery so much as a continual testing of character. Thus, True Grit reimagines the American road narrative through Mattie Ross’s Stoic discipline, turning the frontier journey not into a story of self-discovery but a testing ground for justice, endurance, and moral self-governance.

Moreover, there is a chosen buoyancy to Mattie’s narration that is important to acknowledge. For all the violence of the text, True Grit is persistently comic without ever becoming silly. As American humorist Roy Blount Jr. observes, “Charles Portis could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.” And indeed, McCarthy’s roads (think Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men) usually end in apocalypse, nihilism, or at minimum a man staring silently into the void somewhere in Texas, wishing he were anywhere but in America or in existence at all. Portis’s roads, by contrast, still permit justice, laughter, and a fourteen-year-old Presbyterian girl who is somehow the most competent person in the territory, and in her own head, in the world. In classical comic terms, the world of True Grit bends not toward despair but toward restoration, of self and the reader.

Horseshoe theory is the idea that the far left and the far right converge toward each other, even if they’d both vigorously deny it. Populism, as practiced by both the left and right ends of the horseshoe, has never just been about telling people popular things, such as “ice cream is delicious.” Rather, it’s telling people: “Ice cream is delicious, and you aren’t getting your fair share of the ice cream because you are a helpless victim living in a rigged ice-cream system, and here are the people responsible that we will take to task for you, and by doing so restore your rightful ice cream.”

That was more or less the sales pitch of the populist of the moment: socialist Zohran Mamdani, who clinched the Democratic nomination in the New York City mayor’s race by arguing the city needed revolutionary change. And, with some names changed, it’s a huge part of the MAGA pitch, too.

Today, both the progressive left and the MAGA right seem to run on imaginary—or at best, horribly exaggerated—grievance.

Populism pits “the people” against “the elites.” It requires the finger-point and the class conflict. And it requires things to be very bad, or else there’s not much for the populist leader to fix.

It is also about zero-sum grievance. It’s about telling people they are getting the shaft and our side is the one to unshaft you, extracting vengeance for you along the way. It’s inherently anti-republican (small r), replacing constitutional, individual, and minority protections and rights with the will of the 51 percent (often fewer are needed) who you can convince about your “populist” revanchist policies that will undo all real or imagined past wrongs done to them.

Now, there is nothing wrong with a good grievance—that is, if the grievance is justified and the solution to the grievance reasonable. The left can justifiably point to Americans without health insurance. The right can justifiably point to a border that was consciously left open for many years. Examples abound.

But today, both the progressive left and the MAGA right seem to run on imaginary—or at best, horribly exaggerated—grievance. The uniting theme is that the average American has it terrible these days, and only their chosen end of the horseshoe can fix it. People will go to extremes only when they are convinced things are terrible—and there’s a cottage industry, again both press and politicians, working on selling that story. […]

Wages are the most important component of the flow of financial resources households can use for consumption and savings. But households receive resources from other sources as well, including government transfer payments, social insurance receipts, and businesses. Overall household income tells the same story as wages: Real household income has never been higher than it is today.

And not just for families at the very top. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), families in the 51st to 90th percentiles of the wealth distribution had an average wealth of $1.3 million in 2022, the most recent year data are available. That’s up from around $500,000 in 1990, after adjusting for inflation.

Consumption is an even better indicator of prosperity than income or wealth. It’s how much we all actually get to enjoy life (economically speaking). Spending on personal consumption is at a record level. Now, it might be fair to argue that this consumption is a big part of the looming debt problem America must eventually reckon with, but that would be a howler of an argument from either end of the populist horseshoe, as both the progressive left and MAGA right seem to be big fans of ignoring this issue.

When assessing the best time to be alive, it’s important to give special attention to low-income Americans. The CBO’s income data show that inflation-adjusted post-tax-and-transfer income for the bottom 20 percent of households more than doubled from 1990 to 2021. Real income grew more for low-income households than for the median household. The inflation-adjusted wealth of families in the bottom 25 percent was also at an all-time high in 2022. These families saw their average real wealth triple from 1990 to 2022.

Misery requires ideology.

Consider one of the most repeated tropes about psychopaths, that they are incapable of mirroring or reading other peoples’ emotions: they lack empathy. The problem with this view is that science tells a radically different story. When people diagnosed with psychopathy participate in empathy experiments, their performance is entirely indistinguishable from normal controls.

The most compelling evidence comes from a recent systematic review of empathy research my team conducted, which included a total of 66 studies involving 5,711 persons clinically assessed for psychopathy. We found that the results were ‘overwhelmingly null findings’ (89.11 per cent of all tests). That is, statistical analyses cannot tell the difference in performance between psychopathic vs non-psychopathic persons. We also found that high-quality studies – those using more rigid statistical methods – had an even higher null-ratio of a whopping 94.77 per cent. In behavioural scientific experiments, where datasets are presumed to be rife with false positives, this is arguably as close as you get to proving a negative: people diagnosed with psychopathy do not have empathy deficits.

Consider another well-trodden claim that psychopaths lack emotions. This claim is as old as the idea of psychopathy itself, however it was the psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley who popularised it through his book The Mask of Sanity (1941). Cleckley hypothesised that psychopathy was essentially a neurological disorder of the affective system, causing abnormally shallow emotions. What made psychopathy peculiar was that those who were affected by the disorder could hide or mask their disability, coming across as if they were normal. But, to Cleckley, this is just a façade covering up a barren inner emotional life. In many ways, the Chigurh character effectively captures this aspect of Cleckley’s conception of psychopathy.

However, most researchers have long given up on this idea too, rendering it little more than a myth. There has never been any clear evidence to support it. A person clinically diagnosed with psychopathy might appear as if they are lacking emotions, but once these patients are subjected to careful analysis using technology capable of measuring physiological markers correlated with emotional reactions – like skin conductance, heart rate, brain activity, etc – the data tell a different story.

But even more interesting was why the self-guided therapy seemed to work. According to the researchers, a trio of psychological factors contributed to the self-guided group’s success. Improved self-efficacy, reduced fear of movement, and avoiding negative thinking patterns about pain explained as much as 76 percent of their pain reduction.

Indeed, perhaps the chief benefit of the exhibition is that, through its attention to primary sources accumulated between the fifteenth and late eighteenth centuries, it forces us to approach “England” not as a natural inheritance but as an historical achievement: the coming together of capitalist productive relations, print technology and the emergent administrative state at a particular historical juncture. […]

As a matter of material necessity, Caxton and his contemporaries were primarily concerned to make a profit, and to sell their products to the largest possible number of readers. But how to do so? True, Latin had long operated as an elite, transnational medium of handwritten communication among clerics and scholars. Yet as a market for mechanically reproduced texts, now assuming the form of commodities, it was limited. Nor could printers simply descend into the full plurality of spoken dialects, each too local, unstable and limited to justify the enlarged print-runs on which the new technology depended.

It was the genius of humble but extraordinarily savvy, commercially minded printers like Caxton slowly to assemble a new vernacular reading public below the transnational republic of Latin and the administrative vernacular of the elites, but, crucially, above the mutually opaque world of local dialects. What emerged, over time, was not “English” as a natural tongue, but a mechanically reproducible print-language, capable of dissemination — and sale — through the largest market available to it.

In other words, moveable type and the rate of turnover of capital were not incidental to the development of “our” national identity, but helped establish the material conditions under which this possessive adjective could, over the centuries following Caxton’s publication of Chaucer, become thinkable.

It is a wonderful turn of fate,” wrote the British psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers in 1922, “that just as Freud’s theory of the unconscious and the method of psychoanalysis founded upon it should be so hotly discussed, there should have occurred events which have produced on an enormous scale just those conditions of paralysis and contracture, phobia and obsession, which the theory was especially designed to explain.”

Social contagion is an old phenomenon.