The principles that Jefferson championed—that all men are created equal because all men have innate worth—remain more relevant than ever. At their very best, these ideas have been the driving force behind liberalism, breaking the chains of slavery, fueling social movements that have pushed for greater equality in all walks of life, and sparking revolutions against oppressive governments across the globe. In many ways, Jefferson’s greatest hopes have come to fruition and liberalism has, as he predicted, been a force for good across the world.

The idea of an egalitarian human dignity at the heart of the political order was not just Jefferson’s quirky view of liberal government and society. For most of liberalism’s early history, liberal thinkers saw themselves as making more universal and secular the Christian idea of the Imago Dei—that everyone is born with God Himself reflected in their being.

Freeloaders welcome.

In 2025, a family with two adults and two children was classified as in poverty if their annual income was less than $32,649, the bureau said. The official poverty rate for children fell to a ‌historic low of 13.4% in 2025.

Here’s the thing: if that family works 80 hours a week at McDonalds their income is over $50k

Growing up in the 1980s, I was the last generation to live through the highest period of lead exposure in U.S. history: Exhaust from cars fueled by leaded gasoline, as well as paint chips and lead pipes, added to the toxic burden in my body. Trillions of lead atoms are now part of my being.

For more than 90 percent of the population born between 1951 and 1980, blood lead levels exceeded 5 micrograms per deciliter, a level we now know is associated with lower IQ, attention and behavior problems, and smaller brain volume. In the late 1970s, the peak of the lead crisis, levels in children under 5 averaged 16 micrograms per deciliter, nearly five times higher than today’s threshold for triggering public health intervention. Before national monitoring began in 1976, lead levels were probably much higher.

That arguably makes lead exposure the largest quiet mass poisoning in human history, said Jennifer Weuve, an epidemiologist at Boston University’s School of Public Health.

Despite persistent cost-of-living pressures, workers maintained historically high savings habits. The average employee 401(k) contribution rate remained steady at a record 9.6 percent in the second quarter.

Michael Shamrell, vice president of thought leadership at Fidelity Investments, told CBS News that most 401(k) millionaires achieved their balances through long-term consistency rather than market timing.

“It’s not that they have reached that — it’s how they did it,” Shamrell said. “What was their behavior? One is just saving for a long time.”

The first thing to know is that while reflexes are important, they are not what distinguishes a truly elite driver.

“This is something that people don’t realize when they think of racing drivers living off their reflexes,” said Dr. Lappi, who studies eye movements of various types of athletes. “Most of their skill is anticipation. The anticipation is how the brain buys itself time.”

In other words, a great driver doesn’t react to the road, he predicts it. In many ways, this isn’t surprising because the entire brain is often said to be an elaborate prediction machine. But in Formula 1 drivers, this looks a little different.

There have been many studies of how regular people’s brains adapt to driving, but only a few have actually used elite drivers, because it is hard getting international celebrities to visit a neuroscience lab.

In two small, yet remarkable studies from 2014 and 2013, an Italian team compared 11 professional (including Formula 1) drivers with 11 normal ones. As one might expect, they found that elite drivers had good reaction and visuospatial skills. But the most interesting difference was in an area buried deep in the back of the brain called the retrosplenial cortex, which acts as a hub connecting spatial reasoning and — crucially — memory.

Whereas other parts of the brain might allow you to navigate unfamiliar places, this is the part of the brain that connects where you are now to where you have been before (and was heavily used by London taxi drivers in a 2006 study). A person with a damaged retrosplenial cortex, say, from Alzheimer’s disease, might recognize their home, the corner store and a nearby school, but would have no idea how to use one to find another.

The Italian team found that elite racecar drivers had more densely packed cells in this region and more connectivity to other parts of the brain. In other words, they can make highly detailed spatial maps of places they have been and pull them up quickly. What’s more, among the 11 professional drivers, more density in that region meant more racing victories.

But it’s not just about how many brain cells you have, it’s also about how well you use them. The studies also suggested that elite drivers use far less of their brains while racing than regular drivers.

“This what we call neural efficiency,” said Pietro Pietrini, an author on the paper and a professor of neuroscience at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in Italy. “So if you are very skilled, you rely on less brain.”

Dr. Lappi added that drivers in his studies will often look ahead around corners, even when they are completely hidden from view. The point is not to see the turn, but to see it in their mind’s eye.

As a Jewish Israeli, I grew up inside that language. It turned violent domination into “security,” dispossession into “settlement” and large-scale violence into “self-defense.” That language draws much of its power from real fear. I know that fear. I grew up with it. That fear has many sources, including decades of armed attacks against Israelis. The Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023, has intensified it. Israeli political language manipulates it by dehumanizing Palestinians, collapsing them into a single category — namely, a threat. It uses violence by some to justify the control and oppression of an entire population. This is one way apartheid sustains itself.

The language I grew up with did not require me to deny Palestinian suffering. I could acknowledge it, even be horrified by it, while still regarding the system that produced it as fundamentally legitimate. Today, after years of deepening dehumanization, Palestinian suffering is simply ignored in much of Israeli public discourse. That is why the language of those who live under this system matters so much. The people who witness, endure and survive under that power can describe what their lives look like: unprotected, shaped by fear, vulnerability and uncertainty.

On Monday, B’Tselem is publishing a report on the process unfolding in the West Bank. It tells a story with deep roots. From the mass expulsion and displacement of Palestinians during the Nakba in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced or expelled and the subsequent refusal of refugees’ right to return, through occupation, settlements and apartheid, Israeli policy has repeatedly worked to entrench Jewish sovereignty while making Palestinian presence and political life more precarious.

Yet the investigation into whether the bones belong to Charles de Batz de Castelmore d’Artagnan, who died during the Siege of Maastricht in 1673, was about to take twists and turns that might have impressed Dumas himself.

Within days of our conversation, Mr. Dijkman would find himself in a cell at the local police station. Within weeks, he’d be arguing in the local media that he was being framed for grave mistakes in unearthing and processing the skeleton.

Within months, it would become clear that Mr. Dijkman and his band of mostly amateur archaeologists might well have uncovered D’Artagnan’s remains — but the town of Maastricht would allege that they may also have impaired the chances that the world will ever know whether the bones truly belong to the musketeer.

The quest for D’Artagnan’s skeleton would prove to be a story full of power struggles, hubris and hot heads. It continues to consume the little corner of the Netherlands, nestled between Belgium and Germany, where it has unfurled.

“Everyone comes here and is afraid of Jaws,” he said. “That is not what you should be scared about. It’s the little things.” […]

Roden-Reynolds pointed to a row of stocky little bugs, each with a white dot on its back. These were lone-star ticks, first confirmed to be on the island in 2011. Most ticks are content to sit and wait for a meal to wander past; lone stars have no patience for that. “We see them actually pursuing hosts, which is really disconcerting,” one entomologist told me. Roden-Reynolds has found lone stars on walking trails and benches, in toolsheds, parking lots, and the yards of hundreds of local homes that he has surveyed. He has heard of them scrambling down dunes and across burning sand to feed on sunbathers. “Oh, they’re relentless,” he said.

Across Oregon during World War II, people from small towns who weren’t drafted to fight in the European or Pacific fronts moved to cities where the defense industry flourished. Portland, a little over thirty miles north of Woodburn, became a hub for shipbuilding, while in Seattle, 175 miles further north, Boeing built bombers. That, combined with the forced internment of people of Japanese ancestry — including U.S. citizens, many of them agricultural workers — meant there weren’t enough laborers to pick the berries that grew there during the spring and summer. Woodburn has so many berries that it used to call itself the Berry Center of the World.

“My grandparents are from Coahuila, Mexico,” Anthony says. “They arrived here in 1943.” They were among the laborers who came to the northwest as part of a 1942 binational agreement between Mexico and the United States called the Bracero Program. More than four million Mexican men, across 24 states, came to help the country’s agricultural industry survive.

“We now have five, six generations of Mexicanos, Mexican Americans, Latinos,” Anthony says of Woodburn. Over time, the laborers’ personal roots grew into Woodburn’s fertile soil. The Bracero Program ended in 1964, but many Mexican workers remained, or returned with their families, ready to make home and community out of a place that needed them. Today, 61.4% of the town’s 31,000-plus residents are Latino.

From the beginning, the Braceros played soccer when they weren’t working in fields and forests. It helped close the distance between their new home and the one they left behind.

In “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes dreamed of this moment. He wrote in 1930, “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem: how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure.” Hobbymaxxing is born from an innocent desire for an enriching life offline and outside of work. But Gen Z’s hobbying obsession may have evolved too far, so that these activities are no longer considered leisure but additional jobs.

Before the industrial revolution, the great outdoors was most people’s workplace. They were out there from dawn to dusk in all kinds of weather, doing grueling manual labor, or else they starved. It was only the richest of the rich who could stay inside and partake in such hedonistic extravagances as eating a varied diet or learning how to read. Today we can enjoy the great outdoors because we do it on our own terms.

But back then, wandering around outside could be dangerous. The medieval Norse word skóggangr, a formal punishment for very serious crimes, translates to “going to the woods.” People who received that sentence were cut off from Norse society, leaving them with nowhere to go but the forest, where they eventually died.

Fear of the woods is also evident in old fairy tales, where the forest was commonly portrayed as a scary place because the rules of society didn’t apply there. Now, with the professional management of park services and the aid of mass-produced gear, people can enjoy a break from society even with small children in tow.

As for walking, for most of human history, it wasn’t recreation. It was the primary mode of transportation.

We lead lives of unimaginable leisure.

The modern world owes a lot to the Enlightenment, the 18th-century intellectual movement that emphasized the power of reason. But the Enlightenment also created a myth: that we can get to know the objective world completely, with total clarity, as if we were looking at it from the outside.

Thankfully, Hume saved us from this dead-end.

A 2024 umbrella review of multiple meta-analyses, published in Science Direct, found that a few thousand steps a day measurably changes the trajectory of a life. Modern medicine has, in its own idiom, rediscovered something Judaism has never forgotten: that the body in motion is not incidental to the soul’s condition, but bound up with it.

Judaism has long affirmed the power of walking and movement itself carries spiritual weight. The Three Regalim — Pesach, Shavuot and Succot are literally “foot festivals,” which historically demanded physical pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The Torah’s central narrative is itself a journey on foot, from Egyptian bondage through the wilderness toward the Promised Land.

Tucker Carlson, after all, was a regular guest at TPUSA events. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for TPUSA, relayed a hadith from the recently murdered Kirk: “Honestly, people telling me not to have Tucker makes me want to have Tucker” at the organization’s conferences. After Kirk’s death, Carlson guest-hosted an episode of the show alongside Neff and Kolvet, who would both later be hounded by conspiracy theorists. This was only two days before Carlson blamed “hummus eaters” for the assassination. Already at that point, Carlson had for years been pushing pro-Kremlin narratives and conspiracy theories like the claim that the Pentagon was operating secret bioweapons labs in Ukraine and the idea that Jan. 6 had been a false flag incited by federal agents.

Then, too, Kirk himself was a key promoter of the most significant political conspiracy theory of our generation: the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump. Unlike the conspiracy involving his own death, the #StoptheSteal nonsense Kirk promoted led to actual political violence and a coup attempt that could have proved catastrophic for US democracy had not a brave few — most notably, then-Vice President Mike Pence — acted against it.

In December 2020, Kirk condemned then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for congratulating Joe Biden on his victory, comparing it to congratulating someone who had just robbed a bank. In the topsy-turvy fantasy world Kirk had created for his followers, Biden had obviously stolen the 2020 election.

Two days before Jan. 6, Kirk announced that Turning Point Action was “honored” to be “sending 80-plus buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” This tweet was later deleted. He also told his audience at the time there was “an almost guaranteed way Donald Trump serves four more years.” All it would take was for Pence to refuse to certify the results in the swing states that Trump had lost. As for those who might object on constitutional grounds, Kirk’s answer was to “make them sue.”

When called before the Jan. 6 committee to discuss his role in challenging the 2020 election results, Charlie Kirk invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. And it wasn’t simply election denial; under Kirk, TPUSA events and shows became gathering points for every kind of crank the Right produced, including anti-vaxxers like RFK Jr. In May 2021, TPUSA gave a show to Jack Posobiec, a man best known for having pushed Pizzagate — the theory that Hillary Clinton and her associates operated a child-sex-trafficking ring centered on a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant.

Kirk could at times be just as conspiratorial as Carlson or Owens, with the main difference being that his theories always had a reliable partisan tilt. He claimed that Biden had deliberately allowed the Afghan government to collapse in order to import more Democratic voters. He thus compressed the peaceful transition of power or the closing of a two-decade war into MAGA-friendly conspiracy theories.

Charlie Kirk spread election denial and other kinds of conspiracy theories for the same reasons that Owens and Carlson would later spread conspiracy theories about his death: money, relevance, and playing to the audience. It was only when his family and the remnants of TPUSA became the targets of the forces Kirk had helped unleash, that those left behind began denouncing others for taking advantage of the ignorant and the misinformed.

While for a long time Sweden was a country with some of the world’s highest taxes, this no longer applies to capital taxation. For instance, it no longer has a wealth tax, an inheritance tax or a property tax. The ideal of egalitarianism doesn’t seem to align with patterns of wealth accumulation, especially at the very top. […]

We used Forbes and UN data and found that in 2025 Sweden ranked fourth globally, with 4.7 dollar billionaires per million people. When excluding micro-states (fewer than one million people), Sweden is outnumbered only by Singapore (9.9), Hong Kong (9.1) and Cyprus (7.3), but before Switzerland (4.6) in fifth place. It ranks much higher than some of the world’s largest economies like the US (2.7), Germany (2.1), Canada (2.0) and the UK (0.8).

It is difficult to say for sure whether changes in regulation and wealth concentration have altered cultural norms, but there are clear indicators. Younger generations are now expressing strong materialistic values. When they rank what matters in life, earning money comes second to being with friends and far more important than being with family or getting an education.

Young Swedes and adults alike dream of building a “money machine” by investing in stocks so they can exit the labour market long before retirement. This might be surprising to some, since Sweden has long been shaped by a strong work ethic, both politically and culturally.

The study, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, suggests that our brain and attention may change how our immune system responds to inflammation. When people tried to distract themselves from an itch, it caused the inflammation — as measured by redness and swelling of the skin — to grow larger in size and last longer than if they focused their attention on it.

The research adds to growing evidence that the brain and the immune system — long thought to be relatively separate and distinct from each other — actually have an intimate relationship. Dysfunctional immune activity and inflammation have been linked to several psychiatric and neurological disorders, including schizophrenia, depression, long covid and dementia. In fact, recent research has found that our brains may trigger an immune response even from seeing someone who looks as though they might have an infectious condition.

A New York freelance writer disclosed yesterday that the Central Intelligence Agency had supported a foundation that sent hundreds of Americans to World Youth Festivals in Vienna in 1959 and Helsinki, Finland, in 1962.

Gloria Steinem, a 30-year-old graduate of Smith College, said the C.I.A. has been a major source of funds for the foundation, the Independence Research Service, since its formation in 1958. Almost all of the young persons who received aid from the foundation did not know about the relationship with the intelligence agency, Miss Steinem said.

Ironically, she said, many of the students who attended the festivals have been criticized as leftists. The festivals are supposed to be financed by contributions from national student unions, but are, in fact, largely supported by the Soviet Union. Miss Steinem said she had become convinced that American students should participate in the World Youth Festivals after she spent two years in India.

“I came home in 1958 full of idealism and activism, to discover that very little was being done,” she said. “Students were not taken seriously here before the civil rights movement, and private money receded at the mention of a Communist youth festival.”

Miss Steinem said she had talked to some former officers of the National Student Association, who told her C.I.A. money might be available to finance American participation in the seventh postwar festival, scheduled for Vienna in the summer of 1959. The former association officers had had ties with the C.I.A. while serving the association, which last week conceded it had taken money from the intelligence agency since 1952.

“Far from being shocked by this involvement I was happy to find some liberals in government in those days who were far-sighted and cared enough to get Americans of all political views to the festival,” Miss Steinem said.

I’m generally a fan of Robert Harris, but there’s an incredibly silly bit in his thinly veiled Tony Blair novel: The Ghost. [Spoiler alert] The big “scandal” at the heart of the novel is that the former PM’s wife had worked for the CIA . Like that wouldn’t make her even cooler….

Navier-Stokes is one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems, a list of the hardest open questions in mathematics drawn up by the Clay Mathematics Institute.

It concerns the equations describing how fluids such as air and water move, which are used in aircraft design, weather forecasting and the study of blood flow.

Around 31 percent of U.S. families were considered upper-middle class in 2024, according to an analysis from the public policy think tank American Enterprise Institute.

1. Economists have long known that inequality is relatively low for consumption, medium for income, and high for wealth. What they rarely emphasize, however, is how much wealth depends on age. The richest Americans aged 65-69 are worth about 30x as much as the richest Americans aged 18-24.
2. Net worth is very high in absolute terms. The median is over six figures by the mid-30s. Americans at the 75th percentile are millionaires by their mid-50s. Americans at the 90th percentile are millionaires by around 40. Claims about middle-class, middle-aged Americans who “can’t afford” eggs or gas or beef are nonsense.
3. The most sensible argument for worrying about trade deficits is that we’re “living beyond our means.” Trade deficits represent borrowing, and we can’t keep borrowing forever. But given Americans’ extraordinary net worth, the most sensible argument for worrying is still senseless. After 50 years of unbroken trade deficits, we’re wealthier than ever.
4. Americans of staggering net wealth are all around us. If you walk around an American mall on a weekend, you probably cross paths with several decamillionaires. But except for being older, you probably couldn’t pick them out of a crowd. Even their cars rarely scream extreme wealth.
5. Whatever your complaints about American capitalism, you’ve got to admit that a large share of Americans use the system to become staggeringly wealthy by the time they retire. Not 1% or 5%, but 25%.
6. Americans with low or negative net wealth are also all around us. But who ever thought otherwise? In my 20s, I had very low net worth, and so did all my friends. And that fact contains a lesson: Almost all low-wealth Americans are young. If you have a regular job and age a couple decades, you’re rarely poor anymore.
7. If you’re old and your wealth is still low, your financial situation is basically hopeless. You can still be happy, but it would take a miracle (like winning the lottery) for your finances to dramatically improve. Every other American, however, is already rich, or could become rich with durably cautious budgeting. The math behind “Skip a $5 coffee every day from the age of 18, invest the savings in the stock market, and you’ll have hundreds of thousands of extra inflation-adjusted dollars when you retire” is sound.
8. Earning regular high income is the easiest way to end up with high wealth. But it’s neither necessary nor sufficient. A high-skilled worker who blows his whole paycheck week after week ends up with a net worth of roughly zero. A Costco cashier with a high savings rate ends up a millionaire. That’s not just a freak anecdote. It’s math.
9. Wealth peaks around age 70, roughly what you’d expect given the permanent income hypothesis. What’s surprising is how slowly wealth declines from this peak! Americans over 80 are still loaded, generally having higher net worth than they had 30 years earlier. And despite this wealth, Social Security checks keep rolling in.
10. Given their current net wealth, a solid majority of Americans can comfortably retire without Social Security. The federal government could cut them off completely and they’d still do fine. The best rationale for the status quo is paternalism, but most Americans are well-prepared for their futures even ignoring Social Security.