Among other things, many intro psych textbooks gloss over flaws in famous studies such as the Stanford Prison Experiment; misrepresent areas like evolutionary psychology; present highly contested but left-friendly ideas like stereotype threat as settled science; promote psychological myths such as that violent video games cause real-world violence; and ignore exaggerations and distortions in famous case studies like that of Phineas Gage and Kitty Genovese.

But the wealthy already pay a disproportionate share of taxes. “The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 23.1 percent average rate, six times higher than the 3.7 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers,” the Tax Foundation’s Erica York noted in 2024, of 2022 tax data. “The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of all federal individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 3 percent.”

The share of taxes paid by wealthy Americans is higher than in most other countries.

“The United States places an unusually heavy share of the tax burden on higher earners,” the Cato Institute’s Adam N. Michel commented in January. “You wouldn’t know this from hearing some politicians claim that the rich escape next to tax-free or deserve to be taxed at higher rates.”

Michel drew on a 2025 study by Canada’s Fraser Institute, which compared tax progressivity across 33 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. For those with federal systems (except Canada, for which all provinces were examined), the study looked at one high-tax and one low-tax jurisdiction for a full range of progressivity. Tax-hungry California and Texas, which has no state income tax, represented the U.S.

“California (US) (10.00) maintains the most progressive tax system out of the 45 OECD jurisdictions analyzed in this study, followed by Newfoundland & Labrador (Canada) (9.68), Korea (9.43), and Texas (US) (9.03),” observed the authors.

The Ukrainian solution that has gained the most attention is called Sting. It was developed in Ukraine by a volunteer engineering group called Wild Hornets.

It is a bullet-shaped 3-D printed aerodynamic frame featuring a pursuit speed of 213 mph (343 km/h) and a service ceiling of around 10,000 feet (3,000 meters). Its operational radius is about 20 kilometers (12.4 miles). It is equipped with a home-built thermal imaging camera so it can take down enemy drones at night.

The Sting interceptor costs US$2,100. Ukraine has developed several specialized interceptor brigades (e.g., the 412th Nemesis Brigade), which claim a 95% success rate. The system is operated by a pilot, but the latest versions feature autonomous interception using an automation layer in the Sting software.

The AI computer vision module can lock onto the silhouette of an enemy drone, such as the Geran 2, and navigate autonomously relieving the pilot of target responsibility.

Ukraine uses a system called Hornet Vision, a remote control architecture, meaning the pilot/operators can be far away from the front line, so the Russians cannot target them easily.

Ukraine has a number of advantages over the Russians. It has remote operators/pilots who are good at what they do. It can locally source important drone components, especially thermal imagers. It has talented software engineers with high motivation. And it has considerable battlefield experience.

Unlike the evangelicals who denounce empathy as a sin, Bloom doesn’t believe we should stop trying to understand others’ emotions or stop acting politically with the care of those we don’t understand in mind. Instead, Bloom is ambivalent about the moral weight we assign to empathy. Empathy can improve social cohesion and is a building block for good moral reasoning. And, as I have experienced, empathy can be marred by bias, or it can focus our attention on one person rather than on the social or political forces that harm all of us. Treating empathy as a silver bullet, our highest moral good, is doomed to fail us at ethically crucial moments.

But I have a harder time agreeing with Bloom’s conclusion: Instead of empathy, we should prize moral decisions based on compassionate but deliberative reasoning. Compassion, Bloom explains, doesn’t rely on my ability to discern someone’s feelings accurately. Whereas empathy is just as likely to leave us overwhelmed and fleeing from another person’s pain, compassion considers the other’s needs, takes them into account, and responds in kind. I may not know what it feels like to be facing starvation, and I may find it impossible to get inside the experience of someone struggling with addiction, but I can rationally assess others’ needs and respond.

I suspect that rationality is freighted with many of the same problems as empathy. How someone presents information changes how I understand the ethical stakes of a decision. Our rationality itself is bounded—no one has access to every piece of information before deciding. And I’m certain that cognitive bias affects what I believe is rational decision-making: I look for proof to validate my already existing beliefs every time I fill out my bracket for March Madness.

Thomas Aquinas understood the complexities of following Jesus, who taught us to love strangers while also sensing the strong pull of loving relationships with those closest to us. After all, we simply have more opportunities to love those in our nearest orbit. Because of this, we can’t devise a universal rule to guide every decision we make about caring for others. Instead, we can orient our decisions within the love of God, which, unlike our emotions or rationality, is not constrained by scarcity. Love is drawn from an inexhaustible well. The more we drink, the more like it we become. Mercy is the activation of this love. I am merciful because I am a creature to whom God has extended mercy, indefinitely and perfectly.

Consumption taxes have a lot to offer. First, what may seem like a narrow factor currently could well become the biggest selling point in the next decade. The diffusion of artificial intelligence and automation technologies strengthens the case for adding a consumption tax. The U.S. federal tax system currently relies heavily on taxing labor income. Payroll taxes finance Social Security and Medicare, and the individual income tax derives a substantial portion of its revenue from wages and salaries. If AI and automation technologies hollow out the work force, revenues from labor income would fall, even if overall economic output continues to grow. Adding a consumption tax makes the tax system more resilient to change.

More generally, consumption represents the largest component of GDP, making it an attractive tax base for governments seeking to raise significant revenue. As the bank robber Willie Sutton reportedly said when asked why he robbed banks, “Because that’s where the money is.” Consumption is where the money is, especially given the already-heavy reliance on income taxes in the United States.

Consumption taxes can also be economically efficient. By taxing spending rather than income, they generally avoid discouraging saving and investment. Over time, this can promote capital formation, productivity growth, and higher living standards. In contrast, income taxes can impose additional tax burdens on saving because individuals are taxed both when they earn income and when they earn returns on saved income.

Consumption taxes have the potential to be much simpler than the current system, if they are designed with a broad base—that is, with no exemptions—and uniform rates. Consumption taxes also tend to be relatively stable sources of revenue over the business cycle, during which consumption typically fluctuates less than individuals’ income or corporate profits. This stability can enhance fiscal planning and reduce revenue volatility.

Don’t add it: replace all other forms of taxation.

The term seasonal affective disorder, or rather its catchy acronym SAD, is so popular that it’s used in casual conversation. Steve LoBello, a psychologist and researcher at Auburn University at Montgomery, set out to do his own assessment of the nationwide scale of SAD—annual depression that follows a strict seasonal cycle, typically occurring in fall and winter and receding in spring and summer. LoBello and his team analyzed data from the CDC’s behavioral risk-factor survey, which asks hundreds of thousands of Americans each year about their health and well-being, including a separate screening for depression and anxiety, to see whether major depression rates followed a seasonal trend. “We expected cases to increase in the wintertime and then for that to subside starting in early spring and so forth, and there was nothing like that in the data,” LoBello told me of the study they published in 2016. “It was just flat as a pancake all the way through the year.” They also found no correlation between major depression and the respondent’s latitude (or hours of daylight). A couple of years later, in 2018, LoBello published another paper that found no correlation between even mild depression and the seasons. Still, the idea that we are all more likely to be sad and depressed in winter has dominated, and LoBello argues that that view is more steeped in folklore than science.

The age-old slam on Armstrong among those who consider themselves sophisticates is that he might have been an admirable enough musician in his early days but in time succumbed to the temptations of showbiz and sold out to the squares. As Louie, not Louis, he mugged and shuffled and grinned, playing to his white audiences in a manner that was subservient, undignified, and degrading.

The fact is, he was mugging, shuffling, and grinning when he was a boy in the streets of New Orleans, busking for coins as a member of a vocal quartet. He would do little buck-and-wing dances to entertain the crowds, and long after he mastered the cornet and then the trumpet, he continued to amuse himself as well as his audiences with his exuberant capers. “They called it Tomming—it wasn’t Tomming!” the guitarist and singer Danny Barker explained. “He just loved people!”

Knowledgeable fans of pop music today seem to make a fine distinction between the black jazz musicians of Armstrong’s generation and what the cognoscenti see as their white imitators. But there is little evidence, at least from Riccardi’s exhaustive research, that the musicians themselves felt this way. Oliver, it turns out, mentored white musicians, and Armstrong followed his example. He befriended them too, and vice versa. Armstrong admired white musicians who are seen these days as corny and square. He was a fan of Paul Whiteman, “whose very name might have been chosen by a satirist to illustrate what black musicians were up against,” in Clive James’s words. He was a fan of Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians as well. “Everything they play is perfect,” Armstrong said. “They can play anything . . . a whole lot of things I did remind me of Guy Lombardo.”

Armstrong, who said he was always “trying to Cultivate Myself,” was that lifelong learner we hear so much about these days. He couldn’t read music or follow a basic arrangement until, at nineteen or so, he joined Fate Marable’s band on a riverboat. Before long, he was playing passages from Wagner’s Tannhauser, and of his 1926 solo on “Big Butter and Egg Man,” the late Gunther Schuller wrote, “no composer, not even a Mozart or Schubert, composed anything more natural or simply inspired.”

As of now, with the Iran debacle receding and El Niño looming, we can say a few things with certainty:

The cheapest power on earth comes from the sun and wind, and everyone but us seems to have realized it

That clean power gives us some hope of dealing with the climate crisis that threatens our future, not to mention our insurance premiums

That clean power does not involve us in foreign wars

And the only important person on earth who does not agree with 1, 2, and 3 is Donald Trump, who is being daily proven wrong on exactly everything.

The invocation of “explicitly Christian arguments” is one of several instances in “Communion” when Vance’s approach to political campaigning and governance can seem borderline theocratic. One of his everyday challenges as Vice-President is to figure out “how to take an accepted moral principle and apply it in the real world as a Christian leader.” This conflation of public service with puffed-chest religious crusading is especially jarring when he writes, at length, about his 2025 visit to the Vatican, shortly before the death of Pope Francis, and his tense interactions with officials there, mainly over U.S. immigration policy. “Here I was, the most senior Catholic in the United States government,” Vance recalls, affronted, “and the Vatican seemed unwilling to move its moral guidance past the point of trite platitudes.” He goes on, “I’m one Christian statesman who would welcome an institutional faith less focused on platitudes and more focused on reality.”

It’s hard to imagine a reality-based conversation about the intersection of Catholic ethics and immigration policy with a man who campaigned for the Vice-Presidency by spreading calumnies about Haitian immigrants eating the pet cats and dogs of their neighbors in Ohio. Or who, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a mother of three during the agency’s siege of Minneapolis, condemned the victim as a “deranged leftist” whose death was a “tragedy of her own making.” Or whose career has been largely bankrolled by the co-founder of Palantir, which has a thirty-million-dollar contract with ICE to provide A.I. surveillance and data-mining technology for hunting and deporting immigrants. Or who uses Elon Musk, the tech trillionaire and former Department of Government Efficiency overseer whose cuts to public-health agencies and infrastructure are projected to cause hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, as an exemplar of how “immigration can bring benefits to the host country in its own right. Just think of Elon Musk and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that trace directly to his decision to come to the United States.”

Why did Brexit fail to live down to the economic warnings?

First, the EU is an economic laggard. As Figure 3 shows, since 2011, the EU’s economy has grown by 20.6 percent while the US economy — the second biggest destination for British exports after the EU in 2016 — grew by 39.9 percent, nearly double the rate.

Second, Britain’s economy was one of the least reliant on its EU colleagues. As Figure 4 shows, in 2015, just 42.3 percent of British exports went to the EU, a share lower than in each of the 27 other members. This is partly because, as Luis Garicano, a former member of the European Parliament, noted recently, the “Single Market” is largely a myth.

…of the opportunity to massively deregulate business and expand free trade.

The first system, Mira, was built by academic researchers in Germany.

Given access to a simulated medical record, it can choose from more than 85,000 actions: tests, prescriptions, even hospital admissions. Across more than 500 emergency-department cases, it reached a diagnostic accuracy of about 87 per cent, against 78 per cent for a panel of six doctors. It was strongest on conditions with clear test results, such as pancreatitis and appendicitis.

The second, Amie, is Google’s, and runs on its Gemini model.

Tested against 21 UK GPs across 100 multi-visit cases, it matched them on clinical reasoning and produced treatment plans that stuck more closely to official guidelines. On a benchmark for tricky medication decisions, it came out ahead.

Boston bars have been allowed to stay open extra late under special licensing rules — hailed as the “Tartan Army Bill” — and have enjoyed roaring trade. One Irish pub said takings were triple that of St Patrick’s Day. Sam Adams Boston Taproom ran out of beer. Manager Billy DeCain told NBC Boston: “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

But it was one waitress who spelled out how much the business meant. Identifying herself as Kale, she took to TikTok to say she had earned nearly $1,000 in a single shift in which she was “absolutely whacked”. She was instantly converted by the Tartan Army. “I am rooting for them,” she said. “Let’s go Scotland.”

The diplomatic power of American food has become a breakout star of World Cup content on social media.

From massive trays of traditional Texas barbecue to late night orders at Waffle House, thousands of tourists who have flocked to the U.S. for the first time to attend 2026 FIFA World Cup matches are obsessing over their first taste of American food and dining culture.

World Cup visitors react to beloved American foods
Before international tourists even stepped foot in stadiums hosting the various World Cup matches this month, they had begun filling social media feeds with videos of themselves trying new favorite bites from fast food chains, discovering free refills on drinks, and deli sandwiches at regional grocery stores.

We are unimaginably affluent.

Greenpeace and its activists allies have blocked for more than two decades the adoption of Golden Rice, which is genetically enhanced to produce the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene. The result, according to new calculations by DC Abundance founder and research director at the Golden Gate Institute for AI Abi Olvera, is that “delay has killed about 106,000 children and left another 210,000 to 425,000 blind.”

Her conservative calculations of the deaths and disabilities caused by Greenpeace’s scientifically ridiculous opposition to Golden Rice are focused on 11 countries in which the consumption of rice makes up a significant proportion of their people’s diets.

To achieve independence in 1776, the founders needed people besides themselves to believe in it and practice it. The message of their Philadelphia story could have been many things. Social coherence is something religion provides, often through repeating a story and asserting its moral. Creed is the word scholars use for those incantatory phrases that convey and perform adherence. all Men aRe cReated equal is a creed, in gOd we tRust another. libeRty is a third. Saying a creed publicizes commitment, claims distinction, and tests orthodoxy. A person can have a creed they describe as personal, but a creed is ultimately corporate, something other people can hear and repeat back: “Me too.”

Boston has once more been occupied by the United Kingdom, albeit rather happily this time. For the last week, tens of thousands of “Tartan Army” soldiers have descended on the city with World Cup zeal, good cheer, and an unparalleled thirst for beer. The occasion, of course, is Scotland’s first appearance in the World Cup since 1998, accompanied by its first World Cup victory since 1990 after June 13’s 1-0 win over Haiti.

Scotland’s first World Cup win in 36 years led to an impromptu victory lap of the city, bagpipes and all, and historic sales for restaurants and pubs. A full parade of raucous, singing Scots with bagpipes and kilts marched to Fenway Park on Sunday, where they threw in support for the Red Sox against the Texas Rangers. The Scottish fans have brought an animated energy to the city of Boston, and its residents have embraced it for the singular event that it is.

Sad that it has taken all these visitors to remind us how great daily life in America is.

Yet, in what has become routine in this research area, the NHB study’s findings and conclusions later crumbled under scientific reexamination. As a methodological criticism published (to its credit) in the NHB last month—over a year after the original study—shows, the observed elevation in suicide attempts came from a small sample (roughly 100 youth) in a single state (Idaho), at a time when that state’s “anti-transgender” laws were not even in effect. Further, the researchers did not properly control for confounding factors. (The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine has published its own methodological analysis, which is worth reading.)

The Trump administration has abandoned its effort to halt wind energy projects across the United States and dropped its challenge to the court ruling that tossed President Donald Trump’s order freezing federal permitting and leasing for wind projects. States that challenged the order hailed the development as one of the most significant legal victories against the Trump White House’s campaign against the energy transition.

Sir William Blackstone once observed that “Christianity is part of the laws of England.” Although this statement struck the mind of Thomas Jefferson as a kind of “judicial forgery,” Blackstone was expressing an idea that was commonplace among English lawyers. The question is not so much whether Christianity is part of the common law, but what parts and in what respects it is, or has been, integral to the body of law as a whole. And what can be said of the common law in general can also be said of constitutional law in particular. Certain important parts of our contemporary inheritance of constitutional law have been shaped decisively by Christian beliefs, practices and institutions, and the whole body of constitutional law, in its variegated national forms, reflects numerous specific Christian influences.

Christianity is not, of course, the only influence on the common law and on constitutional law in particular. Many interweaving historical influences have shaped modern constitutional law. Among these, four broad strands stand out as especially influential: Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christian theology, and Enlightenment principles. While the exact contribution that each of these has made—and should continue to make—is a matter of debate, there is little doubt that each has contributed substantially to how constitutional law is conceived and practised in our day.

Greek philosophy introduced a taxonomy of constitutional types and the concept of the rule of law. Roman law contributed the crucial notion of jurisdiction, a fundamental aspect of contemporary constitutional law. Christian theology provided a framework that qualified the authority of civil government by a higher natural or divine law, with the church’s spiritual authority placing practical limits on temporal powers. The powers of civil and ecclesiastical rulers were tempered through various means, including the administration of oaths of office and the issuing of charters guaranteeing the rights of religious, social, economic, and civil associations of many kinds. And while the Enlightenment is rightly associated with the modern principle of the separation of powers and the establishment of written constitutions enforced by judicial review, these principles also owe much to practices established prior to the Age of Enlightenment, especially those developed and extended during the Reformation. Despite important Greek, Roman, and Enlightenment contributions, constitutional law would not be what it is today if it were not for the influence of Christianity.

After Magna Carta the rest follows.