Compact

The US fertility rate hit yet another new record low in 2025, according to the most recent CDC data. This is barely news, as we have heard it almost every spring for nearly two decades. What is notable is that women in their 30s have significantly higher fertility rates than women in their twenties, marking the thirties as the new peak childbearing decade. The mainstream media’s reaction has been sanguine.

Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment to the Supreme Court was championed by conservatives who wanted to end the injustice of Roe v. Wade. It’s a sad irony that she’s now joined a decision that will have similarly far-reaching ill-effects on American politics and jurisprudence alike. Trump v. Barbara, the “birthright citizenship” case decided this week, is a travesty of Roe’s magnitude. The decision’s defenders point to its long pedigree, with precedents dating back more than a century.

New York City Pride, June 2026. A sea of men wearing “Call me Daddy” T-shirts, pushing strollers, carrying babies. In gay subcultures, a “daddy” describes a dominant, authoritative figure who is often paired with a “twink,” a much younger, slight “boy-like” male as a sexual partner. Over in Seattle, fully nude male bicyclists rode past children with their genitalia on full display.

Following the persecution of the Catholic Church, the execution of King Louis XVI, and the introduction of mass conscription, Catholic royalist peasants in the Vendée region of western France revolted against the republican regime in 1793. At first, the rebellion was successful. Yet the government eventually put it down through scorched-earth tactics, resulting in a death toll of over 200,000, perhaps one third of the population of the region.

At the beginning of Citizen Vigilante, a new film that has reached #1 on Amazon Prime, something shocking happens. A young white woman walking down the street of a European city is suddenly stabbed in the neck by an African migrant. The surprise that moment delivers marks Citizen Vigilante as the latest entrant in a genre I’ll call basedsploitation.

In early 2017, an expected hike in gas prices in Mexico—or gasolinazo, as it was informally known—caused a mass panic that resulted in fuel hoarding, with people lining up for hours to fill up their tanks. I remember sitting in my cold car in the middle of the night, in a line that stretched on for a few miles, terrified that it would run out of juice before reaching the pump.

On April 30, 2026, the OECD published a new report claiming that more than one in five people across OECD and EU countries experience a mental disorder, making mental ill health “one of the most significant public health and economic challenges” of our time. For this, the report offers the usual prescriptions: We need to invest in prevention, we need to intervene more and earlier to promote mental health.

In 2014, GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary to Dave Brat, a radical libertarian economics professor who had never held political office. Brat went on to win the seat and served two terms in Congress as a member of the Freedom Caucus before losing to liberal Democrat Abigail Spanberger in 2018, after his constituency was significantly altered by redistricting. After a decade plus of political upsets, Brat’s victory isn’t well-remembered.

I was just speculating for a podcast. I had no personal information. I was just speculating for a podcast.” This was the testimony of Howard Lutnick, the sitting Secretary of Commerce, to the House Oversight Committee on May 6, 2026. For Lutnick, the word “podcast” seems to describe a media format in which aimless speculation is both expected and encouraged.

From David Cameron to Keir Starmer, the decade-long drama of Brexit is a graveyard of British prime ministers. These leaders fell because they kept trying to insert a new kind of politics revealed after Brexit into old political forms.