Compact

On May 5, 2026, in Gwangju, South Korea, a twenty-three-year-old man named Jang Yoon-gi stalked, sexually assaulted, and brutally murdered Lee Chae-won, a seventeen-year-old female high school student. During the subsequent investigation, police discovered two “real dolls”—hyperrealistic life-sized sex dolls—in the perpetrator’s apartment. Both dolls had been mutilated: their necks and breasts slashed by sharp weapons.

Williamson Street is the strangest street in Wisconsin. On the right side stands the Willy Street Co-op, the most expensive grocery store I have ever set foot in. A loaf of bread costs $11. They sell vegan crackers, gluten-free brownies, and a litany of health supplements. On the bulletin board, you’ll see posters about protecting trans kids, abolishing ICE, and “grieving circles” where people gather together to process the trauma caused by climate change. That’s the right side of the street.

As marijuana use surpasses alcohol and tobacco use for the first time, Republicans have delivered another win for the vice economy. Figures ranging from Donald Trump to Rand Paul successfully pushed to delay a ban on intoxicating hemp-derived products. This is the latest in a string of pro-vice moves from the GOP, ranging from rescheduling marijuana by executive order to curtailing regulatory scrutiny on cryptocurrency and prediction markets.

Stefan George is the most elusive figure in the literary history of Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, a period that begins with Friedrich Nietzsche’s excoriations of Judeo-Christian morality in the late 1880s and ends with the Nazi book burnings of 1933. From a distance, George’s life looks like a secret passageway connecting these two ominous termini. He appears as the Antichrist in the age of democracy, as the counterrevolutionary herald of the Third Reich.

How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University By Theo Baker Penguin, 337 pages, $32 Fraud is an ancient practice, but these days its prevalence and scale seems to be increasing. The latest evidence for this comes from How to Rule the World, by the recent Stanford graduate Theo Baker.

No issue encapsulates Americans’ current political ennui more than grocery prices. A recent poll found they were the most common complaint of American consumers, more than housing, transportation, or health care. This fall, Maryland will become the first state to ban dynamic pricing by large grocery stores and grocery delivery apps. Last month, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised 30 percent lower prices in the city’s five forthcoming government-run grocery stores.

In 2023, Jason Arday became the youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history at age thirty-seven, when he was appointed to a chair in the sociology of education.

The Democratic Socialists of America’s hot socialist summer continues. Although the election remains too close to call as of this writing, Abdul El-Sayed looks likely to prevail in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, adding to a momentum that has been building for months. In June, a slate endorsed by the organization’s highest-profile elected official, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, defeated three incumbent Democrats in the state’s congressional primaries.

Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America By Scott Greer Passage, 300 pages, $34.95 There was a time, not too long ago, when the great threat to the right came from its left flank. The conservative movement was filled with people who eagerly canceled their own for transgressing liberal pieties. We all remember the number of prominent conservatives who willingly bent the knee during the BLM hysteria.

American race relations are at a crossroads. In the years since our current racial bargain was struck in the 1960s, our country has coped with its contradictions and imperfections by the very American method of muddling through. That has worked for a long time, but soon it won’t work anymore. We will have to choose between one path and another. There are two reasons for this, and they are unavoidable. The first reason is demographic.