Quillette

In the early 1930s, the Australian government lost a war against emus, and its present war, this time on tobacco, is heading the same way. Excessive taxation in the name of public health has backfired in extraordinary fashion, helping create a massive black market in tobacco products.

A review of Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov; 243 pages; Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 2026) Omer Bartov, a prominent historian at Brown University, was born to a solidly left-wing Zionist family in Kibbutz ‘Ein Hahoresh, south of Haifa, in 1954. (By chance, I was also born in ‘Ein Hahoresh, six years earlier; also by chance, both of us did our IDF service in the Nahal (Infantry) Corps and both at some point were wounded. And both of us did our PhDs in Oxbridge in European history).

Robin Dembroff’s highly anticipated Oxford University Press book, Real Men on Top: How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality, hit shelves in May with impressive endorsements. According to the philosopher Jason Stanley, Real Men on Top is a stunning work of philosophy that explains why insights from gender studies are so feared by authoritarian regimes.

A review of The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life after AI by Cory Doctorow; 240 pages; Verso (June 2026) In late August 2010, I was a senior Obama-appointed official in the office of the Secretary of Veterans Affairs, and I received a message informing me that the secretary wanted to see me right away. These encounters never start well and usually end with someone’s head on a pike.

Earlier this year, a human rights tribunal ordered a former school trustee in the Canadian province of British Columbia, Barry Neufeld, to pay a C$750,000 penalty. Tribunal officials concluded that certain statements Neufeld had made, protesting the inclusion of LGBT-related content in the school curriculum, had exhibited “hallmarks of hate.” “Transpeople are, by definition, people ‘whose gender identity does not align with the sex assigned to them at birth,’” the tribunal declared.

Editor's note: the text that follows has been adapted, with permission of the authors, from “State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences,” a report submitted on 5 April, 2026 to Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, and Andrew D.

On 6 July, at 12:01pm China Standard Time, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) launched a ballistic missile carrying a dummy warhead from a submarine in the South China Sea. The missile (either a JL-2 or the new JL-3) passed over the northern Philippines, arced over the Second Island Chain, and finally made its descent between the islands of Nauru and Tuvalu, in waters close to the latter’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

Four years ago, a colleague asked me whether I could chair a debate with some guy called ‘Gary Stevenson’, who was, apparently, an anti-inequality campaigner and a YouTube commentator of some description. I had never heard of Stevenson, but accepted. The debate went all right, even though it was mostly a case of talking past each other (which, given that I was the moderator, was probably my fault). It was otherwise not especially memorable.

US Politics Is this the far left's #MeToo moment? Senator Bernie Sanders with Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner at a "Fighting Oligarchy" rally at the Collins Center for the Arts, University of Maine, Orono, 24 May 2026.

Nearly every war Israel has fought has been reactive and mostly unplanned. It had to fend off armed attack from other states in 1948, 1973, and 1991. It was dragged into conflict initiated by non-state guerrilla actors in 2006 and 2023. It has been engaged in counterinsurgency or counterterrorism of one kind or another too many times to count. Even when its forces did fire the first shot, it was nearly always in wars that Israel did not seek and did not adequately plan for, most notably in 1967.