The Preamble

In 1986, the California state-legislature created a “Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility.” John Vasconcellos, the politician who pitched this, believed that self esteem was the cure to most social problems. He figured that if you made people feel better about themselves, they wouldn’t engage in crime, addiction and violence. Parents would be less likely to abuse their kids, and kids would be more likely to listen to their parents.

I’ve seen women making homemade butter. I’ve watched hours of videos of sourdough rising. In the middle of the night, I saw one self-declared stay-at-homesteader quartering a hog. She was wearing a floor-length dress that looked expensive. I think it was Dôen. When I clicked on it, I found that it retailed for more than $400, and that if I bought it she would make a 15% commission.

Cattle prices had finally been giving ranchers like Tim Brunner reason for optimism. Then he watched them tumble. At a recent livestock auction in Power, Montana, Brunner saw decent cows selling for hundreds of dollars less than had just weeks earlier. He blames President Trump.

Lately, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has been vocal on social media about how her department is fighting to protect students from sexual abuse in schools. “Parents, we’re with you. Students, we’re here to protect you,” she said in one “back-to-school” message posted on Facebook. “This Administration’s historic action to protect students across the nation isn’t going unnoticed. We will continue to defend our students and take OUT the TRASH!” read a post on X.

Karoline Leavitt, President Trump’s former press secretary, recently had a going-away party at the White House. There was a cake shaped like the presidential podium she often stood behind and — even better — cookies decorated with the words “no more questions.” They were fitting for a job built almost entirely around sparring with reporters asking questions you would rather not answer.

Christian nationalism is not just a theological or political failure. It is a human failure: a failure to care, a failure to treat another the way Jesus would treat them, a failure of kindness. It is the insidious belief that America is a Christian nation, that the country should be governed by the principles of the Bible, and that Christians therefore hold a kind of divine claim on power inside of it.

“I don’t know. I just really like my life. I would say I am pretty happy.” My stomach squirmed. I know those are normally pretty positive words to hear from someone, but I was on my second date with a guy I really liked (let’s call him Mike), and I immediately got the ick. We’d had a great first date the week before, and I had so much excitement that it might go somewhere. But as we drove in his car to the restaurant, I could feel that hope draining out of me. My immediate impulse was to leave.

When it comes to voting by mail, President Donald Trump hasn’t practiced what he’s preached. After years of bashing mail-in voting as inherently “corrupt,” Trump cast his ballot in Florida’s Republican primary on August 13 using none other than mail-in ballot. He did the same in a special election back in March.

A newborn with a life-threatening heart condition is receiving specialized care in Texas while his biological parents, the gestational carrier who birthed him, multiple courts, and the state attorney general are fighting over who had the right to make medical decisions before his birth, and who has it now.

Over the past two decades, education has been conducting one of the largest educational experiments in modern history. Schools around the world have been steadily replacing analog methods of teaching and learning with digital technologies.