The Vatican, as one aphorism puts it, tends to “think in centuries.” But Pope Leo XIV seems intent on changing that, moving with remarkable speed to publish his first encyclical today, Magnifica Humanitas, “on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” Leo has managed to produce a major teaching document on AI while college students are still booing commencement speeches about how the technology will change the world.

Wheeling the old warriors
off the Honor Flight plane
with flags and banners,
people calling their names.
From Chosen to Kabul,
from Baghdad to Hue,
after all these years
today was their day.
Oh, the burden they carry,
I heard one woman say.
I wonder if our children
would serve today?
But not far off
another plane left,
with soldiers and sailors,
their solemn duty kept.
Nearby, a young wife,
two children at her side.
It’s the burden she carries
as the plane took flight.

For the past 18 months, Vladimir Putin’s efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine have been led by a man with no diplomatic background or expertise. Kirill Dmitriev, a banker who is under sanctions for his role in financing the war, has been shuttling from Moscow to Florida to meet with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in and around the exclusive island known as Billionaire Bunker.

Is America heading toward a national debt crisis? As an economic adviser to President Biden and an economist active in mainly Democratic policy circles since the late 1980s, I’ve spent most of my career dismissing arguments that any debt-ratio level signifies a “crisis.” I still think that’s true, even as our publicly held debt has reached 100 percent of our GDP. But I also now believe that if you’re not worried about this country’s fiscal outlook, you’re not paying enough attention.

No one yet knows the details of the Iran deal that President Trump has been teasing on social media for the past day or so. The president himself has admonished his followers not to “listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about.” But as this war stumbles to a close, it is clear that the president, too, is lost: He didn’t know what he was doing when he began it, and now he doesn’t know how to get out of it.
Only a day ago, Trump was trying to project confidence.

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The first surprising thing about President Trump’s impending defeat in the 2026 Iran war is that he already fought and won a successful war against Iran last year. In June 2025, U.S. and Israeli air strikes badly damaged the Iranian nuclear program in 12 days of bombardment. Exactly how badly remains controversial. But they didn’t do nothing.

In 1960, Washington watched aghast as Fidel Castro’s post-Revolution government seized companies and assets it viewed as the spoils of vanquished U.S. imperialism. Among the biggest prizes were two plants that sat above some of the largest nickel and cobalt deposits in the world. The United States had acquired one of them to secure a strategic supply of nickel for armor plating and aircraft engines during World War II.