Not unlike a Supreme Court justice, I have previously hallucinated that the Founders were offering me their insight into the present moment, and I will probably do it again.

Of all the titans of social media, Google CEO Sundar Pichai tried to keep the groveling to a minimum after Donald Trump won last year. He did not, like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, go on podcasts to praise the benefits of “masculine energy” or hire the new president’s close friend, the Ultimate Fighting Championship boss Dana White, to his board of directors. He did not, like the X owner Elon Musk, go to work in the White House or publicly declare his straight-man “love” for Trump.

The so-called moderate Republicans promised they would not slash Medicaid. Conservatives vowed not to explode the national debt. Party leaders insisted that they would not lump a jumble of unrelated policies into a single enormous piece of legislation and rush that bill through Congress before any reasonable person had time to read it.
But President Donald Trump wanted his “big, beautiful bill” enacted in time to sign it with a celebratory flourish on America’s birthday.

Of all the elements of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, perhaps none is as obviously self-defeating as getting rid of tax credits for clean energy. That decision will not simply set back the fight against climate change. Congressional Republicans could also be setting America up for the worst energy-affordability crisis since the 1970s. Unlike then, this time we’ll have imposed it on ourselves.
Electricity demand in the United States is rising faster than it has in at least two decades.

To hear Tucker Carlson tell it, an American attack on Iran wasn’t just likely to precipitate World War III. It would do something worse: destroy Donald Trump’s presidency. “A strike on the Iranian nuclear sites will almost certainly result in thousands of American deaths at bases throughout the Middle East, and cost the United States tens of billions of dollars,” the conservative commentator wrote on X on March 17. “Trump ran for president as a peace candidate,” Carlson added on June 4.

For Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “Make America healthy again” is far more than a nice slogan. His cosmic purpose in life, he has said, is to fix the country’s health woes. “The first thing I’ve done every morning for the past 20 years is to get on my knees and pray to God that he would put me in a position to end the chronic-disease epidemic,” Kennedy told senators during his confirmation hearing in January. As health secretary, he has continued to emphasize his commitment to that goal.

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Conventional housing wisdom dictates that if you can’t afford Los Angeles or New York City, try Austin or Atlanta. For years, astronomical prices, labyrinthine zoning laws, and dwindling square footage have driven renters and homeowners out of big coastal cities in droves.

Less than two years ago, the public image of Sean “Diddy” Combs started to shift from playboy to villain: to the raging boyfriend caught beating Cassie Ventura on a hotel camera; the alleged criminal kingpin facing federal prosecution; the mastermind of an elite sex cult, according to online conspiracy theorists. He was broadly painted as (and assiduously denied being) the sort of man who used money and power to pursue his desires no matter the harm to those around him.

At the Brookfield Zoo, near Chicago, sloshing inside bags of oxygen and water, thousands of tadpoles await their transformation into what the Chicago Tribune has already dubbed “celebrity amphibians.” A few months ago, the sapo concho was bound for extinction. The native Puerto Rican toad has long been endangered on the island thanks to habitat loss and invasive species.

Not long ago, I ran into an old friend, a well-regarded Democratic intellectual who recently has moved to my right, but who still holds liberal values and is not a Donald Trump supporter. After we commiserated about the excesses of the far left, I mentioned offhandedly that Trump’s maniacal authoritarianism makes the fact that Democrats can’t get their act together so much worse.
He reacted, to my surprise, with indignation.