MAY 2026 - David Ignatius wrote a colorful essay pointing out that reports of America's death are, up to now at least, greatly exaggerated - and that China's ascent is not guaranteed. "America is Falling Uphill" reads the head of Ignatius's May 21 column. America is weirdly resilient. Covid-19 looked like a crippling problem, but China took a harder hit than the United States. Border policy was a mess under Biden, but the public now seems unhappier about Trump’s crackdown than about illegal immigration. And finally, there’s the ever-expanding balloon of the U.S. economy. Despite inflationary tax and tariff policies, it keeps rolling along. The AI companies are so advanced they scare themselves. All the harbingers of American decline are present, to be sure. Trump himself is a walking symbol of arrogance and corruption that people once would have called “un-American.” But there’s a mysterious self-correcting mechanism at work. Every poll you read says that despite Trump’s electoral machinations, he’s still likely to lose the House of Representatives in November. Trump continues to try to undermine the Federal Reserve’s independence...

MAY 2026 - Almost daily now The Atlantic publishes commentary on Artificial Intelligence, much of it packaged in audio conversations hosted by Charlie Warzel. It's all helpful; but a recent narrative by Eve Fairbanks jumped out for eloquently making an important and ominous point: The problem is that the efficiency and frictionlessness that make AI appealing to writers are the same qualities that make it feel untrustworthy to readers. And readers are right not to trust it. No matter how much we may tell ourselves that AI is just a tool like spell-check, it isn’t. When we use AI to flesh out ideas, we lose the most important part of the writing process: thinking. Fairbanks' piece hit a nerve with readers, whose comments reflect the overall unease that AI is a replacement for the exercise of human thought. As one popular comment put it: Skills atrophy when not used. I disregard the intrusive offers of AI assistance to write an email. I understand there are people who do not like writing and how appealing that might be for them, but some things do not save that much time and aren't worth the abdication of opportunity to exercise the...