Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Sport

PEARL JAM SESSION:

He Gave It All to Help the Knicks Win in 1973. He’s Still in Pain Today.: Earl “the Pearl” Monroe was part of the last championship team. Now 81, he has thoughts on what really matters. (David Waldstein. June 9, 2026, NY Times)

More than half a century later, after dozens of surgeries and unrelenting pain from a punishing career on hardwood floors and concrete playgrounds, those words still echo, even though it is not so easy and carefree to be Earl Monroe these days. Not that he would complain. An acknowledgment of his constant pain, from his feet to his head, had to be coaxed out of him during a chat at one of his favorite restaurants not far from his home in Harlem.


Now 81, Monroe is paying the price for his Hall of Fame career and all the joy he brought to Knicks fans in the 1970s. He was not known as Earl the Pearl just because it rhymed. His is one of the most apt nicknames in sports: He was elegant, sophisticated, cherished; and it still applies.

Outwardly, it appears as though he has been retired for 6 years, not 46. He bears the unmistakable aura and presence of an elite athlete, even though he uses a walker, which he hates and vows to chuck aside one day.

But he has endured more than 40 operations, he said, including a knee replacement, two new hips and spinal fusion. He can barely turn his head because of the pain in his neck.

“Every time I make a little progress, I’m back in the hospital,” he said. “Mentally it’s hard, because I know I can’t do things anymore. It’s disheartening. But then you think about people facing harder things. I say something for them in my prayers at night.”

Monroe dislikes discussing it all, but he understands that fans and admirers still care about him and want to know how he is faring, and hope he can infuse the current team with some of that elusive championship mojo.

But more important, in his view, is that by sitting for an interview, he would get to shine a light on one of his enduring missions, the charter school in the Bronx that bears his name.

Soccer

NATIONALITY IS A CHOICE:

How migration became a key to World Cup success (Ben Brindle, June 5, 2026, The Conversation)

The 2026 World Cup will feature more foreign-born players than any previous edition. Nearly a quarter of the 1,248 players selected for national teams were born in a different country from the one they will represent.

In some squads, the proportions are far higher than this – 96% of Curaçao’s players were born abroad, as were 85% of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s and 73% of Morocco’s. Overall, foreign-born players make up the majority of footballers in eight of the tournament’s 48 squads.

One Economy to Rule Them All

…ALL BOATS:

What Liberals Get Wrong About the Middle Class (Stephen J. Rose and Scott Winship, 6/08/26, NY Times)

In a recent report, we measured class using constant, inflation-adjusted thresholds. The “core” middle class shrank, but so did the classes below the middle — the poor, the near-poor and the lower middle class.

In 1979, 36 percent of families were in the middle class. At first, it looks ominous that by 2024, a smaller number — 31 percent — could claim that status. But it’s only worrisome if you overlook that over the same period, the upper middle class grew to 31 percent of families from 10 percent. Meanwhile, the number of Americans falling short of the middle class — once more than half — dropped to 35 percent of all families.

The traditional middle class shrank because so many families became better off over time, not because more people fell short. At the same time, inequality rose, too. The higher up the income ladder a family reached, the more disproportionate the improvement. Rather than the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, rich and poor alike grew richer — albeit at much different rates.

Homocentric Universe

WHY EMPATHY IS SELF-DELUSION:

The moderately easy problem of consciousness (Noah Smith, Apr 27, 2026, Noahpinion)

You know you’re self-aware, but that’s about it — you aren’t telepathic, so you have no way of seeing into anyone else’s mind and knowing what it’s like to be them. Actually, it gets worse — you don’t even know if you were really self-aware five minutes ago. For all you know, you could have been created by a powerful computer and given a complete set of false memories.1 The past version of you is just as alien to your currently self-aware self as any of the people around you.

This is known in philosophy as the “problem of other minds”. It’s closely related to the “hard problem of consciousness” — the question of how physical processes give rise to subjective experience. The problem of other minds means that the hard problem of consciousness will never fully be solved. Since you’ll never know whether other people are really conscious, you’ll never be able to get hard scientific evidence about why they’re conscious. You can never explain something if you don’t know if it’s true or not.

Similarly, you’ll never know what it’s really like to be someone else — whether the color red looks to you like it looks to them, whether they feel pain the same way you do, and so on. In fact, you’ll never even know what it was like to be you in the past. Subjective experience is incommensurable.

Sympathy is ample.

Religion

ROUTINE:

A Prayer for the Grace of Ordinary Things (Vicar, 6/07/26, Country Squire)

I have been thinking lately about the grace of ordinary things. Not the grand gestures or the great events, but the small, steady, faithful routines that hold our lives together. The kettle boiling at exactly the same time each morning. The robin that sings from the same branch of the apple tree. The way a well-oiled gate swings shut without a squeak. These things ask nothing of us but attention. And in return, they give us something precious: the quiet assurance that the world still works, still turns, still offers its small mercies to anyone with eyes to see.

The countryside teaches this lesson better than any sermon.

Russia

THERE IS NO BEAR IN THE WOODS:

Erdogan and Putin, the End of an Unlikely Partnership (Gonul Tol, 6/07/26, NY Times)

Ukraine has already been capitalizing on the Iran war by cultivating closer military ties with Gulf states. When Iran attacked neighboring countries with Shahed-136 kamikazes, the same drones that Russia has used in Ukraine, Mr. Zelensky quickly sought to leverage Ukraine’s experience, dispatching air defense teams to Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.


Turkey, which has strong military ties with the Gulf, sees Ukraine’s growing role as a complement to Ankara’s relationships that will allow it to expand what it’s offering. For Russia, which has spent years developing closer economic and security ties with Gulf monarchies, the shift is yet another setback. [….]

It’s clear that Ankara is no longer balancing between Moscow and NATO and is tilting the field against Mr. Putin. Russia’s decline has given Turkey, after a decade of deference to Moscow, the freedom to pursue its interests. Ukraine is the beneficiary.

Energy

YOUR NEXT PLANE WILL BE A VOLT:

Flying car industry turns to solid-state batteries for commercial takeoff (Bojan Stojkovski, Jun 07, 2026, Interesting Engineering)

In the long run, battery technology is emerging as one of the most important factors shaping the future of aerial mobility. Su noted that solid-state batteries will play a central role in enabling the next generation of flying cars by delivering both the energy density required for longer flight ranges and the safety standards needed for commercial operations.

Religion

NEVER BE YOU:

That Hideous Narcissism: All in all, the modern self is remarkably free and remarkably miserable. Liberated from limits and boundaries, we find we are not walking toward anything — only away from something. (Eddie LaRow, June 1, 2026, Mere Orthodoxy)

So here are some ways the narcissistic self is expressed today.

Authenticity


The person seeks their true self within themselves not from without. “Be yourself.” “Find your truth.” “Live authentically.” Lionel Trilling, in Sincerity and Authenticity, observed that authenticity has come to mean moving against the current of conventional moral authority rather than with it. To do what is expected is insincere; to transgress is to be truly oneself. Part of this is the effect of Critical Theory, which views even self-expression through the lens of power dynamics. The self as authentic interior dominates conversations around gender and identity — the true self is hidden within and needs to be expressed outward.

The entirety of morality consists of suppressing the authentic self.

Anglospherics

UNIVERSALISM VS iDENTITARIANISM:

Why the West Needs the American Founding: The Founding shows that the West’s deepest traditions can be reconciled and made to sustain a free society. (Samuel Gregg, June 1, 2026, American Spectator)

What unites parts of the American left and segments of the American right is skepticism about the American Founding. Many on the left seem unable to think about the Founding, save in terms of race and class. Some American conservative commentators regard the Founding as part of the broader eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement that, in their view, is directly responsible for many of America’s contemporary woes.

These pressures, however, make it more urgent than ever for those who care about Western civilization, and who want to save it from being buried under a wave of bureaucracy, technocracy, quasi-authoritarianism, and endless professions of guilt, to remind both elite and popular audiences of the power of the American Founding to serve as a model for what that civilization is ultimately about.

By “the Founding,” I mean not only specific documents like the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, or even some of the powerful personalities of the period. These are all important reference points and will surely remain so. Instead, I have primarily in mind the specific combination of ideas that animated the period in which there was an effort to establish a republican form of government that upheld and promoted certain principles which have deep roots in the broader and deeper cultural patrimony of the West. If this admixture of ideas can be maintained and even magnified in the United States, I think we can have some confidence in its ability to animate other parts of the West.

What, then, is the nature of this set of ideas that characterized the Founding? Broadly speaking, it amounts to a mixture of the thought of Greece and Rome, the religions of Judaism and Christianity, the heritage of England and its institutional expressions of liberty, and the various Enlightenment movements that assumed prominence in the eighteenth century. In America’s case, we are really referring to the “moderate Enlightenment” associated with minds like Adam Smith and Montesquieu. All these things came together to different degrees and in varying ways to shape the principles and emphases of the American Revolution and the constitutional framework that, in fits and starts, gradually formed in the revolution’s wake.

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You Missed

Sport

PEARL JAM SESSION:

Soccer

NATIONALITY IS A CHOICE:

One Economy to Rule Them All

…ALL BOATS:

Homocentric Universe

WHY EMPATHY IS SELF-DELUSION:

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