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)
All the President’s Losses: Courts are telling Trump “No” (Joyce Vance, Jun 01, 2026, Civil Discourse)
The courts continue to let the White House know how this democracy works. It’s become hard to keep track of all of Trump’s losses in court as they continue to add up.Here are the details on some of the newest ones…
Donald who?
The Cartoonist Who Mocked the Madness of Modernism: With biting satire, Alan Dunn captured how 20th-century architectural trends left everyday Americans astonished, baffled, and enraged. (Gabriele Neri, MIT Press Reader)
In 1936, Alan Dunn was paid $25 for his first cartoon in Architectural Record. The drawing shows a scene from American suburbia, with two single-family houses side by side. On the right, we see a modern, geometrically abstract abode with large windows set into very slim walls, a flat roof, bright metal parapets, and no traces of decoration. In short, a work of architecture aligned with the new avant-garde style spreading across the country.Gabriele Neri is the author of “Alan Dunn,” from which this article is adapted.
But to the left, another house appears — one with much bolder features. It is composed of a post set into the ground on which two bare slabs are wedged, which constitute the entire living space on their own. The elevated living space is reached via steps with a curved handrail that rises from the ground to the top. There are no other pillars, not even walls, a roof, or windows. The house, in its sculptural incompleteness, is an exercise in absolute radicalism. Looking perfectly at ease, its inhabitant reads the paper, lounging on a futuristic chair, seemingly unperturbed by issues of privacy or climate control. This display gets on the nerves of his modernist neighbors, irritated by such extreme modernity.“Well, we’re dated!” the wife complains to her husband. “That abstractionist next door built his house in space-time.”
It is a typical setup by Dunn, then a mainstay of The New Yorker’s graphic humor, notorious for satirizing the transformations of 20th-century American architecture. Trained at the National Academy of Design and the American Academy in Rome, Dunn was a shrewd visual critic who brilliantly juxtaposed everyday aesthetic banality with surreal disruption. He showed that, rather than a matter of substance, the modernity seeping into Americans’ lives was, above all, a phenomenon of form — a passing fashion soon to be supplanted by new trends and convictions.
Anti-Woke, or Just Wounded? A Typology of Two Types of Anti-Woke Intellectuals (Scott Barry Kaufman, June 1, 2026, Skeptic)
When we hear “narcissism,” we picture the grandiose type: the swaggering, self-promoting, attention-hungry performer. But in a study with Joshua Miller, W. Keith Campbell, and Brandon Weiss, my colleagues and I mapped how narcissism actually breaks apart into different faces. There’s grandiose narcissism: antagonistic, dominant, status-seeking. And there’s vulnerable narcissism: neurotic, hypersensitive, easily wounded, perpetually aggrieved, convinced the world has failed to grant the recognition it owes. The antagonism is the thread the two share.
Both feed the second anti-woke intellectual, but in different ways. Grandiose narcissism builds the brand: the crusader who discovers that being The Person Who Fights This Thing brings a following, a revenue stream, a standing ovation, and who needs the enemy to stay enormous because the enemy is now load-bearing for the self. Vulnerable narcissismsupplies the wound: the person who was genuinely humiliated—fired, mobbed, exiled, betrayed—and for whom the critique is no longer about the world at all but about settling a score that never closes. A real injury becomes a permanent organizing principle. The crusade is the bandage that never comes off because the cut is never allowed to heal.
And when this goes collective, it gets its own engine. The work of Agnieszka Golec de Zavala on collective narcissism describes groups built around the belief that we are exceptional, that we are not sufficiently recognized, and shows that such groups reliably turn hostile toward whoever they cast as the threat to the in-group’s image. An anti-woke movement organized around shared grievance, rather than shared inquiry, will behave exactly this way: ever-vigilant, ever-aggrieved, retaliating against perceived insults to its own greatness. The truth-seeking recedes; the score-settling takes over.
That’s the distinction I’d draw, and I’d put it as a question anyone in this fight can ask themselves: Am I doing this to make society better, or to repair a narcissistic injury? The two can look identical from the outside. They have very different effects on the world.
And here is the part I find mega-ironic: the second camp talks, almost without exception, from a place of pure victim mindset. The very thing they are most likely to mock in their opponents (the grievance gang, the victimhood culture, the perpetual woundedness group, the “everyone is out to get us” cohort) is the thing they have most thoroughly become. Their accusation becomes a mirror of themselves.
This is the root of the Right’s obsession with manliness: they lack iot.
Thanks largely to robots, Ukraine is now talking about winning, not just surviving: Uncrewed and autonomous systems—and the willingness to adapt to them—have neutered Russian advantages. (Patrick Tucker | June 2, 2026, Defense One)
A small but growing number of European officials and analysts are saying what four years ago was unthinkable: Ukraine isn’t just surviving its grueling war with Russia, it is in some ways thriving and may even be on a path to victory.
This isn’t yet captured in headlines—for example, about last weekend’s barrage of Russian drones and missiles around Ukraine—but in the details, like how some 90 percent were intercepted.
Several long-term trends have shifted in Ukraine’s favor, and the core reason is its fierce focus on AI and robotics.
In the crucible of war, Ukraine has developed drones and ground robots that can hold territory—even take it back.
Waiting in Darkness: The U.S. fuel blockade against Cuba (Joy Gordon, April 27, 2026, Commonweal)
Violence is easily recognized when it takes the form of bullets or bombs. The causality is indisputable, the human impact immediately visible. But economic violence works very differently. Deprivation does not kill or maim directly. Rather, it creates the conditions that bring suffering and hardship. When these are severe, infant and child mortality rates increase, illnesses and injuries are more likely to be fatal, and life expectancy decreases. We know that sanctions may have all those results. Unilateral sanctions, which the United States has imposed on numerous countries and thousands of individuals, have a massive impact on mortality, causing more than five hundred thousand deaths every year.
Folks don’t care to acknowledge that W ended the Iraq War, rather than starting it. Regime change makes ending sanctions acceptable.
Taiwan’s more relaxed than most of us about Trumpian deal-making (Bill Emmott, May 31, 2026, Asia Times)
So it is worth asking why Taiwan itself seems comparatively relaxed about the potential implications of the Trump-Xi summits. This may help us separate the noise that inevitably surrounds these summits from the true strategic signals that both sides are conveying.
One reason why Taiwan is less concerned than others is a simple one: it has had to learn to live with its geopolitically anomalous status for nearly 80 years now. If it got nervous every time the Chinese and American leaders talked, even ones like Xi and Trump, it would soon have a nervous breakdown.
Moreover, while certainly the People’s Republic of China has become vastly stronger in economic, military and political terms, especially over the past two decades, so has Taiwan. The Taiwanese know that they could not defeat China in a head-on conflict but they also know that they are strong enough to impose huge costs and pose high risks for China.Ukraine’s success in resisting Russia’s invasion since February 2022 serves as an inspiration for Taiwan but most of all as a warning to China.
What matters to Taiwan is that it can keep on strengthening its defenses sufficiently to help deter an invasion.
Taiwan actually could win a head on conflict.
The Fire of Stupidity Cannot Be Contained (David French, 5/31/26, NY Times)
[M]illions upon millions of people are enduring democracy as “the worst form of government” without the necessary balanced understanding (that citizens in the mid-20th century had gained through firsthand observation) of “except all those other forms that have been tried.”
So even fascism and communism — for some people, at least — are no longer avatars of atrocity, but dynamic alternatives to a sclerotic present. In their frustration, all too many people are attracted to the theoretical benefits of authoritarianism, and they don’t have the experience or the education to understand its actual and inevitable defects.
They do not understand the link between their fashionable and transgressive ideologies and the oceans of blood that fascism and communism spilled across the globe.
In this ahistorical context, even political violence can seem justified — perhaps even a bit daring and romantic — unless you’ve lived through, say, the riots that swept American cities in the 1960s, a cataclysm that was far more violent, deadly and prolonged than anything that happened in the United States in 2020.
The compromises and restraints of diplomacy, which can often mean granting painful concessions to terrible regimes, can seem like a fool’s errand, unless you’ve witnessed the indescribable horrors of world wars.
The problem is rather different than Mr. French describes: it is the atavism of the Last Men. Life is so affluent and boring, thanks to the triumph of liberalism, that these people are willing to embrace violence just to make their lives more exciting.
Trump vowed to kill wind power. Under his watch, America will produce more than ever (David Charter, May 29 2026, The Times uk)
The United States will have the capacity to produce record amounts of wind power under President Trump despite his vow to “terminate” all renewable energy windmills.Experts say the industry is “winning” a fightback in the courts against Trump’s war on wind, with offshore wind farms expected to generate six gigawatts of energy by the end of Trump’s term — 34 times the capacity of the 174 megawatts in place when he came to office in January 2025.
How a Road Less Traveled Led to Baseball’s Boys of Summer: Anne Keene reflects on a soulful interview between author Roger Kahn and poet Robert Frost that sparked one of the game’s most human narratives. (Anne Keene, 3/26/20, The Saturday Evening Post)
In 1960 The Boys of Summer author Roger Kahn was in his early 30s when he drove along backroads bordering streams in the Green Mountains to spend the afternoon with New England poet Robert Frost. When the sportswriter reached the end of a dirt road, he got out of his car and walked up a hill to Frost’s cabin, where he lived alone, from May until the leaves changed in the fall, when the poet returned to Cambridge.
At the time, Kahn was a celebrated sportswriter who covered the Brooklyn Dodgers for the Herald Tribune in the early 1950s. He based The Boys of Summer on players such as Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, Pee Wee Reese, Preacher Rowe, Carl Erskine, and Roy Campanella. Twenty years after his Boys retired, Kahn caught up with his middle-aged Boys as they struggled through life.
Kahn had met Frost at the Bread Loaf Writers’ conference at Middlebury College in 1951, where the poet pitched to the writer in a summer baseball game with the spine of the Green Mountains in the background. It was there, on that grassy field, when a love for America’s Pastime connected two artists who appreciated the delicate, often brutal plight of the aging athlete.
The World Series was a month away when the 86-year-old snow-headed poet greeted Kahn, wearing blue slacks and a ragged gray sweater. With a face as weathered as the mountain, Frost cut a strapping agrarian frame from years of laboring behind a plow, and daily hikes through the woods, where he conjured phrases about the road less traveled.
The Saturday Evening Post’s “A Visit with Robert Frost” interview drew a response that stunned both Kahn and Frost. Hundreds of letters poured into the magazine from readers. Many enclosed the November 19th feature, asking Kahn to autograph it because they knew he captured Frost in his purest form toward the end of his life.
How Right-Wing Politics Make You Physically Ill (Kristen French, May 29, 2026, Nautilus)
A team of scientists found that conservative Americans got measurably less healthy than liberal Americans over the course of the 2010s. By the early 2020s they were dying at significantly higher rates, even setting aside COVID-19 deaths. They also ran a separate large survey, in 2024, of more than 21,000 people and found that right-leaning Americans—especially Republicans and Trump voters—are less likely to trust their doctors, follow medical advice, and seek care when they probably should.
It isn’t just about COVID vaccines. It extends to medications for chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension, and to willingness to go to the doctor for chest pain.