Amazing that she’s never heard of him, though admittedly Henrich emphasizes ideas unwelcome in today’s academy—that the West’s historical advantage (which itself would be disputed by most leftist professors these days) grew out of the medieval Church’s teaching on marriage and family, which shattered clans and banned cousin marriage, and built a social world based on nuclear families and voluntary associations. The psychology that developed, Henrich maintains, was individualistic, stranger-trusting, rule-following, and patient, and made markets work and innovation explode. Rob’s excellent essay on Henrich’s opus WEIRD (a book that won the 2022 Hayek Prize) explores these themes.

From Chicago’s Hyde Park to D.C.’s Navy Yard to beaches and malls coast to coast, marauding mobs, mostly made up of black youth, are commandeering streets, looting stores, assaulting officers, and turning public spaces into zones of chaos. Social media summon these mobs; various progressive excuses, from supposed poverty to the purported lack of safe spaces, enable them. Here’s Heather Mac Donald with our thickly reported cover story from the forthcoming City Journal on the scourge of teen takeovers and what it will take to restore order.

The DSA was once a debating group of aging Harringtonites—mostly harmless. Then came the big-tent radicals—Leninists, Maoists, Third Worldists, Hamas apologists—who seized it through entryism, relentless purity tests, and character assassination. Now the same disciplined networks are capturing the Democratic Party, says former DSA member Jake Altman. The Democrats’ choice, he believes, is is stark: out-organize these extremists and shut them down, or surrender to them. Walter Reuther once beat the Communists in the UAW by exposing them and building a democratic coalition. Maybe Democrat leaders need to revisit that history. Accommodation with the new radicals is suicide. Altman:

The Democratic Socialists of America are increasingly a vehicle for hardcore Marxists. At the DSA’s 2025 convention, as the indefatigable Stu Smith reports, a “coalition of Communist caucuses” seized a majority on the party’s National Political Committee. They repealed the existing ban on Leninist “democratic centralism,” backed a Maoist with a soft spot for revolutionary bloodletting on a security commission, and narrowly passed an amendment calling to get rid of the US presidency and Supreme Court for bodies subordinate to Congress. Media outlets scoff at the “Communist” label, but the facts are there: self-described Marxists, Marxist-Leninists, and Maoists now have top positions in America’s largest socialist group. The DSA represents a radical faction with expanding influence in our politics. It’s not a good development, and needs to be stopped. Read Stu’s full piece:

It’s worth reading Kōhei Saitō’s Slow Down, a manifesto for the degrowth movement, to get a sense of the destructive telos of this movement. A low-growth world would be a zero-sum world; if abundance is treated as the problem, then politics invariably becomes a fight over resources and control. The humane alternative is more innovation, more agency—and more growth.