“Pope Leo XIII, the leader of the Catholic Church from 1878 to 1903, came to be known as ‘The Pope of the Workers’ because of his groundbreaking 1891 encyclical on the Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, which provided the outline for modern Catholic social justice teaching. Taking its name, Rerum Novarum, from the Latin phrase for ‘of revolutionary change,’ the encyclical recognized that a ‘remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.’ With its embrace of trade unionism and its sharp critiques of capitalism, the encyclical was a transformational message for its time. It did not embrace socialism, as the former pope explained. But its championing of the labor movement and condemnation of robber-baron abuses resonate to this day. So it was notable indeed that Robert Francis Prevost, the Chicago-born Augustinian priest who served for many years as the Bishop of Chiclayo in Peru, chose to take the name Pope Leo XIV when he was proclaimed as the 268th leader of the Catholic Church on Thursday. As Dr. Sr. Gemma Simmonds CJ, the past president of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain, was quick to point out, the new pope’s name can be read as an association of his papacy with that of ‘the great champion of the poor, the great builder of Catholic social teaching.’ Former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a devout Catholic, made a similar observation, writing, ‘For many of us, the name Leo XIV happily brings to mind Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, which was a blessing for working people.’” (John Nichols/The Nation)
“Right after the news broke that Robert Francis Prevost was elected as the new pope of the Roman Catholic Church, the internet produced lots of evidence that he has promoted articles critical of JD Vance and Donald Trump, and even expressed sympathy for George Floyd. That prompted MAGA figures to erupt in anger. They attacked the new pope as anti-Trump, pro–open borders, a Marxist, and soft on thugs and drug dealers, as Media Matters documented. We talked to the excellent political theorist Matt McManus, who was raised in the church and regularly wrestles with the intellectual roots of today’s right wing, including in his 2023 book, The Political Right and Equality. He explains what Vance gets wrong about Catholic teaching, why it’s so inimical to Trumpism, and how today’s pro-Trump influencers and ‘post-liberal’ Catholic intellectuals alike are refusing to reckon with what MAGA has truly become. Listen to this episode here.” (Greg Sargent/TNR)
“India and Pakistan are once again at each other’s throats. Following a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir on April 22, New Delhi launched coordinated attacks this week that struck deeper into Pakistani territory than at any point in the last five decades. Islamabad is now threatening to retaliate. An optimistic reading of the situation could be that this has all happened before: The two rivals fought full-scale wars in 1947-48, 1965, and 1971 and have engaged in several major skirmishes since the 1990s, when they declared themselves as nuclear powers. In each case, and especially since enjoying the shield of a nuclear deterrent, the two nations found ways to eventually pull back and accept a stalemate over the disputed territory of Kashmir. There is a more worrying prospect this time around. The world in 2025 looks very different than it did before: The United States appears disinterested in new foreign wars, major powers are tied up in conflicts on other continents, and multilateral organizations such as the United Nations have seen their credibility erode. As a result, international mediation that was instrumental in years past now seems less meaningful. India and Pakistan have also followed sharply different trajectories since their last serious conflict in 1999. At the turn of the millennium, India’s GDP was about five times that of Pakistan. Today, it is nearly 11 times larger. Greater economic clout has not led to a commensurate military advantage for India, but it has fanned a heady confidence among its citizens, along with a clamor for action. Israel’s overwhelming response to the Oct. 7, 2023, attack led by Hamas has also strengthened New Delhi’s assessment that other powers can’t—or won’t—stop it from exercising its right to defend itself. In Pakistan, meanwhile, the usually quiet army chief, Asim Munir, has become increasingly public-facing, suggesting a military climbdown may be more difficult to accomplish.” (Ravi Agrawal/FP)
“Jamie Roberts was at home in Wrangell, Alaska, in November 2023, when she heard what sounded like a jet overhead. Her first thought was that an Alaska Airlines flight was about to crash—but this was no plane. It was the roar of mud, rocks, and trees barreling down the mountain, smashing through homes and swallowing the island’s only highway. The landslide Roberts observed killed six Wrangell residents and severed access to power, internet, and roadways for weeks. Throughout the crisis, she and others in the community relied on the local radio station, KSTK, for emergency information, rescue coordination, updates from local officials, and advice on accessing essential services. ‘Radio was critical,’ Roberts said. ‘It was our lifeline.’” (Andrew Mercein/CJR)
“I grew up with Erica Jong everywhere—on television, in the crossword puzzle, in the newspaper. She was a kind of second-wave feminist, a white feminist, and (a highly educated, wildly affluent, Jewish, and somewhat out-of-touch) Everywoman. But she wasn’t an actual Everywoman, of course; she was too famous for that. Too famous, and too special. She was famous for her book Fear of Flying, and then later she was famous for being famous, and then eventually she wasn’t famous anymore. Because fame, like youth, is fleeting; it deserts you when you least expect it. The wheel of fortune is always spinning. My mother never got over being famous. Even years after people stopped coming up to us in stores, even years after she slipped from the public consciousness, the virus of fame had made her someone different. Becoming normal like the rest of us, the journey to unfamousness, was for her an event so strange and stressful, so damaging to her ego, that she was never able to process it … My grandfather was a best-selling author who published more than 80 books, but now no one—other than a very narrow subset of the elderly—has heard of him. I never knew my mother or grandfather in the height of their respective fames, but I did know them at the end, when they were desperately trying to claw fame back from the writers who, they believed, had taken it from them.” (Molly Jong-Fast/VF)
“The library of the so-called Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum contained hundreds of ancient literary works when the Roman city was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius in a.d. 79. The eruption left the papyrus scrolls in charred carbonized bundles that archaeologists discovered in the eighteenth century. They have been much too delicate for experts to open, but recent technological advances are now allowing researchers to virtually unroll some of them. The Guardian reports that new X-ray scans of a scroll known as P.Herc.172, which currently resides in the collection of Oxford University’s Bodleian Libraries, were able to detect ink lettering for the first time that revealed the name of an ancient author and the title of the work. Researchers were able to make out the name Philodemus, a Greek Epicurean philosopher who lived in the first century b.c. The written text contained on the scroll seems to be part of his 10-volume work On Vices, which covers topics such as greed, arrogance, and flattery. This was an incredible breakthrough and the researchers believe many more such discoveries could come soon given advances in technology. ‘The pace is ramping up very quickly,’ said papyrologist Michael McOsker.” (Archaeology)
“By far the loudest economic complaint against the Biden administration was about inflation. A May 2024 poll from Pew found 62 percent of adults rating it as a ‘very big problem,’ the highest of any issue and 37 percentage points higher than unemployment. President Biden was blamed for this, and the discontent undoubtedly dragged down Kamala Harris’s campaign. In many ways, this was unfair. Economic analyses show that most of the inflation stemmed from pandemic-era disruptions and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; practically every country in the world saw similar price trends. And the policy that did fuel price increases somewhat, Biden’s American Rescue Plan mega-stimulus, also ended up stemming inflation by allowing the American economy to bust through supply bottlenecks with increased production thanks to high demand. By mid-2024, inflation was nearly back to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target. The U.S. economy was envied around the world as having achieved the mythical ‘soft landing,’ with inflation having been whipped without a recession or high unemployment. So it’s a sad irony that Donald Trump’s deranged tariff policies are leading to price hikes across the economy—and this time, we almost certainly will not have the red-hot Biden labor market to compensate for the rises in price. Despite the inflation, real incomes actually increased between 2021 and 2024, particularly for low-income workers. This time around, however, a recession is building on the horizon. Prices will go up as people lose their jobs and incomes fall. Tariffs can lead to price increases in a number of ways. Most obviously, an importer facing a new tax on their goods is going to pass that cost on to the customer if they possibly can. To what degree they can do that will vary based on profit margins, market competition, and other factors, but in general the customer will take most of the hit.” (Ryan Cooper/TAP)
“President Trump's venture into crypto products has increased his family's wealth by billions in the last six months, according to a new report, as his administration continues to loosen the federal government's regulatory approach to the digital currency industry as a whole. The group State Democracy Defenders Action estimated in a new report that the president's crypto holdings now represent nearly 40% of his net worth — or approximately $2.9 billion. That increase is due in part to his release of the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, in addition to a large stake in World Liberty Financial, a crypto exchange affiliated with the Trump family that launched in October 2024. State Democracy Defenders Action identifies itself as non-partisan, but it is overseen by frequent critics of President Trump, with an agenda focused on ‘the autocratic threat to our nation.’ The president's net worth is expected to get another bump, with World Liberty Financial's announcement this week that a Abu Dhabi-backed firm will invest billions of dollars in the Trump family-affiliated crypto fund. The Emirati firm, MGX, will purchase $2 billion in a stablecoin product offered by World Liberty, the company said in a statement to CBS. The currency, called ‘USD1’ will then be used to invest in Binance, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges. World Liberty has ties to the president and his sons. The fine print on the company's website says an entity affiliated with Mr. Trump and his family members own a 60% stake in the company. According to the company's public reports, a Trump family entity also holds 22.5 billion of the $WLF tokens –- and takes an additional 75% in net revenue from future token purchases.” (Madeleine May and Jo Ling Kent/CBS News)
“The name of the book is a ruse. Camping on Low or No Dollars, the dingy cover page reads. An older edition bears a similarly anodyne title: From Birmingham to Wendover. Both are a misdirection, intended to keep the wrong people—cops, journalists, nosy normies like me—from realizing what they’re holding. The Crew Change Guide is a set of best practices and guidelines for hopping freight trains anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. A ‘crew change’ refers to a train’s personnel shift, a brief window of opportunity for those brave enough to take it … The first Crew Change Guide appeared as a partly typed, partly handwritten pamphlet in 1988. The true identity of its author, a reclusive seventy-six-year-old Vietnam veteran known only as Train Doc, is as fiercely protected as the Guide itself. Train Doc disguised his voice for his sole interview, and of the three people I’ve spoken to who claimed to know him, none agreed to go on the record. The most consistent report about him is that he is remarkably litigious—he’s purported to threaten anyone and everyone who uploads the Guide to the internet with copyright infringement. True or not, the document remains conspicuously absent online. It exists only in the physical, and this scarcity has made the Guide a sacred writ to train-hopping circles across the country. Scans have been known to surface on the darknet now and then, and scammers exploit the unmet demand by selling bogus pdfs of blank pages and blurry photographs. Train Doc, however, insists on keeping the Guide free and ‘low profile.’ ‘It is not meant to be sold for more than the price of copying,’ he writes in the introduction. ‘Only give copies to riders who will be responsible.’ There are other texts in this misfit family (I’ll call them folk texts, for lack of a better term), though by definition they’re not easily discovered. The Israeli Traveler’s Book is perhaps the most organic and decentralized example. A sort of unofficial Green-Book for Jews, it served to identify safe, unprejudiced restaurants, bars, and hostels in Latin America in an age before Google Reviews. That’s the primary purpose of a folk text: to pass from hand to hand the secret knowledge of the marginalized and the outcast. Many of our ancient scriptures, including parts of the Bible, would once have fit this description.” (Jeremiah David/The Paris Review)
“Kosmos 482, a Soviet-era spacecraft shrouded in Cold War secrecy, will reenter the Earth's atmosphere in the next few days after misfiring on a journey to Venus more than 50 years ago. On average, a piece of space junk the size of Kosmos 482, with a mass of about a half-ton, falls into the atmosphere about once per week. What's different this time is that Kosmos 482 was designed to land on Venus, with a titanium heat shield built to withstand scorching temperatures, and structures engineered to survive atmospheric pressures nearly 100 times higher than Earth's. So, there's a good chance the spacecraft will survive the extreme forces it encounters during its plunge through the atmosphere. Typically, space debris breaks apart and burns up during reentry, with only a small fraction of material reaching the Earth's surface. The European Space Agency, one of several institutions that track space debris, says Kosmos 482 is ‘highly likely’ to reach Earth's surface in one piece.” (Stephen Clark/Ars Technica)
“U.S. officials have interviewed white South Africans seeking refugee status about their troubles with land disputes, crime and perceived racism, while refugees from other countries are being deported or barred from the United States. Some of the South African applicants have taken part in a first round of interviews in Pretoria, three of them told Reuters, describing positive encounters with U.S. officials who seemed well disposed towards them and their accounts of persecution. More than 30 applicants have already been approved, according to a person familiar with the matter. ‘The staff at the embassy were exceptionally friendly,’ said Mark, a South African farmer who did not wish his family name to be published as the process is confidential. ‘I could feel they had empathy.’ The U.S. administration and embassy in Pretoria declined to comment or give numbers of interviews and approvals. U.S. President Donald Trump issued a February 7 executive order that called for the U.S. to resettle Afrikaner refugees. It said Afrikaners, who are descendants of mostly Dutch early settlers, were ‘victims of unjust racial discrimination.’” (Reuters)
But what about all the good things -- the hospitals, the charity, the care of the elderly -- that they do in the world?