■ Now, we are contending diplomatically with one of our own, but one who draws upon moral authority beyond national reach. He cannot be “otherized”, and that creates an unprecedented circumstance, particularly when politicians want to provoke fights with him.

■ For a variety of reasons, including the flattening of global culture via the Internet and the decay of many of our social and civic institutions, Americans have to some extent lost touch with the idea of institutions that are strong enough to serve as independent wellsprings of moral authority. The Church did itself no favors in this regard with its clergy abuse scandals.

■ Things seem different, though, under Pope Leo XIV, as though a rebuilding process started under his predecessor has begun to gain traction. And it challenges Americans in particular to look and not only witness the importance of drawing personal identity from many overlapping and interacting sources, but also to look for people speaking in our own times whose authority comes from someplace other than government.

■ The former Gannett Co. (now USA Today Co.) is right on the verge of getting 50% of its revenues from digital advertising and subscriptions. Newspapers were notoriously reluctant to embrace digital models because classic print advertising was such a cash cow for so long.

■ But the numbers leave little room for alternate interpretations: The “paper” part is no longer the defining feature of a “newspaper”. A portion of this really does represent a real cultural loss, since information isn’t just carried by the content of the news stories alone. The layout of a paper, with its embedded cues about where stories rank, is an artifact that offers meaning to historians, among others.

■ And the archival role played by a print edition of a newspaper is noteworthy, too, since old Internet links die out all the time. These sentimental and academic values of newspapers aren’t enough to justify extraordinary interventions, but they’re worth noting. As digital content continues its relentless march across the landscape, the subtle consequences are worth occasional note, as well.

■ Speculation runs rampant that this will be the trigger to put many marginally sustainable colleges and universities out of business. Another trend, though, might offer a map to one possible way out.

■ As Ben Sasse remarked in his insightful interview with “60 Minutes”, lifelong learning hasn’t been the model for higher education, but it’s exactly the model the American public needs. Not exclusively for career purposes, but not exclusive of those purposes, either.

■ Lots of things -- perhaps too many -- are being converted from goods that are purchased once and used indefinitely into services that come with a recurring subscription model. But higher education should be able to serve two concurrent purposes: The signaling effect of a diploma remains as valuable as ever and it isn’t going away, but the future may well belong to those institutions that can offer a sort of perpetual renewal plan -- like a lifetime warranty on the actual learning content.

■ We have community colleges already, often very prudently focused on accessible delivery of highly practical learning. We need more community-centric universities, where a social compact can be fulfilled between scholars and the public. Students can and should graduate, of course, but it should become normalized for them to return after graduation to round out their learning, brush up on forgotten skills, and get brought up to speed on the state of the art. The community of learners needs to move beyond the student body as a bunch of four-year vagrants and evolve into a persistent, life-long relationship.

■ The community should see the necessity of its role in financially sustaining the community-centric university as one half of the social compact, while the scholars need to see their mirroring obligation to look after the intellectual well-being of the community by keeping the people well-informed. What precise form that should take is up for reasonable debate, if only because it really hasn’t been tried before. But if the problems are as significant as they appear to be, we need to find the energy to start experimenting with solutions -- and without delay.

■ In light of these many imperfections, people have choices to make. Some remain indifferent, some become incensed (and revel in the anger), and others get to work doing things to bring about change. The enduring problem with change is in making it stick: As anyone who has ever tried to correct a bad habit knows, it’s easier to uncover a fault than to hold tight to a plan that makes it go away.

■ The astute observer learns to tell the differences among the different types of people by paying attention to whether they fixate on desired results or invest their energies into finding a reasonable path. A youthful questioner at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting lodged an accusatory barrage at company leadership, demanding to know when the company (which owns lots of electric utility subsidiaries) would cease all use of coal out of fear of global warming.

■ The real answer, of course, is that while electrical generation from coal is less than ideal from the perspective of carbon pollution, one of the major shifts underway is a broad move towards electrification -- particularly in areas like automobiles. In other words, to get rid of combustion-engine pollution, choices are being made to create greater demand for electricity.

■ And while the electrical generation mix in the United States has been swinging massively towards a mix of natural gas and renewable sources, we haven’t solved certain large problems like battery storage well enough to rely solely on renewables -- and nuclear power still faces big hurdles with regulators and public opinion. There’s no way to eliminate carbon-based fuels overnight. To get from the present to a better future, we have to go through a very long and imperfect “in-between”.

■ In the words of Teddy Roosevelt, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” But it’s hard to communicate that to people who fixate single-mindedly on a destination without seeking to answer “How will we get there from where we are now?”. Youthful passion doesn’t always see this, but sober-minded adults need to teach them the way.

■ As Margaret Thatcher once reminded the leaders of Poland’s Solidarity movement, one must always ask, “How do you see the process from where you are now to where you want to be?“. To do without only condemns us to frustration and escalation.

■ The force posture of a country isn’t a perfect analog to how one walks down a darkened street at night, it’s not really that far different. Walking with confidence is a way to dare others to put up or shut up.

■ Due to some intemperate remarks by Germany’s chancellor, the Pentagon has decided to remove 5,000 troops from German soil within a year. It’s not a strategic plan; it’s a political reaction.

■ The right number of troops to have in Germany may be more or less than the number there right now. But as a matter of body language, a withdrawal right now -- with Russia shamelessly menacing the European continent -- looks like slouching. It may not exactly represent an invitation to trouble, but it definitely doesn’t look like an energetic display of confidence.

■ Parenting can be difficult, exhausting work. As the saying goes, “Long nights, short years.” But parenting is also something that humans have been doing as long as there have been humans. And if there’s one thing that makes our species truly extraordinary, it’s the capacity for complex speech. Speech, in turn, becomes the basis for reading and writing, and the written word unlocks the most powerful way to make ourselves far more intelligent than the limitations of our biological brains. Every book, library, and website becomes accessible, retrievable storage for knowledge that we can borrow without having to remember.

■ Good parenting does involve storytelling -- at bedtime, to teach lessons, or merely to pass the time. And, it turns out, a whole lot of stories have already been written not just to put kids to sleep but to teach them worthwhile lessons: Aesop’s fables, to name just one family of examples.

■ We, as parents, don’t have to make up everything from scratch, nor rely on LLMs to do the imagining for us. Human nature being what it is, stories have always been a part of parenting, so there are innumerable resources containing stories already written down for us. It may sound like cleverness to turn to artificial intelligence to “write” bespoke bedtime stories, but it’s a misapplication of the tools, like trying to drive an Indycar to pick up groceries.

■ Great stories have already been written! Moreover, becoming familiar with some of the canonical stories is an important part of social knowledge -- we need stories, metaphors, and lessons to hold in common. To be able to say something in shorthand like “tortoise and hare” and have it convey real information is a meaningful part of development. Customizable, single-serving bedtime stories might be fine for the occasional change of pace, but the vast library of pre-existing works should routinely get the first look.

■ At first, this seems paradoxical: If excessive rain is falling from the sky, why should conservation be on anyone’s mind? Most surpluses don’t result in requests to cut back on consumption.

■ The reason is that the MWRD isn’t charged with managing the supply side of water, but rather the post-consumption disposal of it. And because Chicago got an early start on installing sewers (it was the overflow automatically into the rivers. The less that flows in, the lower the chances of those untreated waste overflows.

■ Thus, what sounds completely backwards at first makes a great deal of sense upon further examination. It’s a lesson well worth learning and keeping close to the heart, especially in modern times. Modernity has begotten increased complexity in nearly every aspect of life.

■ The impulse to seek out quick and simplistic answers may come to us very naturally, but we have to be eternally vigilant not to let that impulse keep us from giving a fair hearing to more complex explanations that might land closer to the truth.

■ It’s a valuable skill to be able to take complex matters and distill them for easier understanding. But it’s a shame to be so stubborn and intellectually lazy as to refuse to consider that sometimes right answers are the exact opposites of what our instincts would tell us.

■ It can be much more valuable for professionals to donate their efforts to a cause rather than donating cash, but because nobody in those non-profit institutions is compelled (for deductibility reasons) to be conscious of the billable rates those professionals charge in the marketplace, they risk overlooking just how valuable those in-kind service donations really are.

■ There may be no task more important for non-profit managers to undertake than making it as easy as possible for high-value experts to donate their time for maximum efficient impact. Someone capable of donating services with a market price of $250 an hour shouldn’t be directed to spend their time on $10 an hour work (unless they really want to do it). Knowing the array of skills and talents available to an institution and making the maximally efficient use of them is as important as fundraising -- and perhaps even more important.

■ Significantly, though, the other thing non-profit managers should do is concentrate heavily on making every meeting, training session, and report as efficient as possible. People with valuable skills tend to be conscious of the value of their time, and wasting that time on poorly-organized board meetings, webinars, strategy sessions, and workshops isn’t just disrespectful: It deters high-value volunteers from volunteering.

■ The best thing anyone can do when leading a group of volunteers is to create an environment that is friendly to participation by people who don’t have trouble finding better things to do. The best volunteers aren’t looking for ways to burn up spare time; they’re the ones juggling other obligations because their worth is widely-recognized. Good organizational management values this in volunteers and invests tirelessly in making sure their experiences aren’t just superficially pleasant, but really look like the best use of highly-sought-after time.

■ It’s funny how status remains a thing that even ultra-rich people feel compelled to chase -- at least, most of them. Money does have diminishing marginal utility: There are only so many hamburgers one person can eat. But esteem matters to us all, and mortality cannot be escaped indefinitely. As Buffett has said, “I mean, I can buy anything I want, basically, but I can’t buy time.”

■ There are two sets of people whom the rest of us should regard with great wariness: One is the cluster who confidently pronounce things like “Billionaires shouldn’t exist”. They arrive at this conclusion by making the indefensible logical leap that great wealth can only be accumulated by some “at the expense of everyone else”. This absurd conclusion is easily dismissed by a simple thought experiment: If someone were to discover a cure for some dreadful disease, like pediatric leukemia, then how much would be too much to reward them? Surely an achievement like that would be worth a reward equal to $3 per resident of the United States, and even if it took a special tax assessment to accumulate such a jackpot, it would be a morally just reward. Some merit most certainly can and should be rewarded at scale.

■ The other people to be avoided are the ultra-wealthy who disregard their fundamental involvement in society. As the Communist Party of China seems intent on reminding its wealthiest subjects, money can only buy so much if the government doesn’t respect the dignity of the individual.

■ Wealth can’t be aggregated very well by exploitation. Some powerful crooks can capture a lot, but there is far more room within a free economy for lots of people to gain massive wealth by delivering goods or services that other people want. And when they do, if they’ve been raised right, they’ll see the virtue in considering generosity to be a luxury good worth spending upon.

■ This may be one of the key reasons why the present feels unusually disorienting. In the past, unless your friend happened to be a daily newspaper columnist, you generally had to solicit a specific opinion, ask a particular question, or be in an intentional social environment (like a bar) before you’d know what a friend thought about a subject. You might have had a good guess, but there was generally an aspect of “pull” to finding out.

■ Social media turns that on its head and makes many of those exchanges into “push” relationships: You find out because someone shared a meme on Facebook or posted an update on Snapchat. The algorithms involved push the messages even further, doing nothing to moderate the frequency of what you see according to how close you are to the friend or how much you trust them.

■ Into these feeds is also blended a torrent of material from “parasocial friends“, like celebrities and “influencers”. Many have become quite good at activating the responses of friendship for commercial exploitation.

■ The ability to ask friends and trust the response is why it feels like such a transgression when a purported friend tries to monetize a friendship -- or simply lie. Both violations feel plainly wrong in ordinary life, and yet they happen almost constantly over social media. And it doesn’t have to be an intentional lie to have the same friendship-corroding effects: It’s a very normal experience today to see one too many untruths from an acquaintance, whether it’s a political message untethered from reality or an AI-generated video fake shared by a gullible viewer, and conclude that a “friend” really can’t be trusted.

■ That experience, repeated over and over for years on end, is quite enough to undermine the kind of faith we have always needed to make good use of knowledge as a social enterprise. We don’t know how it will resolve in the future, but we can be sure that it is and will remain consequential for as long as these technologies are around as we know them.

■ By now, it is plainly obvious to anyone watching that artificial intelligence tools, as powerful as they are, will be perpetually incapable of some human characteristics. One of those is honor. Honor is a sensibility, rooted in a complex web of feelings like shame, pride, dignity, and duty.

■ Not to put too fine a point on it, but feelings are embodied sensory experiences: No matter how “smart” it appears that a machine has gotten, it is impossible for it to experience feelings. They are biochemical sensations, often involuntary, and not particularly susceptible to intellectual override. If you don’t have the biological architecture of things like a nervous system and a bloodstream, it’s quite impossible to imagine how you could have feelings. (Or, more simply, feelings are impossible for anything without a body to feel them.)

■ Suppose you have put your name on work made up (in this case, quite plainly fabricated) by a machine, in a legal situation where truthfulness counts, and then charged other human beings $2,000 an hour for your supposed labors. You should feel some very strong sensations related to a sense of honor. It’s hard to say at what rate exactly that behavior should stop feeling entirely dishonorable, but $2,000 an hour is definitely well above the threshold.

■ Eagerness to use new tools has never been a sufficient justification for behaving dishonorably. Any technology is only as good or bad as the people using it: A knife can be used to slice bread for the hungry or to commit murder. We do ourselves no favors in forgetting that honor has to play a part in the implementation process. The technology isn’t going to do that work for us -- without feelings of its own, it plainly cannot. And the rest of us must be willing to shame and shun those who abandon honor, no matter how clever or well-paid they appear to be. Honor is a feeling that cannot be synthesized.

■ Nobody seems to learn, the scholars conclude, because moving the Games from site to site keeps anyone from really accumulating useful institutional knowledge. This is no particular shock to anyone who knows about the problems of institutional memory, but it nevertheless seems odd that despite an obvious (and costly) problem and an abundance of opportunity to improve, nobody appears to know quite how to do it. The Games go on, they end up blasting through budgets and cobbling things together in the 11th hour to pull off the event.

■ Institutional memory comes in three forms: Event memories, decision memories, and process memories. Event memories get documented fairly well -- it’s not hard to find photos, videos, and news stories about the last several Olympics. It’s the other two that are much harder. Decision memories explain why one path was chosen over another. Unfortunately, though, even though decision trees aren’t hard to build, the motivation to record them is hard to find (especially if the people making today’s decision don’t expect to have any part in the event two or four years from now).

■ And process memories are similarly hard to get down on paper. A recipe book is really just a collection of many different process memories: How to start with nothing and end up with the creation you wanted. The case may be especially hard with a sui generis kind of institution like the Olympics, but it’s rare even among successful organizations to find well-documented process memories. A few firms do it exceptionally well (Honda, for instance, reputedly sets the gold standard), but in a huge share of cases, people either actively or passively decline to record their process memories because keeping the knowledge locked up between their ears is a form of job security. Fire me, lose my insider knowledge.

■ The authors think the “myopia of learning” that plagues the Olympics is only rectifiable through sweeping reforms (which are unlikely, given the structural incentives involved). But the problem is far more widespread than just with the IOC and host city committees, and it’s fascinating to consider just how obvious the answers are and yet just how few institutions seem equipped to implement them.

■ Forced to make a choice between the two, it's more important to have liberal values without democracy than to have democracy without liberal values. But the idea that they can be cleaved from one another is farcical: Democratic processes are what secure liberal values in place, by ensuring that those who abuse those values can always be tossed from office.

■ It should never come as a surprise to see an undemocratic state building conspicuous projects: They tend to have unchecked access to financial and other resources, aren't bound by the need to persuade voters of the value of a project before the fact, and rely on highly visible project results in order to secure what little consent they actually try to seek from the public. If you can spend lavishly without facing a tax revolt, don't need to win a referendum, and want to look like you're delivering the goods, then you're probably going to build some big things.

■ Pitted against rivals like this, liberalism can't be afraid to be a little bit muscular. Not overbearing, closed-minded, or pushy, but willing to stand up for principle, confident that character really is destiny, just as much for the culture as for the individual. There should be great self-confidence that not only are liberal values like freedom of thought and the dignity of the individual worth protecting on their intrinsic value alone, but that they are also very good sources of the material things well worth having. They are worth promoting from within and protecting from without.

■ Like the other aspects of self-government, the budget depends on us to keep ourselves accountable. It’s not an impossible problem to fix, but the longer we remain utterly undisciplined, the harder the choices required later on to correct the problem.

■ Debt isn’t necessarily bad on its own, nor necessarily is deficit spending -- the key is that we have to overspend (that is, deficit-spend) by less than the rate of growth of the economy. If the deficit is 1% of GDP, but the economy (that is, the GDP) is growing at 2% a year, then the overspending gets eclipsed by growth.

■ But if the deficit spending is 5.8% of GDP and the economy is struggling to grow consistently at a rate of 2%, then it’s pretty obvious we’re on an unsustainable path. (And we shouldn’t believe the fantastic claims that artificial intelligence will lead to unimaginable economic growth, either -- extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence, and that’s not on display yet.)

■ Growth is certainly a huge portion of the solution, but it’s hard to make a really gigantic economy grow fast. And some of the things that cost the most in the national budget are areas that get more expensive faster than the rate of inflation for everything else -- starting first and foremost with health care. We can do better than this, but the discipline deficit is the leading indicator that we’re unlikely to do enough in time.

■ That isn’t a wrong instinct, but it could use a little bit of temperance -- a sensibility, borrowed from Ecclesiastes, that there is a time for all things. Springtime offers the compelling reminder that nature has always had a form of automation, unlikely as that may seem, in the form of perennial plants.

■ While lots of things (including most food crops) need to be planted each year, many plants fall dormant as fall turns to winter, then reawaken -- automatically -- with the return of sunlight, rain, and other resources in the spring. Once planted, perennials “know” when it’s time to come back, even without any cognition.

■ Perennials don’t belong everywhere; they foreclose on practices like crop rotation and letting fields go fallow. Nor do perennials offer all of the same benefits in the same measures as their annual counterparts; if you see a really spectacular flower, there’s a pretty good chance it’s an annual. And many perennials need boundaries, since their ability to keep coming back means they can encroach on other plants if left unchecked for long.

■ The same kinds of lessons, long proven by the trial and error of billions of years of evolution, should be applied to the creations of our own modern making. Automation doesn’t belong everywhere; it may fall short of what rival approaches can do. It may have appealing outputs, but they’re not always going to be better than the work of a focused human. It shouldn’t be rushed into every nook and cranny, since it won’t always be the best fit.

■ It’s easy to be drawn into assuming that every new situation we encounter is really novel, but there are often patterns to recognize in the presence of whatever is new.

■ First, they’re often more filler than substance. She ran quickly? Of course it was “quickly”, she ran. He screamed loudly? It would have been news if the scream was quiet, not loud. Economical writing skips what doesn’t add value.

■ Second, adverbs are unaccountable. Who is to say what is done gracefully, thoughtfully, or mercilessly? The adverb is most often a judgment call. The fewer the subjective statements, the more objective the report.

■ There is one adverb in particular that needs to be struck -- unrelentingly -- from modern news reporting: “Strongly”. Some journalists can’t get enough of it: In just one report, CNN said that the President “strongly criticized Pope Leo XIV”, the Pope “strongly pushed back”, and the Italian minister “strongly denounced the US president’s comments”. Strange that so much strength can result in such weak writing.

■ When an incident can be more truthfully depicted with an adverb, the writer should go right ahead and use it. But an adverb like “strongly” could mean anything from “loudly” to “emphatically” to “thoroughly” to “exhaustively”, all of which might be better adverbs (being more specific than “strongly”), but none of which are necessary...probably. “Strongly” has become a filler word for the clickbait era, and it ought to be retired. Quickly.

■ Putting aside the lamentations for a moment, there’s a really interesting question lurking just beneath the surface: What kinds of books are not being published right now that would entice more people to read them? What would it take to motivate the 52% who read three books or fewer to read just one more this year than last?

■ If an entertainment product has extremely low penetration with 52% of the market, then you have to spend at least a little bit of time asking how much of that is a supply problem.

■ How much of this is a content problem? People will practically crawl over broken glass to get to really great content.

■ How much of this is a modality problem? Are people missing out because they aren’t exposed to audiobooks, e-readers, or phone/tablet-friendly formats?

■ How much of this is an authorship problem? One might think that in the era of “parasocial” relationships with “influencers”, time spent with the right authors would be attractive.

■ How much of this is a style problem? Too many books are too long -- do we need a better booklet/pamphlet economy?

■ There are probably nearly as many reasons why some people don’t read books as there are reasons why others do. We should steer clear of fetishizing any activity, but of all possible leisure activities, reading surely must rank towards the top of the list. Figuring out why it’s passing so many Americans by would be a tremendous service.

■ It’s not uncommon to hear about declining attendance at conventional religious institutions in America (like Catholic and mainline Protestant churches). Some of the change may reflect changing theological commitment, to be sure. But that doesn’t account for the entire decline.

■ Church leaders who are serious about the viability of their ministries need to ask themselves a pointed question: What about the experience has improved meaningfully since the turn of the century? Not on a superficial level, but on a real and human one -- what’s gotten better?

■ Except for cloistered or monastic communities, most churches exist within an extensive surrounding world. In that world, people have experienced some overwhelming changes, from handheld supercomputers to self-driving cars. Many of the changes start with technologies, but they go on to affect behavior -- consider the near-ubiquity of fitness trackers, and how a phrase like “Closing my rings” is full of behavioral meaning.

■ What has gotten better inside the churches? Has the preaching improved? The outreach? The anticipation of needs? The individualized pastoral care? The skillful delivery of charitable community services? The attention to new and difficult ontological questions uncovered by developments like artificial intelligence?

■ If the answer to all of those questions is nothing but a shrug, then that’s the difference between manageable contraction and terminal decline. Most people don’t expect perfection, but they do reasonably expect improvement. It can be incremental, it can be cautious, and it can be mild. But it needs to be something.

■ By their nature, professionalized think tanks tend to be good at establishing provocative claims and putting them in front of policy-makers, so any claim that gets made in a think-tank study should be viewed with appropriate skepticism. But there often is truth in them nonetheless.

■ It’s not that Ontario isn’t rich in absolute, historical, or even most relative terms -- given the choice between being born in Ontario today, Cuba today, or New York in 1926, there’s no doubt that Ontario today wins. But government policies (like taxation) have compounding effects over time: If taxation is too high or investment in public needs is too stingy, then that affects today’s economy with reverberations for many decades to come. And the gap Fraser’s report identifies is growing, which is worrisome.

■ Economic riches alone do not decide whether a place is a good one to live, nor whether it’s a just and decent one. But economic resources do make it much easier to pay for a great number of good and valuable things. Most Americans continue to respect Canadians not just as good neighbors, but as valued partners in any number of endeavors in the world. Our successes are mutual, which doesn’t give us license to boss one another around, but does give us common interest in figuring out what models work best.

■ This matters to public budgets because governments pay for health care in all kinds of ways (Medicare, Medicaid, VA benefits, and health insurance benefits for public-sector workers, to name some of the big ones), and because health care is extremely high-touch (literally and figuratively), many of those health-care costs are bound to grow both in absolute terms and as a share of budgets, irreversibly and indefinitely.

■ The resulting message isn’t very satisfying: “Health care will get better and more expensive as far into the future as you can imagine, taking up more and more of everyone’s budget with no end in sight, but you’ll be OK with it because lots of other things will get better and cheaper, leaving room for you to still feel much richer.” This doesn’t mean efficiency improvements don’t matter in health care -- just that they’re inherently difficult to find.

■ With National Public Health Week drawing to a close, it’s timely to observe that if Baumol was right, then the public health professions are almost certain to grow in importance and consequence -- basically in perpetuity. In statistical terms, our three biggest health victories in the last two centuries have been antibiotics, vaccinations, and safe drinking water, and the latter two are squarely in the public-health domain.

■ Prevention usually costs less than cure, and if we can discover more high-impact tools of prevention, those might be our only ways to put brakes on the growth in health-care spending. The question is: Will the public health professions have the resources, imagination, and credibility necessary to carry that burden?