The U.S. ranks 82nd in refugees per capita. See which countries host the largest refugee populations relative to their size, led by Lebanon and Jordan. visualcapitalist.com/refugee… via @visualcap

The UK just “smashed” its May temperature record… but here’s the part the Met Office conveniently leaves out: The PREVIOUS record was set in 1922. That’s 104 years ago. Long before SUVs, private jets, or modern CO₂ emissions. Heathrow Airport didn’t even exist yet. The area was literally farmland and small villages. So if a 1922 heatwave could produce nearly identical temperatures in a world with ~130 ppm less CO₂, maybe, just maybe, natural variability plays a much bigger role than the panic merchants admit. substack.com/@irrationalfear…

The central lesson is that societies thrive when they cultivate resilience and self-command, and decay when they train citizens to seek moral status through grievance instead of growth. substack.com/@unfashiontruth…

This is the opposite of what we need. If you want accessibility, talk to a chatbot. Human-writing must now distinguish itself from machine-writing by stepping up its game: more complexity, more creativity, more depth. substack.com/@gurwinder/note…

Growth Is Enough, and Only Growth is Enough Lant Pritchett of the London School of Economics and Addison Lewis of Brigham Young University have released a paper with a deceptively simple title: “Economic Growth Is Enough and Only Economic Growth Is Enough.“ Their target is a claim that has become fashionable in development economics: that growth is not sufficient to improve human wellbeing, that targeted programs and redistribution are “equally important,” and that poor countries should worry as much about the distribution of income as its growth. To this effect, Pritchett and Lewis cite a bunch of examples. The executive director of J-PAL, one of the most influential development research organizations in the world, put it baldly in a 2021 op-ed: “growth is not enough.” Yale’s Rohini Pande, director of the Economic Growth Center, wrote that growth “will not be sufficient to eradicate extreme poverty.” open.substack.com/pub/unseen…

Protests are not emotional support groups Minneapolis proved that resistance movements should not be evaluated by the number of people they bring to the streets. Resistance to authoritarianism is not an emotional support group. In Russian, there is a joke about good-hearted but ineffective pro-democracy protesters: “They are for everything good and against everything bad.” A successful anti-authoritarian movement in America will be a movement of people who are ready to make sacrifices. It will not come from a place of comfort. open.substack.com/pub/persua…

What an amazing way to visualize early human migration. Lovely map by @HarvardCGA. A great colour scheme and an appropriate map projection! Source: buff.ly/3lbxonJ

The usual time of eating dinner in Europe. I remember traveling to Spain as a young kid and my German 6pm meal had to wait until 10pm. It was weird. Source: buff.ly/36goiS4

The IRGC does not view war and peace the same way a normal state institution does. It is not simply a military organization defending national borders. Instead, it was created to defend the Islamic Revolution, the Velayat-e Faqih (clerical guardianship), and the regime’s ideological identity. Its mission has always been larger than Iran’s territorial security: it includes exporting the 1979 Islamic revolution, eradicating the State of Israel, confronting the United States, protecting the regime from internal enemies, and reshaping the regional order. open.substack.com/pub/persua…

The IRGC does not view war and peace the same way a normal state institution does. It is not simply a military organization defending national borders. Instead, it was created to defend the Islamic Revolution, the Velayat-e Faqih (clerical guardianship), and the regime’s ideological identity. Its mission has always been larger than Iran’s territorial security: it includes exporting the 1979 Islamic revolution, eradicating the State of Israel, confronting the United States, protecting the regime from internal enemies, and reshaping the regional order.

How did human evolution take place? So every theory is going to have a similar structure: it will posit an initial modification, show how it was adaptive, then explain how it gave rise to a second major trait, then the third, and then finally the fourth. For example, Hariri posits the following sequence: 1. intelligence, 2. language, 3. cooperation, 4. culture. (This is in fact why I presented them in that order. What Harari is adopting here is the traditional order of explanation, which was assumed to be correct for the better part of the 20th century.) Henrich, by contrast, posits the following sequence: 4. culture, 3. cooperation, 2. language, 1. intelligence. This is the exciting hypothesis that has been generating interest and attention over the past few decades. open.substack.com/pub/joseph…

A million seconds ago was about two weeks ago. A billion seconds ago was in 1994, when “Pulp Fiction” was about to open in theaters. What about a trillion seconds?  Whatever number is in your head, you might want to add some millennia—because a trillion seconds ago was back in the Ice Age.  wsj.com/business/trillions-g…

Therapy Is Looking More Like Re-Education Everyday struggles become studies in power, privilege and oppression until patients stop coming. In a recent email from a fellow therapist, I noticed a section below the signature labeled “Social Location.” It identified the sender as “cis, queer, white, Euro-American, middle class, post-evangelical, spiritual but not religious.” In parts of the profession email signatures amount to political personal-identity statements. They also reflect a broader shift in the field toward reinterpreting ordinary human problems through a highly ideological vocabulary. wsj.com/opinion/therapy-is-l…

Europeans coming to America for the World Cup are shocked by our prosperity. A German guy has his mind blown by Buc-ee’s. A Swedish woman is amazed by ranch dressing, says it's "like crack." She claims that the internet on a plane flying over the Rockies is faster than what she has at home. She declares “The U.S.A. has completely radicalized me within 48 hours.” Americans can romanticize Europe all they want. But it's good to have a higher standard of living. And we do, thanks to freer markets and mass migration. 🇺🇸

Headlines today 1963:

crazy stat: "In 2024, 18-to-25-year-olds without a college degree supported Donald Trump, 55 percent to 43 percent. For those with a college degree, it was the opposite; they backed Kamala Harris 56 percent to 43 percent." truly was a vibe shift moment

Important wisdom.

A “Failure of Journalism” in Canada It’s a sobering moment for the Canadian press corps, which is grappling with one of the biggest reporting errors in a generation. Five years ago, on May 27, 2021, Tkʼemlúps te Secwépemc, a First Nation in Western Canada, made an announcement that shocked the country. With the help of ground-penetrating radar, the band said it had “confirmation of the remains of 215 children”—deceased students from the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Kamloops was one of more than 130 largely Catholic Church-run institutions that operated across the country from the 1830s to the 1990s, with documented histories of physical and sexual abuse and, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, at least 3,200 student deaths, many from tuberculosis and influenza. The problem is that Tkʼemlúps had not actually found any remains in 2021—and still has not. What was discovered were ground anomalies, and, so far, the band has not excavated. In fact, the majority of the First Nations that reported potential grave sites have not done so. Late last month, in the leadup to the story’s fifth anniversary, Canada’s paper of record The Globe and Mail finally ventured to ask: “The lowered flags, the vigils, the hundreds of millions in government funding, the national reckoning—what if all of it was dedicated to 215 burials that don’t exist?” open.substack.com/pub/persua…

Signs in Teachers' Classrooms larrycuban.wordpress.com/202… via @CubanLarry

Selective Pressure, Selective Silence However, the Reich study suggests that the Holocene—our current geological epoch, which began approximately 11,700 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age—has not been a period of stasis at all. It has been a furnace of differentiation. Natural selection has been more pervasive, and more recent, than the Gouldian consensus allows. Psychological and cognitive traits long assumed to be universal can no longer, it seems, be cordoned off from the evolutionary processes that shaped skin colour, disease resistance, or lactose tolerance. These traits vary by population history. And while folk categories of race remain crude and biologically imprecise, the broader claim—that evolution somehow stopped at the neck—is becoming increasingly untenable. quillette.com/2026/06/10/sel…