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)
Talking cures: A psychologist chronicles an evolving profession (Nick Haslam, 4 September 2026, Inside Story)
Without being reductive, Ayan shows how the temperament of therapy’s pioneering thinkers manifests in their preferred approach to treatment. The tough-minded advocate rigour, the tender-minded heal with empathy, conservatives tighten up their patients and radicals loosen them down.
Monkey-Man Mystery Explained (Tuhin Singh, September 2, 2026, Skeptic)
Pareidolia also has a higher chance of occurring when individuals are isolated, and thus under high amounts of stress. Deprivation, whether of food, or oxygen, or even shelter, can exacerbate symptoms, as we are forced to look around more for external support, or to fear that which we cannot see. Interestingly, pareidolia is affected by cultural contexts. If one sees a monkey-like creature for example, whether it is naked or clothed, whether it can speak or not, whether it is malevolent or benevolent, is decided by the social-cultural environment in which the brain has been conditioned.
Another aspect to keep in mind is that instances of pareidolia are self-reinforcing. Once a creature gets spotted, the reports of its sighting get implanted in the minds of other observers, who may thus end up seeing the creature themselves, even if they didn’t believe in the initial reporting and dismissed it as a hoax. The mere implantation of an idea is incredibly impactful upon an impressionable, desperate, and lonesome individual, and has led to multiple cases of mass hysteria, or more technically, Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI). Pareidolia is one of the most fascinating cases of our minds misconstruing things because we always see creatures that are almost human enough, but lie right in the uncanny valley of uncomfortable recognition. Isolated from society, we wish to see figures similar to ours, but something always feels awry.
Israel Isn’t Debating a Palestinian State. It’s Preparing for Expulsion: Gadi Eisenkot’s position on Palestinian statehood is beside the point. Across Gaza, the West Bank and Israel itself, the machinery for making Palestinian life impossible is already operating, laying the groundwork for mass expulsion (Amira Hass, 9/01/26, Ha’aretz)
The debate over one state, two states or a federation is more theoretical than ever. Any agreed-upon solution requires first acknowledging the problem and agreeing on what it is. Too many Jews in Israel have been conditioned to believe that the problem is the very presence in this land of a Palestinian people with roots, historical and economic continuity, cultural capital and material assets, a rich agricultural heritage and a profound love of homeland.
“Erasure” is the nightmare solution being written into reality every day. Knesset laws, politicians’ declarations, military orders, school textbooks and the holy real estate battalions operating in Gaza, the West Bank and the Negev all work, together and separately, to advance this “solution” diligently and without fear of international condemnation.
There is nothing mnore anti-Semitic than exempting Israel from Judeo-Christian moral standards.
He Warned That the End of History Could Be Rough. Maybe Now People Will Listen.:
Francis Fukuyama’s famous take on the post-Cold War world was widely misunderstood. In a new memoir, he tries to set the record straight. (Jennifer Szalai, Aug. 31, 2026, NY Times)
In the last five chapters of his book, which hardly anyone seemed to read or remember, Fukuyama predicted that boredom and restlessness could fuel a rage against the establishment machine.
More than three decades later, restlessness and rage are everywhere, and Fukuyama, at 73, is still trying to make himself understood. On Sept. 8, Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish “In the Realm of the Last Man,” a memoir. As the title suggests, Fukuyama is doubling down, pushing back against what he derides as “these stupid, superficial interpretations of the end of history” that caricatured him as a naïve Pollyanna. He sees the current plight of liberal democracy not as a rebuke to his earlier work but as a vindication. The “last men” of our age grew so restive that they fell for populist demagogues who convinced them everything was rotten — “an outcome,” he says, “that was perfectly predictable more than 30 years ago.”
One of the reasons 9/11 was so thrilling was because Islamicism at least presented a challenge. But W and Obama dispatched it without asking much (not enough?) of us.
Suppose a presidential candidate treated eliminating the national debt and reforming the welfare state as the equivalent of the moon landings? He’d have to guarantee that everyone’s ox was going to get gored: not just budget cuts but getting rid of tax breaks; Means-testing all social programs; etc. An ideal candidate would offer a plan that his own party bitched about. This would foster some sense of shared sacrifice and treat the problem (even if it is aesthetic rather than economic) with a seriousness that folks could rally round. And the numbers have grown so big that folks could believe it a superhuman challenge.
Suicidal hostility and the fall of the American empire: The price of paranoid conservatism (Nick Cohen, Aug 28, 2026, Writings from London)
In ways I do not believe most of us have grasped yet the perverse logic of paranoid conservatism leads Trump to embrace the West’s enemies, and leads Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen to do the same.
If you believe your allies are cheats, who have been ripping off honest Americans since 1945 with one-sided trade deals and defence alliances, what then of America’s actual enemies?
If America’s allies are “the worst countries in the world”, the countries that genuinely are the world’s worst cannot be so bad.
Suicidal hostility turns friends into enemies and enemies into friends. Just as the man who insists that benefit claimants are cheats whitewashes the behaviour of sweatshop employers so the superpower that insists its allies are swindlers, whitewashes the behaviour of its enemies.
China is secretly fueling America’s data center rage (Josephine Walker, 8/26/26, Axios)
Roughly 200 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm have quietly tried to influence Americans to oppose AI data centers on social media, X said Thursday night.
These Generals Fought for Israel. Now They See ‘Jewish Terrorism’ as the Threat. (Azam Ahmed, Natan Odenheime, Ronen Bergman, Aug. 31, 2026, NY Times)
“This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply,” Ephraim Sneh, a retired brigadier general and former minister of health, said of Israeli settlers’ attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.
Asaf Agmon, a retired Air Force general, went even further, comparing it to what some Israelis’ forebears endured in the Holocaust — not in the scale of the violence, he explained, but in the effort to erase the Palestinian presence from much of the West Bank.
“Once a society behaves this way,” he said, “that society is doomed.”
For Many Americans, Covid Is Still a Chronic, Disabling Disease. These Scientists Are Working Tirelessly to Bring Them Relief (Mike Mariani, September/October 2026, Smithsonian)
The PLRC and other like-minded groups have outlined more than 200 associated symptoms, including fatigue, muscle weakness, joint pain, sore throat, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, memory issues and post-exertional malaise…
At least pretend it’s physical.
Football Conquered the United States. Now It Wants to Conquer Global Football: Can the U.S. ambition to conquer football on a global scale and to remake the game in American style be stopped? (George Courmouzis and Stephan Richter, 8/30/26, The Globalist)
The U.S. has done something similar, and arguably better, on the women’s side. It was essentially the key driver of the launch of women’s soccer.
U.S. universities’ varsity teams played a major role in bringing women’s soccer from a total sideshow to a significant sports activity, first nationally and then globally.
Spain may currently hold the World Cup in both the men’s and women’s game, but the U.S. tops the all-time list on the women’s side, with four Women’s World Cups.
And it is the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) that has turned that record into the world’s most valuable platform for the women’s professional game.
Just consider that Denver’s 2026 home opener drew over 63,000 fans, a number few European women’s clubs could dream of.
Whatever else the info of American money may do to football, it has done more than any other market to make the women’s professional game a going financial concern.
The game is only understood because American sabremetrics have been applied to it.
Dolly’s theology was love (Brandon Ambrosino, August 28, 2026, Christian Century)
There’s a certain kind of Christian for whom faith begins with an exam (and doesn’t grow much beyond that). Their salvation depends on getting theological answers correct: Is the Son co-eternal with the Father? Does God’s knowledge of the future jeopardize human’s free will? Are the original copies of Scripture free from error?
But there are Christians who are not that concerned about these questions and nevertheless have decided to follow Jesus. Christians like, you know, the first generations of Jesus’s followers. To them, following Jesus meant trusting the God he trusted, meant continuing his ministry to the sick and the poor, meant never giving their complete allegiance to an earthly ruler, meant hoping for God’s future. I think this is the kind of Christian Dolly was. It’s the kind of person Jesus was—the kind of person he calls his followers to become.
I’m a theologian. I’m paid to overthink nebulous, inside-baseball theological ideas, ones that most of Jesus’s followers haven’t heard about and probably wouldn’t ever care to discuss. I think theology is important. Theology is a gift to the church and the world the church is called to serve. But when I start to get bigheaded about my job, as if I’m part of an exclusive group that has been nominated by God to protect Christianity, I’m forced to remind myself that Jesus decided to build God’s kingdom with fishermen and sex workers, that he preferred to tell simple stories without opening a textbook, and that his God will not be bound by my ideas even when power-wielding, self-authorizing groups of educated people call them “orthodox” and “canonical.”
He eventually made His own theology rather easy to comprehend, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.”