A Dozen-Plus Stimulants, Gathered for Your Edification and Inspiration
Dear Intelligent American,
Whether at the church parking lot or outside the supermarket or anywhere there’s asphalt and stripes of paint, there seems to be a growing number of Americans who simply can not / will not park their cars between those big, bloated white lines. Why? Ignorance? Obtuseness? Laziness? Maliciousness? The chain reaction the haphazardry sets off has got to prove some Einstein protocol, or at least chaos theory.
Then there are the I’ll-park-wherever-I-want types (tough guys camped in handicap spots, knuckleheads stealing the corner space reserved for those needing access to the tire-air doohickey, malcontents plopped in the fire lane), first cousins to the parking-disabled. Should bets be taken that at the grocery store, these are surely the same shoppers who are incapable of returning carts to their corrals?
Related: Have you ever-so-lightly brushed against someone’s car in the last decade? The minutest of touches can set off hysterics and oath-swearing from the batteried-Chevy owner. Better you drop kick the firstborn son than let a knuckle graze their chariot.
Enough of this kvetching! Someone obviously woke up the bed’s wrong side. Now let’s get on your right side by offering a fascinating batch of worthwhile articles for your consideration, enjoyment, maybe even merriment.
Some Ideas to Ponder While You Wait on the Drive-Through Line
1. At The Coolidge Review, William B. Allen finds through his research that King George may have been mischaracterized these past 200-plus years. From the piece:
What the Americans didn’t see was that the imprudent steps the House of Commons undertook with regard to the colonies arose as part of the attempt to assert the supremacy of Commons. The discretion of the monarch had to be eliminated with regard to the ministry, executive authority, executive administration. All must emerge upon the nomination of the Commons. This tremendous change brought into being the principle of popular rule. The liberals signed on to government by consent of the people.
So we find ourselves very close to the point of having to acknowledge that the American Revolution was a by-blow of what was effectively a revolution in England. British reform resulted not from tyranny but from political instability. To overcome the political instability, the British produced dramatic modern innovations, which were paralleled subsequently and indigenously in America.
One of the modern innovations was the invention of the programmatic political party. In responding to King George III, Burke argued that parties did not have to be factions. In his analysis, the party must be an association of people committed in advance to an explicit program to be approved by voters, and from that source would spring legitimacy.
2. At Tablet Magazine, Erez Winner and Gadi Taub find that in the PR war, Israel, despite feeding Gazans, is losing. From the analysis:
Here are the facts: Enough food enters Gaza. Pockets with shortage are the result of two things: the United Nations not relinquishing control to the American Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), and Hamas’ war strategy of increasing its own population’s suffering to put international pressure on Israel—confident in the press’ willful cooperation.
Israel’s original plan at the end of the long second cease-fire in March would have denied Hamas the ability to execute this strategy. The plan was to break Hamas’ control over Gaza’s population by breaking its control of the aid entering the strip. The IDF was to divide Gaza into discrete areas, isolating each one while providing it with a humanitarian corridor to enable civilians to leave combat zones and move south to temporary accommodation in safe sanctuaries, which is what the IDF had already done before the second cease-fire (during which many evacuated Gazans returned). Meanwhile, the American GHF was to distribute food in these sanctuaries. It would do so in family packages, rather than through wholesale supply, which invites middlemen. More than 100 million such meals were distributed by GHF in the past two months. . . .
But Israel did not execute this plan. Instead, it concentrated on the effort to reach a hostage deal while attempting to prove its morality to the world. Subjecting itself to standards far stricter than international law requires, the IDF opted for half measures and did not move the population to designated safe zones to supply them with food. Instead, fearing a humanitarian crisis, the IDF began sending aid to pockets where Hamas has been using the population and the hostages as human shields to create safe havens for itself. In so doing, Israel became the first country in the history of warfare to assume responsibility for feeding the enemy population. It thus relieved Hamas of responsibility instead of insisting that the group surrender and release the hostages. So far from scoring points for morality, Israel dug itself into a hole, and still it was blamed for the crisis that Hamas and the United Nations have manufactured.
Take Note of the Deadline! . . .
August 31 is the get-that-big-discount / early-registration deadline to sign up for the Center For Civil Society’s November “Givers, Doers, & Thinkers” conference on Civil Society and America at 250: The Past and Future of What Has Made America Exceptional—it’ll provide a boatload of wisdom and inspiration about our Semiquincentennial from a bevy of terrific speakers. You can register here. (And use the code EARLYBIRD25 before flipping your calendar to September.)
. . . Now like JoJo Get Back to Where You Once Belonged
3. At National Review, Rick Brookhiser remembers the great liberal journalist, Murray Kempton. From the piece:
Kempton was a lifelong man of the left, yet he was never predictable, for he believed the people that he wrote about never were. “When we go among humans,” he said in a late-life college lecture, “we are unable to deal with them as abstract presences; their very faces command us to be honorable.” To Kempton, Khrushchev’s peasant face still showed human reactions; Anderson’s Midwestern mug was frozen in self-regard.
Kempton was impressed by the faces of American Communists, which persistently led him to errant conclusions. Their ideology, he said in a 1962 speech, “represented a great ideal” (it didn’t); their paragon Ho Chi Minh, he wrote in a symposium for Commentary, was “obviously more attractive . . . than General Ky” (he wasn’t). Yet Kempton could wonder, in the midst of a long mash note to the communist playwright Lillian Hellman, what her companion, Dashiell Hammett, said to her after the legal aid group he belonged to declined to help a paraplegic Trotskyite who had been fired from his low-level government job. “But then,” Kempton wrote, “Hammett was a Communist and it was an article of the party faith that Leon Trotsky, having worked for the Emperor of Japan since 1904, had then improved his social standing by taking employment with the Nazis in 1934. Thus any [of his followers] could be considered by extension to be no more than an agent of Hitler’s ghost.”
4. At Public Discourse, Holly Taylor Coolman considers the young person wrestling with the idea of starting a family. From the article:
Now, almost thirty years later, I can say that we did, more or less, figure it out—even if so much did not go as I planned. Today, that baby is all grown up and married, and now living for a while back at home, along with her husband and her own toddler. She is a great mom, but I can see that the “figuring-out” required of parents has expanded exponentially, and the stakes seem even higher.
Parents eager to hand on a faith tradition face an additional set of hopes and challenges. How can they invite children into the richness of a religious heritage at a moment when so many people are leaving all of that behind? Given the busyness and distractions that are now everywhere, even the prolegomena of faith—cultivation of wonder, attentiveness, and real connection—can feel like goals that might require parents to just move their children to a mountain cabin somewhere off the grid.
So what are young parents, or those hoping to be parents, to do? I believe there are some essentials that can give parents a firm footing. For me, raising that first baby and then four more children, all while studying and teaching theology, has convinced me of three things.
5. At The American Enterprise, Christopher Scalia mounts the ramparts to defend the novel. From the beginning of the piece:
At one of my children’s sporting events a few weeks ago, another parent arrived to cheer on our sons’ team carrying a foldout chair in one hand and, in case the game was a blowout, a book in the other. When I asked her what she was reading, she said, “Oh, just a novel.” Her tone implied she was indulging in a guilty pleasure, as if she believed—or assumed I believed—that novels were mere time killers. Not the right kind of reading. But over the course of a few conversations, I learned that she loves fiction. She wrote her college thesis about the great novelist Joseph Conrad. Her home bookshelves sag with great novels she and her husband have enjoyed. But as she explained to me, her response to my question took an almost apologetic tone because people in her professional circles talk only about reading histories, biographies, and self-improvement books. As if those are the only pages where true wisdom resides.
That isn’t a new doubt. The novel has been a suspect genre since becoming popular in Britain during the 18th century. The great lexicographer and essayist Samuel Johnson warned that novels “are written chiefly to the young, the ignorant, and the idle” and were therefore capable of corrupting their readers in profound ways. Read too much of the wrong kind of book, and you’ll addle your brain. A recent Wall Street Journal story about the popularity among women of a genre called romantasy—“a mix of fantasy and romance [in which] heroines ride dragons to battle enemies and otherwise navigate magical realms, all while living their best sex lives”—warned that “the books create such unreal expectations about what a relationship should offer that mortal men can’t match up.” The story quotes a therapist who reports having “single clients who have had to take a break from romantasy because it sets up unrealistic ideals of a relationship and how they’ll be treated.” Again, that’s not a new story—it’s a variation of what Miguel de Cervantes and Sir Walter Scott depicted happening to their title characters in Don Quixote (1605, 1616) and Waverley (1814), respectively, and Jane Austen with her heroine in Northanger Abbey (1817).
6. At Law & Liberty, Stephen Eide finds these are complex times for Faith-Based Organizations. From the beginning of the essay:
Faith-based organizations (FBOs) loom large in conservative thinking about poverty and related ills. It’s widely believed that we could restore social health by reining in big government and expanding private religious programs. George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism laid out the standard expansion plan. It called for giving religious nonprofits a better shot at government contracts. That framework has also been endorsed by Donald Trump. In a February 2025 executive order, Trump stated, “The executive branch wants faith-based entities, community organizations, and houses of worship, to the fullest extent permitted by law, to compete on a level playing field for grants, contracts, programs, and other Federal funding opportunities.” In other words, the plan is to slot FBOs into the NGO state. This merits rethinking.
America’s welfare state relies on a vast network of private nonprofit contractors to enact social policy. From one perspective, that model seems conducive to building a larger FBO sector. From another, it seems designed to tempt FBOs into overlooking how reliance on public financing makes it harder for a program to keep the faith. Temptation is a concept to which one would expect FBO champions, of all people, to appreciate. Ill-advised expansions threaten FBOs’ integrity as religious organizations offering a meaningful alternative to the social services status quo.
Setting FBOs up for success means creating programs that outperform government in boosting school performance, sobriety and employment, and/or that which promote values to which government programs are indifferent or hostile. Without a strong sense of FBOs’ distinctive virtues and the distinctive pressures they face in a secularized culture, policymakers who encourage expansion are setting faith-based leaders up for failure.
7. At The Caravan, Russell A. Berman contemplates the significance of that water-hemmed place where Asia, Africa, and Europe meet—the Middle East. From the piece:
First and foremost, it is up to the U.S. to maintain freedom of navigation in an area vital to the world economy. Such has been the American role in the region since the suppression of Barbary Coast piracy and boots on the ground on the “shores of Tripoli.” Today this mission includes maintaining chokepoint security and denying adversarial actors the capacity to block the trade flows and commerce in energy at locations like the Straits of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb. It also defines a key component of the strategic relationship with NATO partner Turkey which commands the pathway between the Black Sea and the Aegean. Currently the Iran-backed Houthis threaten shipping with missile and drone attacks. As a result, maritime security has been eroded, forcing vessels to find alternative and lengthier routes from Asia to Europe, thereby contributing to a rise in prices. The U.S. has the naval presence to respond to the Houthis, especially with the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, but resources are stretched thin. The ceasefire of May 6 promises protection to U.S. ships alone, meaning that the Houthis will continue their disruption. This is an unstable pause at best. Continued conflict is likely.
Second, Iran is not merely a local problem, a human rights question involving the regime’s suppression of domestic opposition, when the Iranian people try to assert their rights. In addition, the Islamic Republic has long been pursuing a strategy of regional destabilization, framed in terms of its foundational revolutionary ideology. As a response to the traumatic impact of the threat to the homeland experienced during the war with Iraq, Iran prefers to keep the fighting far from its own borders by relying on proxies, politically aligned military forces in an array of theaters: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, Shia militia in Iraq and the aforementioned Houthis in Yemen. Hence the characterization of Iranian policy as the will to fight to the last Arab in distant theaters.
8. At Forbes, edu-guru Bruno Manno lauds the “Workforce Pell” expanding access to education, training, and opportunity. From the article:
The federal Pell Grant Program, originally known as the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant Program, was established by the Higher Education Amendments of 1972. It provides need-based financial aid to undergraduate students who have not yet earned a bachelor’s, graduate, or professional degree. The program was renamed in 1980 to honor Rhode Island’s long-time Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell, who sponsored the 1972 legislation.
To qualify for Pell financial support, students must be enrolled or accepted for enrollment in eligible programs at participating institutions. These programs must lead to a degree or certificate and typically be at least 600 clock hours and 15 weeks in duration. It is currently the largest source of grant aid available to U.S. students. The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will cost nearly $32 billion in fiscal year 2024. Since these grants do not require repayment, they are a crucial tool for expanding access to higher education.
9. At The American Mind, David Randall describes the need for reform that will get America’s schools back on track. From the article:
Education reformers are for high expectations in education. We are for depoliticized education. And we are for transmitting to our children the knowledge of Western civilization and America’s history and ideals. We are for education that prepares our children for college and a career that supports American prosperity, security, and liberty. We are for education that helps our children become self-reliant citizens capable of exercising moral judgment in private and public life. And we are for a practical way to achieve these goals in every state and school district.
We will pass laws and enact regulations that ensure our public K-12 schools are guided by these principles. Education reformers must focus on public schools, because that is where the vast majority of American children are educated. But we can’t just rely on laws and regulations to change what’s being taught in our country’s classrooms. Laws restraining ideologically extreme teachers will never be as effective as educating a new generation of K-12 teachers who want to teach properly. This means we must also reform the colleges and education schools where our K-12 teachers are taught.
K-12 public school instruction has become ideologically extreme. Far too many of our high school graduates are semi-literate and simply parrot radical propaganda. Radical activists have redesigned our public high schools to produce Americans who are not ready for college or careers, much less prepared to contribute to the scientific and technological research that’s needed to defend America from peer rivals such as China.
10. At The Lamp, Valoree Dowell reflects on old age. From the piece:
What happens when you get old? That’s a good question, and one that I have answered differently at each stage of my life. “Old” when you are four means being like your cousin Kerry, then age thirteen. “Older” is when you date the third-year graduate student as an incoming freshman. “Aging” is a term intended to take the sting out of sixty being the new thirty. “Getting old” is the fanciful definition of indulging in midday naps on the sofa. But deeper contemplation of the actual process can begin at any time, such as during a long, overnight flight to Asia, seated between two Japanese frequent fliers.
What happens? I mean besides the obvious and ubiquitous aches and pains, forgetting the names of those most closely related, or figuring out how to clean the paper feed on the printer without a teenager’s help.
How about walking through the house wearing just one slipper, looking for the missing one—everywhere—while at the same time brushing your teeth? Good thing the electric toothbrush is on a timer and stops itself. It did take me the full two minutes to kick the barren foot under the bed to find, lo and behold, the other slipper. Or what about observing that my hand intuitively knew the right shelf to reach in the laundry room to pull down the clothes brush but did not recall which side of the brush to swipe first on the red sofa to remove the dog’s hair?
11. At Religion & Liberty Online, Art Carden and Caleb S. Fuller say that, all the kvetching aside, we’ve never had it so good. From the piece:
In our opinion, Walmart is the poster child for what legendary 20th-century economist Joseph Schumpeter called the “capitalist achievement” of improving goods at falling prices. The largest private employer in history welcomes any and all into a brightly lit, air-conditioned palace stocked from floor to ceiling with food, clothing, office supplies, garden implements, electronics, books, exotic fruits, furniture, sporting goods, and much more that even our ancestors’ rulers could not have imagined. Save money, live better.
The goods don’t tell the whole story, however. The megastore is remarkable for its clientele. Walmart is a palace open to the peasantry. Walmart wonders are available not only to powdered lords, Party members, or ostentatiously coiffed Capitol residents. Walmart’s customers are overwhelmingly ordinary people of underwhelmingly modest means. At Walmart, they can exchange the fruit of a few hours’ labor for a shopping-cart-sized cornucopia.
A 1979 episode of the game show The Price Is Right displayed a microwave oven with a retail price of $499—roughly $2,000 in today’s money. But today you can get a much better microwave from Walmart, Target, or Amazon for under $100. You don’t even have to go to the store. With a few flicks of your thumb, a microwave will arrive on your porch tomorrow. If this is the much-maligned “late-stage capitalism,” then sign us up.
12. At CNBC, Hayley Cuccinello reports that Bill Gates’s “Giving Pledge” idea has had few actual commitments from the world’s billionaires. From the article:
In two months, the Giving Pledge garnered signatures from 40 of America’s richest families and individuals to sign up. That first batch of pledgers, including Michael Bloomberg and David Rockefeller, was announced 15 years ago this week.
In the years since, the Giving Pledge has lost steam when it comes to enrollment. By the end of 2010, 57 signatories representing an estimated 14% of America’s billionaires had made the nonbinding commitment, according to a recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies. Currently, the pledge has commitments from 256 individuals, couples and families, including 110 American billionaires, per the progressive think tank. This group makes up 12% of the U.S. billionaire population as estimated by Forbes.
The annual number of sign-ups has also flagged since that first year. Even in 2020 when the pandemic spurred wealthy donors to give more, the Giving Pledge only earned 12 new signatories. This past May, the pledge welcomed 11 new members, a marked improvement over 2024′s record low of four.
Lucky 13. At the Times-Republican in Marshalltown, IA, Jonathan Meyer reports on a successful fundraiser that finds a safe path for students in the Tama-Toledo community walking and biking to school. From the story:
Members of the Hometown Action Team (HAT), local leaders, and community supporters gathered in Tama Park last week to celebrate a milestone five years in the making: the successful completion of the fundraising campaign for the Safe Routes to School project.
In just over 100 days, the committee raised an impressive $237,000, with nearly 70% of the funds coming from grants and the remaining 30% from local businesses, organizations, and individual donors. Karen Mixdorf, one of the key organizers and the 2025 Tama Citizen of the Year, thanked the many grant providers—including Lincoln Savings Bank, IMT Insurance, the Guernsey Foundation, and the Mansfield Foundation—as well as local contributors and STC alumni who stepped up to help.
Mixdorf shared that storytelling played a major role in the fundraising effort.
“We thought there were two things that would help us raise money: making connections with people, and telling a good story,” she said. “So tonight, we’re going to keep sharing stories — just like we did throughout the campaign.”
Bonus. At Plough Magazine, Abraham M. Nussbaum, psychiatrist, tells of a patient, Sharon, who taught the therapist a lesson or two. From the article:
Sharon had suffered many harms in her husband’s home and, before that, in her father’s home. She told me, “In all my relationships, there was never anything for me. Now when I get something, I hide it.” She mentioned the few nice things that came her way: dresses that flattered, foods that delighted, and our therapy sessions that unburdened her. “I need this time for myself, but if my family knew, they would think I was crazy.”
Far from crazy, Sharon needed someone to say what many people in her small town knew but never said to her face. In high school, she met her future husband. She was a student, he was a teacher. When she was pregnant with their second child, he mocked her before the other students only to drive her to their shared home afterward. She never really stepped outside her husband’s shadow until she attempted suicide with a handful of medications three decades later.
Sharon taught me the third lesson I learned in therapy: there will be secrets. People carry secrets like rocks in their shoes, walking on them until they can no longer endure the feeling. They stop carrying their secrets alone only when they find a place where they can empty the rocks out in front of someone else.
For the Good of the Cause
Uno. The Center’s important upcoming “Givers, Doers, & Thinkers” webinar—ace training (via-Zoom, and free!) for fundraising professionals—takes place on Tuesday, September 9th, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. (Eastern), and will focus on digital fundraising, especially on how to bringing in grassroots donors. Handy tips will abound for writing email copy that wins over donors, how to create realistic goals, analyze results, and much more. Are you attending? Of course you are. Find out more, and register, right here.
Due. At Philanthropy Daily, Shaka Mitchell explains the anatomy of the biggest school-choice win in history. Read it here.
Point of Personal Privilege
At National Review, Your Intrepid Hack pens a report on the back-pedal of California’s governor, hater of Big Oil. Read it here.
Department of Bad Jokes
Q: What do you call a bee that can’t make up its mind?
A: A maybe.
A Dios
Could there be a parallel parking universe?
May the Plastic Jesus on Our Dashboard Grace Us with Patience,
Jack Fowler, who walks the line at jfowler@amphil.com.
