Read Gerald’s essay, “How to Have a Happy Retirement,” and Joe Nocera’s introduction to Ancient Wisdom, a new series from The Free Press.

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart—because once upon a time, as Ryan Holiday writes today, Americans could “pick up their daily newspaper and find a totally straightforward, understandable poem full of advice on how to be a good person.” He shares some of his favorite verses in the following column.

Poems have always been earnest. Rhapsodizing about nature. Pouring out your heart to a lover. Finding deep meaning in small things. Brooding on mortality. It can all seem a bit cringe.

A few years ago, I was talking to Allie Essiri for my podcast, The Daily Stoic, about her wonderful anthology, A Poem for Every Night of the Year—which I have been reading to my sons since they were little—and I mentioned that I was struck by the earnestness, the desire for self-help and self-mastery, in many 19th-century poems.

You might be familiar with some of them.

Rudyard Kipling’s “If—” is obviously a classic of the genre, its advice both cliché and yet still profound: If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you / If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you / But make allowance for their doubting too. So is William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus,” with its famous lines, I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul. Adam Lindsay Gordon’s “Ye Wearie Wayfarer” is another, ending:

Life is mostly froth and bubble,

Two things stand like stone,

Kindness in another’s trouble,

Courage in your own.

It must be acknowledged that many of the most famous of these poems were products of the British Empire at the height of its imperial power—and I’m pleased that we no longer publish poems calling on a generation to pick up “the white man’s burden” or celebrating the suicidal (and totally avoidable) charge of the Light Brigade. But I would like to point out that there was once a time, not that long ago, when an average person would pick up their daily newspaper and find a totally straightforward, understandable poem full of advice on how to be a good person or navigate the difficulties of life.

The tale of the last two decades of American culture is, in many ways, the story of what happens when the boys who did advanced math and broke open gadgets in their parents’ garage get insanely, ridiculously, rich. We got a new space race. We got new political coalitions and de-extinction projects. We got sperm racing. The nerds have used their winnings to transform the media, and in some cases, our biology. And they’re not stopping anytime soon. In fact, sooner than you think, one of these tech bros will make it across the red tape and become the world’s first trillionaire. Which raises the question. . .

The richest men in the world today are not the ones who own gold mines or railroads; it’s guys who invented new ways to buy toilet paper or send messages at work. And I don’t just mean Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk; it’s no-name coders bringing in the millions, especially since the AI arms race ratcheted up. Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly offering $100 million bonuses to top OpenAI software engineers if they abandon ship and join artificial intelligence efforts at Meta. Forget heiresses and hotel proprietors; guys who were into crypto early, or bought Nvidia stock before the price went to the moon—which is to say, people who spent high school playing Elden Ring—are the wealthy ones now.

It sometimes feels like our cities are broken: soulless and sprawling, full of concrete and cars, loud and dirty and devoid of community. Just hard to live in. That’s a problem Strong Towns is trying to fix—the nonprofit believes American cities were badly made and is fighting for “cities of all sizes to be safe, livable, and inviting”—and last month, it invited a friend of The Free Press, Chris Arnade, to be the keynote speaker at its 2025 National Gathering, in Providence, Rhode Island.

Chris has been to a lot of cities. He spent a decade walking around parts of America most tourists avoid. Now, every few weeks or so, he flies from his home in New York to a different one—Milan, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Los Angeles, Tashkent (that’s in Uzbekistan). When he arrives, he spends his days walking around all the unremarkable neighborhoods where ordinary people actually live, until he understands what makes the city tick. Then he writes about it on his Substack.

In his speech, he distilled everything he’s seen and heard and felt during his travels into what he describes as “my larval attempt to try and build a ‘grand unified theory’ of urban planning.” He’s aware that might “sound pedantic, trivial, and boring,” but the truth, as he reminds us, is that “how we choose to live is as fundamental a question as exists.”
—Freya Sanders

“Anyone who cannot form a community with others, or who does not need to because he is self-sufficient, is no part of a city-state; he is either a beast or a god.” —Aristotle

Everything I’ve done in the last 15 years has taught me this: There is no such thing as a human without a community, and all cities are a reflection of that.

I came to this conclusion during my decade talking to Americans. What I’ve seen over my last four years walking the world—from one of my first walks in Vietnam to a more recent one in Lombardy, Italy—has supported it, and provided me with evidence for a stronger version, which is this: Human despair is no longer primarily a result of economic destitution; rather, it is due to a lack of functional and healthy communities, and the current challenge for most of the world’s political class is understanding that.

Everyone, rich or otherwise, needs to feel they belong to something greater than themselves, like rivers flowing toward a sea. If they don’t have access to healthy communities, they will find unhealthy ones. I learned this from speaking to addicts across America: When traditional forms of community erode—family, faith, place, and yes, bowling leagues—people will gravitate toward drug traps, bars, and gangs, like water running to the lowest point.

While I don’t want to open Pandora’s box regarding the Covid era, it did provide us with a real-time example of what happens when people are denied community. My theory, which I’ve been suggesting since the lockdowns began, is that the spike in crime, protests, and other antisocial behavior in the months and years immediately following was a manifestation of the despair that comes when humans are wrenched apart; a national and sometimes global display of the pent-up, simmering anger that comes with isolation.

It’s been seven days since President Trump signed his massive, sweeping, and extremely expensive “Big Beautiful Bill,” which our Tyler Cowen called “one of the most radical experiments in fiscal policy in my lifetime.”

Tyler was one of many contributors to our symposium on the BBB, featuring analysis and critiques from across the political spectrum. In case you missed it:

But perhaps the BBB already feels like a vague and distant memory. There’s been an astounding amount of news over the past seven days—and no story more tragic than a horrifying natural disaster in Texas.

More than 120 people are now known to have died in the massive flooding along the Guadalupe River in Texas Hill Country. It’s a heartbreaking tragedy, which of course hasn’t prevented politicians from trying to capitalize on it. This one blames DOGE, this one blames Joe Biden—you get the picture.

But as Roger Pielke Jr. argued this week, the whole tragedy was both predictable and preventable. For one thing, it occurred in an area of Texas dubbed “Flash Flood Alley.” And the Guadalupe River has done this kind of thing before. Yet there were no apparent warning systems in place. Pielke makes a strong case for why public officials should have been more prepared and must now make sure that this never happens again.

As Congressman Dan Crenshaw wrote in our pages, the nightmare flood brought out the best in Texans. One example: Emma Foltz. A rising senior at Louisiana Tech who was working as a counselor at Camp Mystic, the famed Christian summer camp for girls that was devastated by the flood, Foltz protected the lives of more than a dozen campers when she guided them to higher ground.

She is one of many Texans who risked—and in some cases lost—their lives trying to save others. Among them was Julian Ryan, who died getting his young family out of harm’s way. And then there’s Coast Guard petty officer Scott Ruskan, who personally rescued 165 people. Read about their stories in Dan’s moving piece.

When I was in college, consulting was the hot career. It seemed like everyone dreamed of a career at McKinsey or Bain or Deloitte. These firms—and the people who worked there—made big money, even if what they did all day was never clear to many of us.

But Joe Nocera says those days are over thanks to two things: the Trump administration’s crackdown on government waste and the rise of AI.

If you want to understand how transformative technology and federal belt tightening is reshaping one of America’s most lucrative industries—and transforming our economy in the process—this is a must-read:

The 33-year-old socialist is now the Democratic nominee for mayor, which means he’s very much on track to run America’s greatest city. But he’s also facing some unusual headwinds, as Olivia Reingold reported for us this week, such as endlessly embarrassing social media feeds. Mamdani is the kind of guy who deploys shopworn progressive phrases like “culture is not a costume,” which makes his decision to tweet out videos of South Asian men pretending to be Jews during Hanukkah look a little hypocritical.

Oh, and he also identified as both “Asian” and “Black or African American” when applying to Columbia University, where his father was and is a radical professor. Mamdani is not black. He’s also not apologizing. Read Olivia’s report here.

But most observers believe that for Mamdani to lose, his opponents must coalesce behind one candidate. In an interview with Coleman Hughes this week, Mayor Eric Adams—who was elected as a Democrat in 2021 but is now running as an independent—made the case for why he should be that candidate.

The bigger question in this race is whether Mamdani is a harbinger of things to come nationally, namely a resurgence of socialism, which is proving awfully attractive to folks who were born after the Cold War ended. Tyler Cowen takes a look at socialism’s ongoing appeal—and whether it’s primarily a symptom of America’s increasingly grumpy attitude toward capitalism.

When he was 14 years old, Holden Hughes would smudge a dark-green paste on his skin to treat his acne. Three years later, amid the madness that engulfed the nation in the summer of 2020, a photo of him wearing the paste would surface on social media—and completely upend his life. He was accused of wearing blackface, and within 24 hours he was told he was no longer welcome at his Catholic high school in California. Now 22, Hughes opened up to Frannie Block about his teenage cancellation and the scars left by the experience.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump’s former “first buddy,” announced this week that he’s starting a new political party. Yet despite his near-infinite resources, nobody in Washington seems to be taking it all that seriously. Should they? Matt Continetti takes a look at why the odds are stacked against Elon’s latest political venture.

Medical researcher Shay Laps arrived at Stanford in 2024 hoping to transform how we treat diabetes. He had a sterling résumé and was hired at the recommendation of a Nobel Prize winner. So why was he gone less than a year later? Laps believes it’s because he’s an Israeli who served in the IDF, which he says led to him being ostracized by his colleagues. In a lawsuit against the school, he’s even accusing a coworker of sabotaging his research. Maya Sulkin has the exclusive.

And as we wind down this week’s email, let me admit something to you: I don’t know a whole lot about Love Island, TV’s hottest show. I suspect there’s a demographic explanation for my ignorance—it doesn’t exactly seem designed for busy, middle-aged moms. But Sascha Seinfeld makes a compelling case that the sleazy-seeming reality show is a blessing in disguise for Gen Z, the most lovelorn and sexless generation since . . . I don’t know, the Puritans? And at least the Puritans got married. Gen Z can barely get out of bed. Kids today, am I right? Anyway, it’s an excellent piece about a show my aging brain has trouble comprehending.

That’s it for this week, but we have plenty coming in the next few days, including a great Chris Arnade piece tomorrow on what a perfect city would look like. Check it out. And have a wonderful weekend.

Forty percent of American fourth graders have less than basic reading skills–and only 26 percent of 12th graders are considered proficient in math, according to the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress.

So you might think that there wasn’t much else on the minds of teachers at the latest annual gathering of the nation’s largest teachers union.

You can read a description of every approved business item in this summary published by the NEA. But one convention delegate from Texas summarized them by telling me the response that a friend of hers got while trying to talk to other union members about the best ways to teach reading and writing.

“We don’t have time for that. We’ve got to fight Trump,” her friend was told.

Tina Brown isn’t exactly MAGA. But the former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor does agree with the president’s base on one thing: that when it comes to the death of Jeffrey Epstein, important questions remain unanswered. Conspiracies have swirled since his apparent suicide in 2019, but the attorney general insisted this week: “Case closed!” In this article, reprinted from her brilliant Substack, Fresh Hell, Tina explains her own part in breaking the news of Epstein’s 2008 sweetheart deal—and why she still thinks the pedophile sex-trafficker’s death is suspicious.

—The Editors

It’s rare that I agree with the MAGA conspiracy theory loonies, but in the case of the Epstein files, they deserve an answer about why the full folder has not been released. I have never fully believed that Epstein committed suicide, and my skepticism grows the more the mysteries accumulate.

Flashback to 2010. During my time as editor of The Daily Beast—thanks to the pioneering reporting of Conchita Sarnoff—we were the first news outlet to break the story of the 2008 sweetheart deal Epstein made with a U.S. attorney in Florida. Multiple charges of child sexual trafficking were reduced to state charges only, and he served just 13 months in a work-release program that allowed him to spend as much as 12 hours a day outside jail.

Sarnoff, a Cuban American anti–human trafficking activist, stumbled on the Epstein story when interviewing a Mexican child trafficker in the Palm Beach stockade who told her that underage girls were brought to Palm Beach to service rich older men.

Dimly remembering an item about the arrest of a New York high roller named Epstein, who once asked her for a date, Sarnoff dug through the Palm Beach police files and was stunned to learn that the department had identified as many as three dozen underage girls who had been trafficked for sex by Jeffrey Epstein—the youngest imported from the Balkans at age 14. So, how did this serial predator (the DOJ report says Epstein harmed over one thousand victims) get off with a slap on the wrist—only two counts of solicitation of a minor for prostitution? Spurred by the suspicions of a Palm Beach society lady who lived close to Epstein, Sarnoff brought the story to me and we launched a six-part Daily Beast investigation about the rank perversion of justice enabled by Epstein’s money, connections, and political donations. She revealed how Epstein’s crack team of all-star lawyers discredited the young victims, many of whom had been abused previously or came from rough backgrounds. (“The younger, the better,” Epstein instructed a local teenager who was paid to bring girls to his home.)

The MAGA revolution—haunted by the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein—is eating its own. No one should be surprised.

It started in the summer of 2020. That was when Donald Trump did something American presidents usually don’t do: publicly question his attorney general—and, in particular, his finding that the sex trafficker had committed suicide in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, in Lower Manhattan, in August 2019.

The president suggested, without offering evidence, that the truth was murkier and more sinister. “Was it suicide?” Trump, then facing a tough reelection battle, mused in an interview. “Was he killed?”

Trump’s remarks were couched in an off-the-cuff comment about Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, who had been charged with helping Epstein procure underage girls and who was convicted in 2021 and is now serving a 20-year sentence in a federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, my dispatch from way up north. This is the land where Mark Carney still boldly claims that “This is Canada. And we decide what happens here”—and Donald Trump reminds everyone who really calls the shots. Meanwhile, your “traditional values” may be flagged as a sign of extremism, a Canadian country singer lands in hot water for praising America a little too much, and more!

It didn’t take long for their budding bromance to unravel.

U.S.-Canada relations seemed to be warming so much that Mark Carney even got a new nickname: the Trump whisperer. But on Thursday, Trump told Carney in a letter that the 25 percent tariff on Canadian imports imposed in February over concerns about fentanyl flowing into the U.S. will be raised to 35 percent on August 1. Trump warned that the rate could go even higher if Canada responded with retaliatory measures.

Trump indicated that he might consider an “adjustment” to the tariff rate if Canada “works with me” on a fentanyl crackdown, adding that the adjustment would also depend on “our relationship with your Country.”

Carney responded that his government will work toward the August 1 deadline while “steadfastly” protecting Canadian workers and businesses.

While a steeper tariff might be Trump’s way of forcing Canada to the negotiating table, Canada walked right into this mess on its own.

It’s been so long, I barely remember how to TG. I’ve been busy in my jet-set life; I’m now in Sun Valley surrounded by my fellow media moguls. Lachlan Murdoch and Bret Baier are leading a knitting circle. I have TGIF’ed my way directly into the heart of American power and the rosé is divine—but how are YOU? Studio apartment hunt going okay? Anyway, after this I’m going out to shoot endangered bunnies.

This week, deserving but not receiving bylines, are Will Rahn and Sean Fischer.

→ TSA and America’s shoes: There’s plenty of news from the week but none reaches this development in significance. Because this week, the Department of Homeland Security announced that Americans can once again go through TSA airport checkpoints with their shoes on. For us busy moms without TSA PreCheck: This is our V-E Day.

TSA is security Kabuki. It’s fake. It’s performance art. They were once found to have a 95 percent failure rate in catching dangerous items and other contraband. Those scanning machines, the water bottle rules, the X-rays, the little bottles of lotion, it’s all a charade to make us feel like that’s the security system. Like, do they really think I can fit a bomb into my Tevas? What exactly is the risk posed by my full Poland Spring water bottle, besides the microplastics it’s probably introduced to my bloodstream? I guess for someone having a schizophrenic break, trying to get through with a machete, the machines work. Maybe. The actual security system is that someone plugs your name, and now your face, into the dragnet system that knows every single thing about you and probably listened to your Alexa that morning. Anyway, my days of flopping my bare, wide, flat feet onto Newark’s polished concrete are over. We’re finally free. And all it took was the last shreds of our privacy to get there.