From The Hills to Glee to the rise of girlboss media—Sophia Rivka Rossi has seen and shaped our culture from the inside out.

Today, she pulls back the curtain.

On this week’s episode of Second Thought, Sophia joins Suzy Weiss to unpack the machine behind reality TV, the secret sauce behind Ryan Murphy’s dominance, and what happens when you finally stop ou…

Lance R. Blyth, command historian of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), joins School of War to discuss the evolution of North America’s air defense. How has NORAD adapted to shifting threats over the decades? Are today’s threats manageable? Are we in a new Cold War? And what can the comm…

David Rose is the director of policy and research at the Free Speech Union, a UK-based nonpartisan organization that campaigns to defend freedom of speech. The organization will soon publish a new report examining allegations against the political network Labour Together, and linked to figures associated with Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Rose joins me t…

At a bar lined with indoor golf simulators in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Nalin Haley is posing for pictures with a procession of starstruck twentysomethings in blazers.

It’s a humid evening in late March and we are at the kickoff event for the Tri-County Young Republicans, the organization that Nalin, the 24-year-old son of former South Carolina governor and U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, launched in February. Featured guests include gubernatorial candidate Ralph Norman and state senator Wes Climer. Several have driven hours to get here. And Nalin appears to be the main attraction.

“He’s a rising star,” Matthew Carlyon, a 21-year-old campaign staffer for Norman, told me. “I think he’s going to get into politics one day.”

A day earlier, Nalin assured me that wasn’t on his mind: “People who plan that far ahead are kind of psychotic.” But in the past year, while working a finance job outside Charlotte, he has quickly become a poster boy for the young, post-Trump right that believe the system is rigged and the old guard has failed.

In November, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and argued, among other things, that naturalized immigrants should not be able to hold public office and that dual citizenship should be illegal. A little more than a week later on Fox & Friends, he urged Republicans to reject “free market neoliberalism” to win over Gen Z. A recent X post, calling for a shift away from foreign wars to domestic spending, amassed 29,000 likes. (He has over 42,000 followers on the platform.) Even former FBI deputy director Dan Bongino is a fan.

Cole Tomas Allen, the 31-year-old Caltech graduate who tried to attack the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, acquired his weapons legally, years ago, according to the Justice Department. He trained. He took a three-day train ride to transport them to Washington, D.C., apparently without fear of detection. He checked in to the hotel hosting the dinner, President Donald Trump, and his cabinet, at 3 p.m. the day before. He methodically used his intellect to get close to the dinner, and then he rushed a secure area so full of Secret Service agents that he had no hope of reaching the door, much less crashing through it. What was the point of all that reconnaissance and forethought when there was no way to effect an assassination?

I’ll go with President Trump’s description of Allen. He’s a whack job. A whack job with an impressive level of intellect culminating in climactic stupidity.

Trump attracts assassins. At his black-tie briefing later last Saturday night, the president seemed to revel in this fact a bit, saying that assassins shoot only at the impactful presidents, Gerald Ford and James Garfield excepted. Then Trump laid some statistics on us about race car drivers having safer jobs than presidents. Exaggerated, but four presidents assassinated out of 45 is actually a pretty high percentage.

I got the news on New Year’s Day. Dan Grossman was dead at 81.

Dan was a longtime friend and mentor, the man I jokingly called my “Jewish dad.” I’d known him since my early 20s, when we met at a political event in Washington. Over three decades of lunches, always with dessert, he coached me through building a business, navigating personal crises, and thinking seriously about the world. A few days before Christmas, we met one last time at his usual table in the back of his usual restaurant. We caught up, joked around, and swapped advice.

“How do I get people to stop nagging me about my health?” he asked.

I didn’t know that would be our last conversation. Or maybe, deep down, I did.

Dan was born in 1944, on the outer edge of the baby boomer generation, part of a cohort now entering its 80s. His death was personal, but it felt epochal. The Long Boomer Farewell, I realized, had begun.

That’s what I’ve come to call it: the roughly 20-year period, from now through the mid-2040s, during which the boomer generation will pass from dominance into history.

Sleepwalk into this era and we’re looking at decades of gerontocratic drift, fiscal implosion, and a younger generation that inherits a country stripped of the investments it needed. Get ahead of it and we have a genuine shot at renewal. Almost no one is treating it as the civilizational reckoning it is.

To understand why this generation’s passage will be different—harder, slower, more disorienting—it helps to remember the last one.

Perhaps you too can pivot to AI.

You might have heard the sneaker company Allbirds is trying exactly that. This once-highly touted company that made shoes out of wool for tech bros was valued at $4 billion soon after it went public in 2021, but the main business lines failed and the assets ended up worth a tiny amount of the peak total.

So Allbirds sold those assets for a pittance, and said it will rebrand as “NewBird AI.” The company also announced it had raised $50 million, supposedly for hardware to train advanced AI models. The stock rose rapidly from $2.49 to a close of $16.99, with the price later falling again, and now trading in the range of $6 to $7.

What is going on? One issue is that some underinformed investors may have been out there, looking to snap up any stock issue that appears related to artificial intelligence, given the current boom. In all likelihood, most of these investors will end up burned, but in the meantime some of them can flip it for higher value, as many did during the recent price run-up.

This part of the story is not new; during the dot-com boom of 1999–2000, we saw some businesses try to rebrand as internet companies. Sooner or later, corporate earnings—or the lack thereof—have a way of imposing reality.

Spencer Pratt, one of the greatest reality-TV villains of the 2000s, and a current candidate in the Los Angeles mayoral race, just delivered what may be one of the most effective, viral political ads in decades.

Here’s a brief synopsis: Bathed in ethereal California light, Pratt, 42, stands outside the mansions of incumbent LA mayor Karen Bass and city councilmember (and mayoral candidate) Nithya Raman. They, he tells viewers, do not have to deal with the consequences of their bad policies. Cue the consequences, flashing across the screen: homeless encampments, buildings on fire, a masked man holding a flare in front of a graffitied wall.

“This is where I live,” Pratt says, as the ad cuts to an Airstream trailer on the scorched lot where his Pacific Palisades property used to be. He’s been living there for most of the time since his house burned down in the 2025 LA wildfires. The response to the fires by Bass’s administration has been widely maligned.

“They let my home burn down,” Pratt says in the ad. “I know what the consequences of failed leadership are. That’s why I’m running for mayor.” The camera pans back to reveal his empty lot surrounded by some trees, the sun in the sky, and the campaign’s slogan: “A New Golden Age for Los Angeles.”

What sets America apart from its peers? One answer is the “animal spirits” of American business, which have produced generations of prosperity at home and helped uplift the poor across the world. At our best, Americans seek to harness the power of capitalism, rather than denounce and suppress it.

There was a time when Americans celebrated great industrialists—when Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie were household names spoken with pride, rather than contempt. Today, the conventional wisdom in mainstream media outlets and storied educational institutions is that capitalism is evil—and that violence may even be justified to thwart it.

In our morally inverted world, it’s worth remembering that, for all its imperfections, American capitalism is worthy of celebration. So this week, as part of America at 250—our yearlong celebration of this country’s milestone birthday—we’re celebrating America’s great capitalists, from Ford and Carnegie to Taylor Swift: how they made their fortunes, how they spent them, and the legacies they leave behind.

As we enter the age of artificial intelligence, the great entrepreneurs of our time produce things that live in servers and on the cloud—inventions that may leave little physical trace hundreds of years from now. But, in our first offering, Philip Delves Broughton takes us on a different journey: into the Walmart Supercenters you can shop in, the golden arches you can enjoy a burger under, the factories humming across America. He’s celebrating the titans who changed our physical world: the Builders.

If the Builders mold the physical world, consider the woman whose very presence boosts revenue at every business in every town where she performs—the first major pop star to own all of her own copyrights, and the undisputed ruler of the sonic world: Taylor Swift. “Swift is a titan of industry,” writes Dominic Green, “one of the great American capitalists that Ralph Waldo Emerson called ‘monomaniacs’—the creative spirits whose ‘speculative genius is the madness of few for the gain of the world.’” Read his essay on how Swift made it in the business of sound, right before the hostile takeover by the business of images.

After making all their money, America’s great capitalists are faced with the question of how to spend it—and how much of it to give away. That can be a trickier dilemma than you might think. Mark Gimein traces the arc of American philanthropy from Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 “Gospel of Wealth” to the Giving Pledge, launched in 2010 by Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates, and asks why today’s billionaires are walking away from the tradition that made their predecessors immortal.

—The Editors

Dear Abigail,

My 7-year-old daughter has a good group of first-grade friends at our local public school. I am casually friendly with most of their moms. This week, my daughter reported to us, while giggling uncomfortably, that one of the little boys in her friend group told her he doesn’t like Jewish people. We are Jewish. But so far, she’s been okay.

I know this boy’s mother—I see her regularly at various school events, and he has been to our house. My friends have told me to call her, and to give her the benefit of the doubt. My friends point out their own sons have made offensive remarks that didn’t originate from their families. My own 5-year-old son said something offensive about another race recently, and got multiple talking-tos, to correct this belief. (He said Mexican people had bad breath, based on a person he knows.) Another friend pointed out her son wrote the N-word, and she was completely mortified.

But somehow a boy saying “I don’t like Jewish people” feels different, and thus I am disinclined to give the family the benefit of the doubt. My inclination is to do nothing, and let my daughter decide if she wants to be friends with this boy. What do you think?

—Rachel, 39

Rachel,

It is a truth rarely acknowledged that the most tiresome aspect of parenting is the advice showered on you by other moms. Newbies to the job themselves, they nonetheless issue proclamations with the confidence of Caesar. But in this instance, neither you nor your friends are seeing things clearly.

Rachel, the boy who says he “doesn’t like Jewish people”—he’s 7.

Based on the stray comment of a boy who just learned to tie his shoes, you’ve invited his entire family to set up residence inside your head.