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Reactionary centrists rarely imagine solutions to political problems that do not involve a policy move to the right, especially on social issues. Won an election? You’ll need to give ground to govern. Lost an election? You’ll need to give ground to win next time. That this is obviously unfalsifiable doesn’t bother them in the slightest.

One of the main problems with reactionary centrism can be put in this way: Politics is about both policy and values. To use immigration as an example, the number of visas to be issued would be a question of policy, but whether a pluralist society is a good thing would be a question of values. Reactionary centrists tend to focus exclusively on policy, and sometimes they reframe issues of values as actually being about policy. Changing the policy offer is virtually the only way they can imagine a party appealing to a larger number of voters.

But values matter—not just morally but practically. Voters judge governments, and decide which politicians to trust, based on values. A party’s policies matter in part for what they tell us about their values. Politicians supporting punitive restrictions on immigration are communicating that they believe immigration is bad for the country. If those measures include making language requirements and “good character” tests more stringent, they are also communicating that they believe diversity is a threat to social cohesion, and a homogeneous society is a better one. They might deny these implications. They might not even directly intend them. But the implications are clear nonetheless, and people vote on the basis of them.

Skeptics may claim, You’ll never win voters by telling them they’re racist. But some voters are, abjectly, racist—those who tried to burn refugees alive in the U.K., for instance, or who marched in Charlottesville in the United States chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” They are a minority, but a larger share of the electorate than is often imagined quietly supports them.

Our disagreement with fascism is, ultimately, one of values, and it is on that level that the rhetorical fight against fascism must be taken. Those to the left of the populist, nativist right must articulate a competing, values-based vision to give everyone else—and especially the complacent middle—a true alternative to reaction; they must offer a clear, compelling, and coherent story about what the sorts of lives we want people to be free to pursue, and what type of society we want to have to support those dreams. And part of this story will be about just how dangerous, how utterly society-destroying, the far right’s story is. What policy views people can be persuaded to support will follow this conversation, not the other way around.

I was doomscrolling through news articles one evening — this was June 2024, which feels simultaneously like yesterday and several epochs ago — when I saw a headline stating there was $2.8 million in school lunch debt across Utah.

So I called my local school district, because that seemed like the sort of practical thing a reasonably civic-minded adult might do. I had no particular plan beyond basic verification. The woman who answered sounded simultaneously surprised and unsurprised that someone would call about this, if that makes sense. Yes, lunch debt was real, she told me. Yes, it affected children in our district. Yes, it was about $88,000 just for elementary schools, just in my district. And then, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned that Bluffdale Elementary — a school I had no personal connection to — had about $835 in outstanding lunch debt.

$835.

The figure hit me like one of those rare moments of absolute clarity, utterly devoid of irony or ambiguity. Eight hundred and thirty-five dollars was the cost of preventing dozens of children from experiencing that moment of public shame I couldn’t stop imagining. It was less than some monthly car payments. It was approximately what I had spent the previous month on DoorDash and impulse Amazon purchases. The grotesque disproportion between the trivial financial sum and the profound human consequence felt like a cosmic accounting error.

“Can I just... pay that?” I asked, half expecting to be told about some bureaucratic impossibility.

“Um, sure,” she said. “Let me transfer you.”

[...]I called another district. Then another. I started a spreadsheet, which is what middle-class professionals do when faced with systemic problems — we quantify things, as if converting human suffering into Excel cells might render it more manageable. I learned that some elementary schools had thousands in debt. I learned that, contrary to popular belief, most school lunch debt doesn’t come from low-income families — those kids generally qualify for federal free lunch programs. It comes from working families who hover just above the eligibility threshold, or from families who qualify but don’t complete the paperwork for various reasons, ranging from language barriers to pride to bureaucratic overwhelm.

I began to realize that the problem is both smaller and larger than I had initially understood. It’s smaller in that the per-school amounts were often relatively modest. It’s larger in that the entire structure of how we feed children at school is a tangle of federal programs, income thresholds, paperwork requirements, and local policies — all of which seemed designed to maximize shame and minimize actual nutrition.

The Utah Lunch Debt Relief Foundation began not with a mission statement or a business plan, but with a post I shared on social media asking people if they would be willing to chip in, along with the receipt I had been given for Bluffdale Elementary’s debt. Within a week, I’d raised $6,000. Within a month, $10,000. The mechanics were almost embarrassingly simple: I would call a school, verify their lunch debt amount, write a check, drop it off, repeat. People seemed to find the concrete nature of it satisfying — this specific school, these specific kids, this specific problem solved.

One particularly sleepless night, I found myself spiraling into what I’ve come to think of as “the advocacy paradox”: If I succeed completely in paying off all lunch debt, will that remove the urgency required to change the system that creates the debt in the first place? But if I don’t pay it off, actual children — not abstractions, but specific kids with specific names who like specific dinosaurs and struggle with specific math problems — will continue to experience real shame and real hunger tomorrow. The perfect threatens to become the enemy of the good, but the good threatens to become the enemy of the fundamental.

I don’t have clean resolutions to these contradictions. What I do have is a growing conviction that the either/or framing is itself part of the problem. We live in a culture increasingly oriented around false dichotomies — around the artificial polarization of complex issues into two opposed camps. You’re either focused on immediate relief or systemic change. You’re either practical or idealistic. You’re either working within the system or fighting against it.

But what if the truth is that we need all of these approaches simultaneously? What if paying off a specific child’s lunch debt today doesn’t preclude advocating for a complete structural overhaul tomorrow? What if the emotional resonance of specific, concrete actions is precisely what builds the coalition necessary for systemic change?

Maria Montalvo speaks with emotion, her eyes shining as she recounts her reading experiences. She says she especially enjoys books by Isabel Allende, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Erika L. Sánchez and John Grisham because, in her words, “reading makes you wiser and you learn how people live in other countries. It takes your mind to other places you can’t travel to.”

Montalvo isn’t an ordinary reader. During her incarceration at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility, a prison in New Jersey, she has participated in the activities of Freedom Reads, a nonprofit organization that has been promoting reading in U.S. prisons since 2020.

“Freedom Reads has brought books on different topics, and it’s very important to read because it makes you wiser,” Montalvo, 60, said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo. “Books change the prison climate; they change the way people think about themselves. This opens your mind and makes you want to change.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans have grown markedly more positive toward immigration over the past year, with the share wanting immigration reduced dropping from 55% in 2024 to 30% today. At the same time, a record-high 79% of U.S. adults say immigration is a good thing for the country.

These shifts reverse a four-year trend of rising concern about immigration that began in 2021 and reflect changes among all major party groups.

With illegal border crossings down sharply this year, fewer Americans than in June 2024 back hard-line border enforcement measures, while more favor offering pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.

These findings are based on a June 2-26 Gallup poll of 1,402 U.S. adults, including oversamples of Hispanic and Black Americans, weighted to match national demographics.

The same poll finds many more Americans disapproving than approving of President Donald Trump’s handling of immigration. Trump’s 21% approval rating on the issue among Hispanic adults is below his 35% rating nationally, with the deficit likely reflecting that group’s low support for some of the administration’s signature immigration policies.

What if planting a tree wasn’t a CSR activity, a school punishment, or a presidential photo op, but a national obligation?

Imagine if, like filing taxes or renewing your ID, every Kenyan was required by law or culture to plant a tree each year. Not as a suggestion. Not as a campaign. As a basic act of citizenship. You turn 18? Plant a tree. Want a business permit? Show us your sapling. Run for office? Let’s see your forest.

Wild? Maybe. But is it wilder than pretending we can survive ten more years of erratic rains, poisoned rivers, and cities that choke more than they breathe?

We have turned sustainability into an option. A luxury. A side show. But what if it became a rite of passage? A shared ritual that cuts across tribe, class, and county?

Developing nations are challenging Big Tech’s decades-long hold on global data by demanding that their citizens’ information be stored locally. The move is driven by the realization that countries have been giving away their most valuable resource for tech giants to build a trillion-dollar market capitalization.

In April, Nigeria asked Google, Microsoft, and Amazon to set concrete deadlines for opening data centers in the country. Nigeria has been making this demand for about four years, but the companies have so far failed to fulfill their promises. Now, Nigeria has set up a working group with the companies to ensure that data is stored within its shores.

“We told them no more waivers — that we need a road map for when they are coming to Nigeria,” Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, director-general of Nigeria’s technology regulator, the National Information Technology Development Agency, told Rest of World.

Other developing countries, including India, South Africa, and Vietnam, have also implemented similar rules demanding that companies store data locally. India’s central bank requires payment companies to host financial data within the country, while Vietnam mandates that foreign telecommunications, e-commerce, and online payments providers establish local offices and keep user data within its shores for at least 24 months.

A great city is typified by character and the character of great cities is often built on the bedrock of small businesses. Conversely: Chain shops smooth over the character of cities into anodyne nothingness. Think about a city you love — it’s likely because of walkability, greenery, great architecture, and fun local shops and restaurants. Only psychopaths love Manhattan because of Duane Reade. If you’ve ever wondered why overtourism can be a kind of death for parts of a city (the parts that involve: living there, commuting there, creating a life there) it’s because it paradoxically disincentivizes building small businesses.1 Nobody opens a tiny restaurant or café to be popular on a grand, viral scale. Nor do they open them to become rich.2

So why do people open small shops? For any number of reasons, but my favorite is: They have a strong opinion about how some aspect of a business should be run, and they want to double down on it. For example, forty years ago Terui-san, the owner of jazz kissa Kaiunbashi-no-Johnny’s up in Morioka, was like: Hmm, nobody is spinning wa-jyazu (Japanese jazz),3 so I’m only going to rock it. That led to a bunch of cool knock-on connections, not the least of which was a lifelong friendship with the incredible Akiyoshi Toshiko. That singular thing can drive an initial impulse, but small business purpose quickly shifts into: Being a community hub for a core group of regulars. That — community — is probably the biggest asset of small business ownership. And the quickest way to kill community (perhaps the most valuable gift for running a small business) is to go viral in a damaging way.

Slovenia’s liberal Prime Minister Robert Golob said on Friday that he intends to call a consultative referendum on the country’s NATO membership, following a surprise defeat in parliament over a related measure on defence spending.

"There are only two ways: either we remain in NATO and pay membership, or we leave the alliance – everything else is populist deceit of the citizens of Slovenia," Golob said, according to a government statement.

His referendum is expected to be formally tabled next week.

Golob’s gambit comes as part of a damage control effort in response to a successful initiative by The Left party, a junior partner in his centre-left coalition, pushing for a consultative referendum on increasing defence expenditure.

If you took a straw poll of the general public, chances are that few people would have any idea what space weather is, if they’ve ever heard the term at all. In contrast to terrestrial weather, space weather cannot be felt. It doesn’t warm your skin, drench your clothes or blow down your fence. Unlike the floods, droughts and hurricanes that have beset human civilizations since ancient times, it is not an age-old threat. For the first 10,000 years of human civilization, the sun’s flares and CMEs would have had no impact on life at all.

It is only since humanity constructed a planet-scale network of electromagnetic technologies, and subsequently grew to depend on that network for just about everything, that the sun’s activity became a potential hazard. In basic terms, the primary danger of space weather is its capacity to produce an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Upon making contact with the upper reaches of the atmosphere (the ionosphere), charged particles thrown out by the sun can instigate a “geomagnetic storm”, inducing currents in the Earth’s crust that overwhelm electrical equipment and its infrastructure, resulting in cascading malfunctions, power surges and blackouts. Anything that relies on electricity is vulnerable. Satellites, power grids, aviation, railways, communications, farming, heavy industry, military installations, global trade, financial transactions — the categories of vital systems that could be impacted by a sun-borne EMP are endless and interconnected, affecting every facet of our networked society.

The United Kingdom-based MOSWOC is one of only three institutions worldwide tasked with assessing and forecasting that risk. (The other two are in Boulder, Colorado, and Adelaide, Australia.) Each monitors solar activity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Low-severity space weather, like the expulsions Waite was scrutinizing during my visit, occurs all the time. During the solar maximum, MOSWOC usually records around 1,000 such events per year.

But playing at the back of every forecaster’s mind is the hypothetical centennial event, the moment when a sunspot might dispatch a solar storm at a scale that we know has happened historically, but never in our modern, technological age.

The curious paradox at the heart of space forecasting is that the satellites and supercomputers that empower the observations are themselves vectors of vulnerability. The more umbilical our relationship to technology becomes — the more our lives and livelihoods become governed by algorithms and automation — the greater the risk of disaster.