July 14, 2026

TYLER PASCIAK LARIVIERE/CHICAGO SUN-TIMES/AP PHOTO

In March, hundreds of black-clad teens swarmed through Washington, D.C.’s Navy Yard, robbing bystanders, fighting, and screaming. Over Memorial Day weekend, more than 1,000 teens rampaged through Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, jumping on cars, twerking, and fighting with police. That same weekend, a 16-year-old was shot and stores were looted at uncontrolled gatherings in Detroit.

Similar “teen takeovers” have occurred in cities across the country. Explanations for the phenomenon are just as numerous, writes Heather Mac Donald in the Summer 2026 issue of City Journal. Among the causes proffered: loneliness, Covid, emotional neediness, poverty, hunger, capitalism, a lack of “safe spaces” or “opportunities,” and too much law enforcement.

“None of these explanations withstands scrutiny,” Mac Donald maintains. The real solution is “a change in culture—both in the elite culture that excuses lawlessness in the name of racial justice and in urban black culture itself.”

Read more here.

The 2026 World Cup has demonstrated soccer’s growing popularity in the United States, but Major League Soccer’s salary cap is preventing the league from reaching its potential. Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Chris Pope argues that abolishing the cap would improve the quality of play, attract global talent, and boost attendance and television ratings. A more competitive MLS could eventually rival Europe’s leading leagues.

“Eliminating the salary cap would surely cause attendance and broadcast revenues to surge. U.S. crowds exceeding 70,000 for insignificant preseason games between European teams are already common,” Pope maintains. “A great improvement in the quality of MLS would be a boon to the development of homegrown players.”

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Artificial intelligence faces a political backlash even as its economic potential expands. Public opposition to AI infrastructure, especially data centers, is fueling moratoria and restrictions that could slow American innovation.

Manhattan Institute’s Jesse Arm and Sean Speer argue that supporters must build a bipartisan coalition around AI by emphasizing its ability to broaden opportunity for all. Research shows that AI delivers the largest productivity gains to less experienced workers, promotes entrepreneurship, and makes specialized skills more accessible. Arm and Speer propose a “diffusionist” approach focused on expanding access to AI, investing in the infrastructure needed to support it, and ensuring its benefits are widely shared before public opposition hardens.

“The window for building a pro-AI majority remains open,” they write. “But not indefinitely.” 

The Trump administration is pursuing two competing visions of mental-health policy. While the Department of Justice and other agencies have expanded involuntary treatment and psychiatric intervention for people with serious mental illness, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to reduce overprescribing and promote nonmedical alternatives.

Manhattan Institute’s Stephen Eide and Carolyn Gorman argue that these goals can coexist if MAHA’s skepticism of medication is limited to milder conditions rather than schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Untreated serious mental illness is a major factor in homelessness, incarceration, and premature death, so reform should prioritize intensive treatment for the most severely ill—and doing that means pushing back on MAHA’s skepticism of medical elites.

“Deference to expert medical authority is indispensable for treating serious mental illness,” Eide and Gorman maintain. “Indeed, with respect to questions such as when to commit someone to a hospital who doesn’t want to go, our mental-health system defers too much to lawyers and not enough to psychiatrists.”

Joshua Beasley Jr. entered the Texas juvenile justice system in 2018 at age 11, after a series of misdemeanor offenses. For five years, as his mental health and behavior continued to deteriorate, his mother struggled to secure the inpatient psychiatric care she believed her son needed. In 2023, after he turned 16, he was transferred to the state’s adult prison system. On March 24, he was found unresponsive in his cell, with a sheet tied around his neck.

“Joshua’s experience reflects a problem common in many states: an ongoing lack of residential psychiatric care,” writes Christina Buttons.

Youth residential mental-health treatment programs are declining nationwide. “The kids who once would have been helped by those programs did not disappear,” Buttons writes. “Instead, they increasingly entered other public systems, particularly the juvenile criminal-justice system.”

To prevent future tragedies like Joshua’s, she recommends rebuilding the “intensive residential treatment continuum.”

Read here for more.