July 22, 2026

Photo credit: Scott Olson / Staff / Getty Images News via Getty Images

Last week, Canadian wildfires shrouded the Midwest and Northeast in smoke, putting more than 100 million Americans under air-quality alerts. By Friday, about 900 wildfires were burning, with over 100 in northwestern Ontario alone.

Many have blamed climate change, which has certainly lengthened the fire season. But fires’ severity ultimately depends on how landscapes are managed. “Targeted fuels treatment—including forest thinning, brush clearance, and prescribed burning—removes the dense vegetation that causes wildfires to spread and intensify,” Shawn Regan and Sean Speer explain. “These treatments don’t necessarily keep fires from starting, but they reduce their intensity, restore more natural forest conditions, and give firefighters a better chance to contain blazes once they break out.”

In 2023, Canada’s prescribed burns treated only about 7,000 hectares—an area about the size of Manhattan. The U.S., meantime, treats millions of acres every year. Both countries need to expand their efforts.

Read more about the problem.

Earlier this week, a man used what appeared to be a device made of gasoline and fireworks to firebomb 26 Federal Plaza in New York City. On his wagon was a sign that read, “ICE off our streets!” He was armed with other weapons including knives, airsoft rifles, and a machete.

It’s no coincidence that attacks like these are on the rise, especially in New York, where public officials have increasingly spoken out against immigration enforcement. Mayor Zohran Mamdani is perhaps the best example—he has often described ICE “in a manner best reserved for genuinely oppressive government operations whose historical analogs might be found in West Germany, Mao’s China, or Stalin’s Russia,” Rafael A. Mangual writes. “He referred to immigration arrests as ‘kidnappings’ reflective of a boundless ‘cruelty.’”

Read more.

After George Floyd’s death in 2020, Black Lives Matter promoted ideas like defunding the police and shutting down American prisons. Now, with several DSA-affiliated candidates scoring a number of recent electoral victories, those proposals have resurfaced.

But why would anyone support such extreme ideas?

“The assumption is that prisons filled with the poor function as weapons of class suppression, maintained by the entire criminal-justice apparatus, including courts and police,” Barry Latzer writes.

It’s true that most prisoners are poor, and most of them are minorities. But what about their victims? In 2023, blacks made up a massive 56 percent of homicide victims—four times their share of the U.S. population.

“Socialist claims would gain more cogency if they offered an alternative to prison,” Latzer observes, “but the principal left-wing proposal—restorative justice—is totally inadequate.”

Read why.