May 1, 2026

Photo credit: Justin Paget / DigitalVision via Getty Images

In 2021, California launched the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI) to address the state’s youth mental-health crisis. Amid a significant increase in hospital visits for self-harm and suicide, children were being left in emergency rooms, forced to travel hundreds of miles for treatment, and enrolled in short-term programs that failed to help them.

But rather than address these breakdowns in care, CYBHI focused on screening kids who weren’t in crisis to begin with. At a cost of more than $15 billion, the state turned schools into mental-health service providers and offered grants for “community-defined” practices—not evidence-based ones—including programs centered on progressive activism.

“Only a small share of the funds, by contrast, went toward securing psychiatric residential-treatment beds for the troubled kids at the heart of the state’s mental-health crisis,” Christina Buttons writes. “Far too few facilities were planned; five years later, none has opened.”

Read about how children have paid the price.

The Supreme Court’s decision earlier this week in Louisiana v. Callais “is a major win for those who oppose the balkanization of America into racially defined political blocs,” Dan Morenoff writes. The case involves the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits any procedure that denies the right to vote based on race.

Up to now, the Court had maintained “that the Constitution forbids the drawing of districts where race ‘predominated’ in the assignment of voters, unless that arrangement could meet strict scrutiny as serving a compelling interest in the least discriminatory way possible,” Morenoff explains. “Legal commenters long noted that this created a ‘Goldilocks’ problem, where states too ‘hot’ in their consideration of race violated the Constitution, while those too ‘cold’ in their treatment of same violated the VRA.”

The ruling finally resolves this paradox. Read about the case here.

Clean-energy advocates claim that the Strait of Hormuz crisis shows that it’s time for the world to move away from oil toward alternative energy sources. But we’ve tried this before, Mark Mills points out, and it hasn’t gone well.

Over the past two-and-a-half decades, the U.S. and Europe have spent more than $10 trillion on energy-transition policies. And yet, the world is using more oil today—not less. The only thing that has changed is the price of oil, which has skyrocketed since the Iran conflict began. “No radical new non-oil technologies have emerged or are visible on the near-term horizon,” Mills writes. Indeed, he observes, “energy markets in the post-Hormuz oil era will be shaped by how importing nations de-risk their oil supplies, not by how much they commit to funding alternative energy sources.”

Read more about how the war could reshape oil markets.