May 11, 2026

Photo credit: Gary Coronado / Contributor / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Theodore Dalrymple’s book, Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, was published 25 years ago, and yet its warnings feel entirely contemporary. During his time as a doctor in London’s inner-city hospitals and prisons, Dalrymple witnessed pervasive poverty and its power to erode any sense of meaning or hope. He observed these conditions while many intellectuals mocked self-restraint and family structures, and portrayed police officers as oppressive.

“Those utopian notions seeped down into Dalrymple’s wards, where they wreaked havoc on those least equipped to resist,” Robert Henderson writes. Henderson witnessed that havoc firsthand, moving through unstable foster homes as a child. It was during his college years at Yale that he first encountered Dalrymple’s work—and found it especially relevant.

“Like many upwardly mobile individuals who encounter members of the ‘luxury belief’ class,” Henderson writes, “I was mystified to hear elite university students deride marriage, family stability, personal responsibility, self-control—the very norms that had fueled their rise and served as my ladder out of chaos.”

Read more.

Last week, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced that she would enroll the state in the One Big Beautiful Bill’s tax credit for Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs). That means that starting next year, taxpayers can claim a $1,700 federal tax credit when they donate to SGOs, which support children’s education via tutoring, scholarships, and other expenses. The program, John Ketcham writes, “will not only help students in tuition-dependent private and religious schools but also cover expenses such as after-school programs, books, supplemental instruction, and tutoring for students in traditional public schools and charter schools.”

Read more about Hochul’s move, which Ketcham says prioritizes students over teachers’ unions.

More than half (59 percent) of public flagship universities evaluated in the City Journal College Rankings mandate that students take DEI courses. Similarly, 57 percent of private liberal arts colleges, 45 percent of private research universities, and 27 percent of Ivy League and “Ivy Plus” universities require them.

Meantime, just three of the 61 universities mandating a DEI course for graduation also require a class on government or history. “In practice, then, colleges and universities are not crafting graduation requirements that supplement a dedicated focus on civic education with insights from DEI—instead, they are supplanting curriculum on U.S. government and American history with courses that emphasize identity, power, and inequality,” Kevin Wallsten writes.

The consequences have been stark. Read on about how little knowledge American students have of U.S. history, and how Wallsten says colleges can correct the imbalance.

In their new book Muskism, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff appear to want to diminish Elon Musk, giving the impression that he earned his wealth not through skill—but luck.

It’s true, of course, that Tesla successfully lobbied for electric vehicle tax credits, which accounted for 43 percent of the company’s net income in the first three quarters of 2024. “But showing that Musk’s ventures depend on the government is not the same as reducing him to his historical and economic context,” Russ Greene writes. “Other entrepreneurs and companies bid on those same government contracts, applied for the same loan programs, and lobbied for the same tax credits. Musk’s success is grand enough that one cannot explain it away as mere bureaucratic largesse or lobbying skill.”

Read Greene’s review.