November 11, 2026

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Last month, Colin Wright and Andrew Hartz published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the American Psychological Association (APA) and a recent conference of its Division 39, the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology. They noted how 70 of the event’s 90 panels had a political focus, while all of the talks were left-leaning and covered topics like “family abolition” and “queer anarchist psychoanalysis.” Indeed, they wrote, the APA now seems more interested in activism than caring for patients.

Division 39 President Dana Charatan responded to the op-ed in a letter, arguing that “patients are affected by systems in which they live” and accusing Wright and Hartz of making “biased assumptions about what belongs in psychological scholarship.”

“What makes Charatan’s response especially frustrating is how completely it ignored the specific examples we raised,” Wright and Hartz maintain. “We would genuinely like to know, for instance, what clinical skills therapists were expected to gain from a session titled ‘Feel the F—king Fantasy (Redux): Drag, Desire, and Queer Theory at WERK in Psychoanalysis,’ which concluded with a drag performance where attendees were encouraged to tip drag queens like strippers. Why was this considered appropriate for a professional psychology conference?”

Read more.

New York City parent Adriana Aviles had always believed her 14-year-old son’s math education was on the right track. In elementary through middle school, he had consistently received high grades. But then a bad test score revealed that he was struggling with fractions and basic algebra—skills he should have long since mastered.

Had she missed the signs? Yes, she had: her son’s seventh-grade state exam reported that he was “not proficient” in math, but she had discounted the result because of his good grades.

Aviles’s experience is an increasingly common one for parents, reports Neetu Arnold. A recent survey shows that parents tend to put more trust in report-card grades over standardized tests, but grade inflation is diluting the effectiveness of report cards as a measure of student learning. At the same time, education professionals have campaigned against standardized tests, further misleading parents.

“Report cards may have been trusted resources in the past. But they are increasingly gamed by schools,” writes Arnold. “Parents should pay more attention to standardized test results.”

Young Americans are resentful. Housing prices are sky-high. Less than half of millennials are doing better than their parents. Median net worth among those 75 and older rose 37 percent from 2022 to 2025 but fell 23 percent for those under age 35. Nearly half of young adults aged 18 to 29 still live at home.

A generational conflict appears to be brewing, but younger Americans should resist the anti-senior agenda, Joel Kotkin writes. Both generations need each other, and a war between them would be devastating.

“Burning down their grandparents’ world may feel satisfying in the moment, but the notion that older Americans had it easier is not convincing,” Kotkin argues. “Boomers faced interest rates as high as 17 percent and unemployment rates much higher than today.”

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The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is feeling emboldened, with its co-chair recently writing that “the socialist presence in Congress will soar to heights unseen in over a century.” Indeed, the midterm elections expanded the DSA’s House caucus from two to eight and added one to the Senate.

“At the same time, however, signs of awareness are emerging within DSA that its most radical factions and the public demands they place on elected members could backfire in a less favorable political climate,” Jake Altman writes, “jeopardizing recent electoral gains and damaging the broader socialist project.”

Elected officials, after all, have to navigate the realities of governance and reelection. Take New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He has resisted pressure from the far Left to fire Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch, as he knows that would hurt him politically.

Read more about the DSA’s looming challenges.