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The historian Bernard Lewis once offered sage advice to any group that faces adverse circumstances: “The question, ‘Who did this to us?’ has led only to neurotic fantasies and conspiracy theories. The other question—‘What did we do wrong?’—has led naturally to a second question, ‘How do we put it right?’ In that question … lie[s] the best hope for the future.”

For the party of the president to do well in a midterm election is very rare: 2002, 1998, 1962, and 1934 are the exceptions over the past century or so. In all four of those exceptional years, the president’s party was buoyed by some affirmative factor: a rally around the flag after 9/11, the economic boom of the late 1990s, relief after the Cuban missile crisis, the beginnings of recovery from the Great Depression.

This year was one in which all the indicators seemed negative for the party of the president: right-track/wrong-track numbers, presidential approval ratings, and optimism about the future. Yet Biden’s party won and won and won again despite the negative indicators.

John Kenneth Galbraith assessed the trajectory of America’s increasingly “affluent society.” His outlook was not a happy one. The nation’s increasingly evident material prosperity was not making its citizens any more satisfied. Nor, at least in its existing form, was it likely to do so

One reason, Galbraith argued, was the glaring imbalance between the opulence in consumption of private goods and the poverty, often squalor, of public services like schools and parks

nother was that even the bountifully supplied private goods often satisfied no genuine need, or even desire; a vast advertising apparatus generated artificial demand for them, and satisfying this demand failed to provide meaningful or lasting satisfaction.

“I consider Mark and Elon to be role models to children in their embrace of fighting,” Andreessen writes.

Modern American society, at least in the big cities, is turning on law enforcement and tolerating crime, so you need combat skills to protect your loved ones. We are also fat and depressed, and learning to fight might help on both counts. In conclusion, “if it was good enough for Heracles and Theseus, it’s good enough for us.”

what caught my eye was the veneration of the virile aggression of the Greeks, the call to rediscover the ways of the ancients. A list of things that were good enough for the Greeks but not good enough for us would run long: Slavery, pederasty and bloodletting come to mind

Jack Bogle is ready to declare victory. Four decades ago, a mutual-fund industry graybeard warned him that he would “destroy the industry.” Mr. Bogle’s plan was to create a new mutual-fund company owned not by the founding entrepreneur and his partners but by the shareholders of the funds themselves. This would keep overhead low for investors, as would a second part of his plan: an index fund that would mimic the performance of the overall stock market rather than pay genius managers to guess which stocks might go up or down.

Not even Warren Buffett has minted more millionaires than Jack Bogle has—and he did so not by helping them get lucky, but by teaching them how to earn the market’s long-run, average return without paying big fees to Wall Street.

“When the climate really gets bad, I’m not some statue out there. But when I get knots in my stomach, I say to myself, ‘Reread your books,’ ” he says. Mr. Bogle has written numerous advice books on investing, including 2007’s “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing,” which remains a perennial Amazon best seller—and all of them emphasize not trying to outguess the markets.

Governing during this era will require extraordinary levels of experienced statesmanship — running industrial programs that don’t become bloated, partially deglobalizing the economy without setting off trade wars, steadily outcompeting China without humiliating it. If China realizes it is falling further behind every year, then an invasion of Taiwan may be more imminent.

Miller was asked what were the odds that over the next five years a dangerous military clash between the United States and China would produce an economic crisis equivalent to the Great Depression. He put the odds at 20 percent.

This stretch of Broadway has in recent years gained the nickname “the Canyon of Heroes,” which makes the inclusion of Pétain and Laval feel wrong to many people, and that is understandable. But the actual tributes to Pétain and Laval were the parades, which we cannot take back. The names along the sidewalk don’t inherently celebrate anyone. Instead, they only hold us to account about whom we once considered heroes.

At the time of their parades, at least, Pétain and Laval had not yet revealed themselves to be traitors and war criminals. Pétain was still the “Lion of Verdun,” the general credited with saving France during the darkest moments of World War I. Laval was prime minister of a still unbowed France, soon to be named Time’s “Man of the Year” for his efforts to end the Great Depression.

Yet we have also knowingly thrown parades for white supremacists, dictators, kleptocrats, mass murderers — and, yes, fascists we already knew to be fascists. Air Marshal Italo Balbo was already infamous as one of the Blackshirts most responsible for bringing Italy under fascist rule when he was celebrated in New York in 1933 for leading a fleet of seaplanes across the Atlantic.

The notion behind the commercial is fairly obvious. Apple wants to show you that the bulk of human ingenuity and history can be compressed into an iPad, and thereby wants you to believe that the device is a desirable entry point to both the consumption of culture and the creation of it.

Most important, it wants you to know that the iPad is powerful and quite thin.

But good Lord, Apple, read the room. In its swing for spectacle, the ad lacks so much self-awareness, it’s cringey, even depressing.

The same inflationary forces that pushed these prices higher have also pushed wages to be 22 percent higher than on the eve of the pandemic. Official statistics show that the stuff that a typical American buys now costs 20 percent more over the same period. Some prices rose a little more, some a little less, but they all roughly rose in parallel.

It follows that the typical worker can now afford two percent more stuff. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s a faster rate of improvement than the average rate of real wage growth over the past few decades.

many folks feel that they’re falling behind, even when a careful analysis of the numbers suggests they’re not.