“Exposure to infants in the social environment,” economists Sebastian Galiani and Raul Sosa write in a recent paper, “activates neurobiological mechanisms that increase the desire for parenthood.” That is, babies are contagious. We’ve long known that. As a culture of rational sophisticates, we try to laugh off “baby fever” as an old wives’ tale. As […]

The United Nations General Assembly, led by Ghana, recently passed a resolution by a 123-3 vote declaring that the “transatlantic” slave trade was the “gravest crime” ever committed against humanity. The resolution demands “reparatory justice” for “Africans and people of African descent” due to its “scale, duration, systemic nature, and brutality.” Why focus just on the transatlantic […]

Many American progressives of different faiths, or no faith, celebrated the message delivered by Pope Leo XIV at St. Peter’s Basilica for the April 11 Prayer Vigil for Peace that, in other circumstances, they might have balked at. “Thoughts and prayers,” is shorthand for a kind of consolation after gun-related tragedies in the United States […]

The world is not short on bad news. Gas prices remain stubbornly elevated. Congress has lurched from one standoff to the next, the SAVE America Act is still grinding through the Senate, and a partial Department of Homeland Security shutdown is dragging into its fourth month. Overseas wars grind on. Americans looking for something to […]