Bump Stock Ruling & Pope Joins G7 | Afternoon Update | 6.14.24

After a string of controversial Supreme Court rulings, many are calling for reform to counter what they see as the court’s increasingly partisan bent. But if we were to reform the court, could we do it without making it more partisan?

A Promised Land is Barack Obama’s memoir of his early political career and the first two years of his presidency. Obama takes us on his journey from relative obscurity as a biracial kid from Hawaii to becoming a transformative figure as the nation’s first African-American president. At every step of his career, Obama was guided by a deep faith in the fundamental unity of Americans; the potential and promise of America; the necessity of compromise and seeking common ground; and above all, the power of the democratic system to heal our divisions and effect real change for ordinary people.

Following the 2016 US presidential election, pundits argued that the 81% of evangelical Christians who voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton viewed him as the lesser of two evils. But, according to historian Kristin Du Mez, this explanation is misguided. In Jesus and John Wayne (2020), she argues that evangelicals endorsed Trump because he was the paradigm of militant masculinity that became orthodox among evangelicals in the last century.

In this guide, we’ve organized Du Mez’s analysis into four historical eras of evangelical masculinity. We’ll discuss: how the first and second World Wars caused evangelicals to shift toward a militant view of masculinity; how the Vietnam War and the feminist movement entrenched this view of masculinity in the ’60s and ’70s; how the lack of a military opponent in the ’90s caused this view to soften; and, finally, how the impact of 9/11 and the Obama presidency created a sense of embattlement that led evangelicals to support Trump in 2020.

The election of Donald Trump has sparked a great deal of discussion about the fate of American democracy. How Democracies Die explores some key questions that have become paramount in the Trump era. Does the election of a figure like Trump—an inexperienced outsider with obvious authoritarian instincts—suggest that democracy in the US is backsliding? Are we doomed to suffer the fate of other 21st-century democracies, like Hungary, Venezuela, and Turkey, where true democracy ceased to exist? By what processes was democracy killed in those and other countries—and how might we prevent it here?

In The God Delusion, University of Oxford biologist and anti-religion activist Richard Dawkins seeks to demystify religion and discredit faith. He explores the unlikelihood of God’s existence; how evolution by natural selection explains the centrality of religion to the human experience; and how religion promotes immoral values, impoverishes the human mind, and provides justification for intolerance and persecution. He argues that ultimately, we as humans must free ourselves from our self-imposed shackles by destroying faith and religion and positively embracing the full potential of our species.

Hailed as this one of this generation’s most innovative entrepreneurs, Elon Musk has built several industry-disrupting businesses, and he’s known for shooting for the moon—or more literally, Mars. Technology journalist Ashlee Vance spent almost 50 hours interviewing Musk and talked to around 300 people close to him to produce this biography, which presents new insights into Musk’s life and businesses.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Musk’s childhood and early companies. Then we’ll talk about his roles in SpaceX and Tesla, and later, in SolarCity. Finally, we’ll discuss the traits and management methods that helped Musk succeed throughout his entrepreneurial career. Along the way, we’ll provide updated information about Musk and his companies, as well as perspectives from other experts on business success and key management strategies.

Elon Musk is one of the modern age’s most controversial figures. He’s made commercial spaceflight a viable business and brought electric cars into public awareness, but the way that Musk presents himself has led many to see him as disruptive toward society. His drive and lack of empathy have stirred up chaos in the companies he owns, and his need for absolute control of his businesses silenced criticism that he may have found useful.

Renowned biographer Walter Isaacson shadowed Musk for two years, gaining access to his thoughts and those of the people closest to him. In this guide, we’ll follow Isaacson on Musk’s journey from a traumatic South African childhood to his founding of SpaceX and Tesla, as well as his takeover of Twitter. We’ll compare the views of Musk’s supporters and detractors while giving context to his innovations and decisions that have shaped the path of technological progress.

In Why We’re Polarized, American progressive journalist, political commentator, and podcaster Ezra Klein argues that Americans are divided into two sharply contrasting groups rooted in partisan identities.

He writes that the clustering of nearly the entire electorate into the Democratic and Republican camps is a story about identity. Specifically, our partisan political identities have become overarching super-identities that encompass and activate our most deeply felt personal, religious, linguistic, socioeconomic, and ethnic/racial identities. In today’s America, these underlying lines of division all come together in one main division—between Democrats and Republicans—that makes bipartisan cooperation increasingly difficult.

In this guide, we explore the origins of modern political polarization and its differing impact on the two major political parties, how polarization has made American politics a winner-take-all struggle, and ideas for how we might depolarize our politics. We also supplement Klein’s ideas and analysis with commentary from other political scholars and analysts and explore additional perspectives that both support and challenge Klein.

Americans are increasingly identifying as non-religious. Churches are closing across the country. In this article we’ll examine what that could mean for the political future of America—and why appearances may be deceiving.