December 18, 2025

IT ISN’T THAT HARD: Studying the humanities is hard, and that’s a good thing.

As attention spans dwindle, even among students at elite schools, humanities departments are struggling to attract students, he writes. Many colleges are trying to persuade students the humanities are “relevant” and “practical.”

That’s not going to work, writes Williams, who teaches about books and ideas at Bard. “For humanities departments to continue to matter, they must challenge the modern world rather than accommodate it.”

He’ll teach two spring seminars this year, one on Albert Camus and his influences, the other on the idea of the American dream through Black writers such as Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin. His “bright, self-selecting” students say they’re “eager they are to immerse themselves in the texts,” he writes. But their zeal doesn’t last when they realize that close reading is difficult. “By the end of the semester, only a fraction seem to have gotten through the texts and writing assignments without outsourcing at least some of their work to AI.”

Humanities instruction — at least without lefty deconstruction — largely fell by the wayside long before AI. Probably because teaching the humanities leads to a deep appreciation for Western culture.

Posted at 3:51 pm by Stephen Green

PUBLIC LIBRARY DECLINE: Roughly two of every three public libraries in America have major facility maintenance problems that Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigators say will cost beaucoup bucks to fix. And the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) — the nation’s Report Card on how its public schools are performing — produced the worst reading scores ever among graduating high school seniors.

Posted at 3:21 pm by Mark Tapscott

ANALYSIS: TRUE. That ‘Superflu?’ It’s the Flu, Nothing More.

Don’t get me wrong. The Influenza virus is no small thing.

Well, yes, it is, but you know what I mean. It can be very dangerous for many people, and even if it doesn’t put you in the hospital, it is one of the most miserable experiences to get the flu. I am pretty much a hermit these days, spending all my time spewing out words onto a computer screen, but even I know that getting the flu really sucks.

But it has always sucked, and this strain of influenza is, so far, not causing more hospitalizations per case, but is instead a bit more common than in many years because they blew it when formulating the vaccine, and even when they get it right, the flu vaccine is not especially effective compared to most. Respiratory viruses are much harder to vaccinate against than something like smallpox.

Still, people are being bombarded with stories about the “superflu” that is sending droves of people to the hospital. Newsflash, folks: hundreds of thousands of people a year are hospitalized by the flu every year in the US, because the flu is awful and dangerous if you are especially vulnerable. And as the population ages, it will get even more so.

I gave up on flu shots years ago because the results were just too hit and miss to bother with them, and I’m not in any risk groups.

But I have since added l-lysine and zinc to my supplements during flu season, along with doubling up on the vitamin C.

Knock on wood, I haven’t the flu in years — and just going by personal history, “should” have caught it once or twice by now.

Posted at 2:49 pm by Stephen Green

MARK JUDGE: The Most Explosive Book of 2026.

Yes, they waged war on us.

That’s the simplest way to summarize what the government, technocratic elite, security state, and media did to the American people in 2016. It’s also the premise behind what is sure to be the most important and explosive book of 2026. That book, The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control by Jacob Siegel, explores the ways the crazed reactions of these parts of society to the arrival of Donald Trump drove them to label him “a threat to American democracy” and take actions that, ironically, turned them into the very threat they tried to warn us against.

Worse, that justification for their actions turned this elite class not just against Trump but against the people who supported him. Trump’s rise, Siegel, writes,

“meant that politics had become war, as it is in many parts of the world, and tens of millions of Americans were the enemy. With Russian active measures having supposedly penetrated the Internet, anything said online could be attributed to Moscow.”

The great value of The Information State is how well it is organized, brilliantly it is written, and carefully it marshals the evidence that makes its case. There were agencies, within agencies, within agencies who were involved in spying, censorship, peddling false stories, and attempting to ruin lives. The media was essential to the effort and is unlikely, ever, to regain the public trust. Yet behind these Byzantine departments erected to combat “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation”—that last just meaning any opinion with which our elites disagreed—there is one simple truth: With the arrival of Trump, America’s elite institutions waged war against their own people.

And never forget this part: “That madness began with people like John Brennan of the CIA, James Comey of the FBI, and President Barack Obama.”

Posted at 1:47 pm by Stephen Green

ROUTINE BUT NEVER BORING:

I asked Grok to look at the record number of launches set each year by company, going back to 2005. Here are the results:

2005–2017: No single entity exceeded ~30 launches in a year. Russian state launches (via Roscosmos/RKK Energia) peaked around 25–30 in some years, but no major records were set in this timeframe compared to later surges.

2018: China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) – ~39 launches. China set a new modern-era high for a single organization, surpassing previous annual totals by any entity in the post-Cold War period.

2023: SpaceX – 98 launches (96 Falcon 9 + Falcon Heavy missions)
SpaceX more than doubled China’s mark, largely due to Starlink deployments and reusable Falcon 9 technology.

2024: SpaceX – ~134 launches (132–134 Falcon family missions)
SpaceX broke its own record again, with the Falcon 9 fleet alone achieving a Guinness-recognized high for a single rocket model.

2025 (as of December 18): SpaceX – 165 launches. SpaceX already set a new annual record mid-year, continuing the trend of rapid cadence growth. No other company (e.g., CASC in China, ~50–60 launches/year recently) comes close.

It really is SpaceX versus the world.

Posted at 12:45 pm by Stephen Green

DISPATCHES FROM THE LOST GENERATION:

The (very) lengthy tweet concludes with a reference to the above photo

I remember visiting a media company around 2015 that was very “hot” at the time, and the news floor was a sea of very young and hip-looking faces, mostly women and POC. Every once in a while a Steve Ballmer-looking guy in pleated khakis would emerge grinning from a corner office for a coffee refill. He’d peer out over the open-plan desks and hear fingers busily tapping on Macbooks. I sometimes wonder if that guy was smiling because he took pride in being a force for change, or if he was just waiting out the clock, and thinking about that lakehouse on Zillow.

***

My favorite memory from this era is this picture of a dozen white women, which was tweeted out in 2016 with the caption: Notice anything about this Huffington Post editors meeting?” Some poor girl thought this was going to be an iconic image of a bold new media era, where finally women would have a voice, only for it to be roundly ridiculed across dozens of thinkpieces for not including enough POC.”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll