Check out these recent articles from around the web:

Whoopi Goldberg’s American Idea of Race by Adam Serwer: “The Nazi Holocaust in Europe and slavery and Jim Crow in the United States are outgrowths of the same ideology—the belief that human beings can be delineated into categories that share immutable biological traits distinguishing them from one another and determining their potential and behavior. In Europe, with its history of anti-Jewish persecution and violent religious divisions, the conception of Jews as a biological “race” with particular characteristics was used by the Nazis to justify the Holocaust. In the United States, the invention of race was used to justify the institution of chattel slavery, on the basis that Black people were biologically suited to permanent servitude and unfit for the rights the nation’s Founders had proclaimed as universal. The American color line was therefore much more forgiving to European Jews than the divisions of the old country were. But they are branches of the same tree, the biological fiction of race.”

It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart by Jennifer Senior: “Yet it’s precisely because of the atomized, customized nature of our lives that we rely on our friends so very much. We are recruiting them into the roles of people who once simply coexisted with us—parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, fellow parishioners, fellow union members, fellow Rotarians. It’s not wholly natural, this business of making our own tribes. And it hardly seems conducive to human thriving.”

Annett’s ‘Cathonomics’ should be required reading in Catholic business schools by Michael Sean Winters: “Economist Anthony Annett has delivered a book that should be required reading not only for those of us who have long been interested in Catholic social doctrine, but for anyone who is serious about bringing their Catholic faith to bear on decisions relating to public life. Cathonomics: How Catholic Tradition Can Create a More Just Economy should especially find its way onto the required reading list at every Catholic business school.”

Deleted Tweets Reveal a Progressive Group’s Ukraine Meltdown by William Bredderman: “A self-styled “institution of progressive popular education” founded by a former U.S. senator and backed by top left-of-center intellectuals and leaders spent the days and weeks ahead of the bloody Russian assault on Ukraine pumping out misinformation, experts say. Now it is desperately attempting to backtrack, in part by deleting tweets.”

What Putin Fears Most by Robert Person and Michael McFaul: “Putin may dislike NATO expansion, but he is not genuinely frightened by it. Russia has the largest army in Europe, now much more capable after two decades of lavish spending. NATO is a defensive alliance. It has never attacked the Soviet Union or Russia, and it never will. Putin knows that. But Putin is threatened by a successful democracy in Ukraine. He cannot tolerate a successful, flourishing, and democratic Ukraine on his borders, especially if the Ukrainian people also begin to prosper economically. That undermines the Kremlin’s own regime stability and proposed rationale for autocratic state leadership. Just as Putin cannot allow the will of the Russian people to guide Russia’s future, he cannot allow the people of Ukraine, who have a shared culture and history, to choose the prosperous, independent, and free future that they have voted for and fought for.”

Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin’s Two Wars by Sergei Chapnin: “Patriarch Kirill is not ready to defend his flock—neither the people of Ukraine nor the people of Russia—against Putin’s aggressive regime. Human suffering is not one of his priorities.”

Paul Farmer Invented a New Way of Caring for One Another by Ashish K. Jha: “Paul inspired generations of medical and public-health students and practitioners to reach beyond their self-imposed limitations and do more.”

4 lessons for a post-Roe world from Fannie Lou Hamer: a pro-life, civil rights icon by Chris Crawford: “Fannie Lou Hamer continued to fight so passionately for the right to vote because she understood that voting was fundamental to the protection of all of the other rights. All the issues for which we advocate, including the right to life, rely upon free and fair elections and a democracy that serves the will of the people. Pro-life leaders should strongly oppose voter suppression and efforts to subvert the results of free and fair elections. Even if we do not like the results of an election, the pro-life movement should not give cover to false claims of voter fraud or otherwise sow doubt about accurate results. The just ends of legal protection of unborn children should not be sought through means that would undermine our democratic republic.”

The Five-Day Workweek Is Dying by Derek Thompson: “Americans really, really don’t want to go back to the office, and we are just beginning to feel the repercussions.”