Check out these recent articles from around the web:

The Art of Choosing What to Do With Your Life by Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey: “Our educational system focuses obsessively on helping students take the next step. But it does not give them adequate assistance in thinking about the substance of the lives toward which they are advancing. Many institutions today have forgotten that liberal education itself was meant to teach the art of choosing, to train the young to use reason to decide which endeavors merit the investment of their lives.”

Making Pregnancy Safer by Jessica Keating Floyd: “Pro-life activists should not imagine that one can build an authentic culture of life without greater public investment in health care and social services. But pro-choice activists, politicians, and journalists should not pretend that the only way to protect women from life-threatening complications of pregnancy is to ensure that they have unrestricted access to elective abortion, or that we know more about the relative risks of abortion and pregnancy than we actually do. The sooner we come to terms with these realities and let the needs of vulnerable mothers and babies dictate our policies, the sooner we can do the important work of making pregnancy as safe in the United States as it is elsewhere in the world.”

‘A Crisis Coming’: The Twin Threats to American Democracy by David Leonhardt: “The makeup of the federal government reflects public opinion less closely than it once did. And the chance of a true constitutional crisis — in which the rightful winner of an election cannot take office — has risen substantially. That combination shows that American democracy has never faced a threat quite like the current one.”

Six months of war in Ukraine and the moral stakes are still high by Michael Sean Winters: “The battle in Ukraine is not only between Ukraine and Russia but between closedness and openness, between ethnic nationalism and cosmopolitanism, between “might makes right” and the messy, frustrating, complicated style of democracy that we in the West have built. The people of Ukraine are fighting for us, not just for themselves.”

Trump should fill Christians with rage. How come he doesn’t? Image without a caption by Michael Gerson: “Leaders in the Republican Party have fed, justified and exploited conservative Christians’ defensiveness in service to an aggressive, reactionary politics. This has included deadly mask and vaccine resistance, the discrediting of fair elections, baseless accusations of gay “grooming” in schools, the silencing of teaching about the United States’ history of racism, and (for some) a patently false belief that Godless conspiracies have taken hold of political institutions.”

Marriage is Increasingly an Institution of the Highly Religious: Why That Might Be a Problem by Brian J. Willoughby: “Marriage is slowly becoming an institution mostly utilized by the religious, who continue to view marriage as a symbolic representation of life-long commitment to one’s partner.”

How to Fix America’s Child-Pornography Crisis by David French: “America is in the grips of two kinds of child-pornography problems. The first involves the production of child pornography itself—the abuse of children photographed, filmed, and monetized. The second involves the remarkably early age at which children are now exposed to pornography, when they start to see the images that shape their minds and hearts.”

My Hopes and Fears for My Children as They Go Back to School by Tish Harrison Warren: “The new school year is also a time when, yet again, I must practice letting my kids go. A mentor of mine whose children are now adults told me that for each new stage they entered, he felt delight and joy, and at the exact same time, he grieved losing the stage before. This is the complex melody of parenting. From the time the cord is cut till your children grow into adults, parenthood is a long practice in loving deeply yet letting go. Over and over again.”

A Berkeley professor’s Senate testimony didn’t go how the left thinks it did by Megan McArdle: “In most of America, “Does a late-term fetus have value?” is a softball. And when Hawley leaped in to ask whether women are the ones who give birth — a question few Americans today would struggle with — she resorted to extended question-begging. That might be fine for a Berkeley classroom. But it just won’t do for a political debate in which the majority of voters disagree with you.”

Influencers are whitewashing Syria’s regime, with help from sponsors by Sophie Fullerton: “It’s clear these influencers don’t want to deal with the political and ethical implications of their travel. We can’t police people’s consciences. But we can question whether the companies sponsoring such tourism are violating the sanctions placed on the regime because of its human rights violations.”

There’s More Than One Way to Ban a Book by Pamela Paul: “We shouldn’t capitulate to any repressive forces, no matter where they emanate from on the political spectrum. Parents, schools and readers should demand access to all kinds of books, whether they personally approve of the content or not. For those on the illiberal left to conduct their own campaigns of censorship while bemoaning the book-burning impulses of the right is to violate the core tenets of liberalism. We’re better than this.”