Check out these recent articles from around the web:

How the Catholic Church has protected elections around the world by Maria J. Stephan: “The Catholic Church’s opposition to election manipulation has involved a wide range of activities, including truth-telling through sermons and pastoral letters; building bridges across communities; violence mitigation efforts; and participating in peaceful protests, strikes and other forms of noncooperation to uphold democratic principles and the rule of law.”

Status Defines Friendship for Too Many Americans by Christine Emba: “If loneliness really is a public health crisis, it’s the responsibility of government and institutions, not just the market, to begin offering solutions. Connection is, or at least should be, a public good.”

What becoming a father taught me about God by Zac Davis: “Besides helping to care for my grandmother in her final days, this is the closest I have come to living the paschal mystery of Jesus Christ’s life, death and resurrection. Every day I grieve for the Madeleine of yesterday, and stand ready to encounter the Madeleine of today, and hope and pray for the Madeleine of tomorrow.”

The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs by Michael Powell: “From 2014 to 2024, roughly 862,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, more than twice the toll of the previous decade. Several studies have shown that addicts who shoot up at official injection sites are far less likely to die of overdoses than those who use drugs in, say, alleyways and parks. Over the past decade, however, overdose-death rates climbed sharply in nearly every city where the strongest harm-reduction policies were in place, and even with declines in the past two years, the rates remain well above those of previous decades.”

Why I Quit the Tenure Track by Tyler Austin Harper: “By 1980, as many as two-thirds of American college professors were tenured. Today, only about a quarter are. We went from a world where most faculty members could say what they think without fear of being fired to one where most people teaching college courses have to worry that their contract won’t be renewed if they cause intellectual offense. It is not surprising that a professoriat disproportionately composed of contract workers would also be one that could be pressured into groupthink.”

Dignity Denied by Terence Sweeney: “While MacIntyre’s thought is inimical to Trumpism, his Catholic appropriators are carrying intellectual water for a noxious regime while tossing aside Church teaching. May I propose they listen not only to the Magisterium, but also to the degraded, denied, detained, and deported. They could start with the migrants trapped in detention centers, those whom the Vicar of Christ says need to be treated with the dignity that is theirs.”

Vice Cannot Build Virtue by Nathan Beacom: “We sometimes seem to think that we can deceive, massage the truth, manipulate, propagandize, tolerate corruption, and sow division so long as, at the end of the day, we win political influence and push our policies through. But you can see how this becomes a race to the bottom indeed, as competing factions with competing ends concur only on the underhanded means they will use to achieve victory. One side’s lowering of moral standards lowers the bar for the other. A culture of cynicism develops in which everyone assumes that other actors are acting in bad faith and, as a result, makes excuses for their own bad faith.”

Labor Day in the age of Artificial Intelligence: The worker must remain at the center by Robert Stewart: “A ‘virtue economy’ asks: Can workers support their families? Is employment safe and meaningful? Are the vulnerable protected? Is wealth serving the common good? Are the benefits and burdens of change shared fairly? Are workers free to organize? Does development leave people more human – or more disposable?”

My Question for the Formerly Woke by Carlos Lozada: “If you can dismiss it so casually now — all the defunding and abolishing, the BIPOCing and Latinxing, the canceling and decentering and my truthing — how much of it did you truly believe at the time? How much was conviction, how much was a pose, how much was groupthink, how much was fear? If you did believe it, jettisoning it now should take something more than a sheepish grin. If you didn’t believe it and yet declared it with such passion, with such pretensions to moral clarity, with such disdain for contrary perspectives, then the least you can do now is acknowledge that dissonance. You should explain the shift, not just explain it away.”

With time limits and stronger age checks, Meta’s new rules for kids go further. Critics say it’s not enough by Barbara Ortutay: “Kids under 18 will soon see a host of changes to their Instagram and Facebook experiences thanks to a historic $18 billion settlement Meta Platforms reached Wednesday with 48 U.S. states. Besides the money, which will be paid out over a decade, Meta has agreed to strengthen its age estimates to keep kids under 13 off its platforms and teens in age-appropriate accounts, enact a hard limit of two hours a day for users under 18, block kids from the apps from midnight to 6 a.m., and hide ‘like’ counts, among other changes.”

America Is Atomizing by Jesse McKinley: “Atomization has dangerous historical precedents, too. Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher widely credited with popularizing the idea, saw the phenomenon as a precursor to regimes like the Nazis and Stalinist Russia.”