Society

The Washington Post just quietly pulled the plug on its police shooting database, “Fatal Force.” Don’t expect an apology or a reckoning. Don’t even expect an explanation. Because to acknowledge the full impact of that project would be to admit this: that for nearly a decade, the nation’s premier legacy newsroom helped manufacture and perpetuate a toxic narrative – that police officers are hunting black men in the streets with impunity.Let’s be clear, the “Fatal Force” database didn’t just compile data; it crafted a storyline. It presented fatal police shootings in isolation, stripped of context and devoid of nuance. No breakdown of the circumstances. No mention of weapons. No differentiation between justified use of force and actual misconduct.

President Trump appeared in the long hallway Saturday night, flanked by his Three Sons – J.D., Pete and Little Marco – to let us know he’d done the big violence in Iran. It was a somber moment, a war moment, though, as Trump said on Truth Social after he’d ordered the dropping of the Mother of All Bombs deep into the heart of old Persia, “NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE.”   Terry Southern, the screenwriter of Dr. Strangelove, couldn’t have dreamed up a line so darkly ironic, but Trump gifts us with daily comic diamonds, intentional and unintentional. Saturday’s crown jewel came at the conclusion of his statement, the time usually reserved for “God Bless America.

Zero-hour was approaching. A joint US-Israeli attack on the mullahs’ mountain fastness at Fordow seemed imminent. The B-52s were on the tarmac, the USS Nimitz had taken to sea, Ambassador Mike Huckabee was reaching for the smelling salts.  And then? A last-minute pause. “I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks,” said the President. Delays like these have now become a standard part of Trump’s box of tricks. If a drama – like the ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs of earlier this year – can be kept going for a little longer, then all the more time to extract further concessions from the opposing party. As negotiating tactics go there are certainly worse ones. But was there another reason?

One of the most disturbing pieces of recent documentary journalism follows Lily Philips, a petite blonde Englishwoman and popular OnlyFans creator, on a deeply unsettling quest: to sleep with 100 men in a single day. The footage, produced by YouTuber Josh Pieters and viewed more than 10 million times, doesn’t leave viewers shocked by her “empowerment," it leaves them queasy. Philips doesn’t come across as a liberated woman expressing her sexuality. She looks like the product of trauma. That look of trauma is more easily understood when it becomes clear that her mother is her manager. As a parent, I have a visceral reaction to my children being exposed to pornography, let alone participating in it.

Most Catholics were well aware of Joe Biden’s, at best, tepid observation of Catholic teachings as president.But even they will be aghast after a new report from the Senate Judiciary Committee uncovered the true breadth of a crackdown by the FBI – during the Biden administration – on “radical traditionalist” Catholics. In 2023, an FBI memo called for sources to be developed within parishes that offer the Latin Mass and online Catholic communities for the purpose of “threat mitigation.” At the time, the FBI retracted the memo after an outcry and said it was an isolated incident out of one field office. Now Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has discovered new evidence that casts serious doubt on that narrative.

If one were looking for dismal assessments of the Trump administration’s contributions to the vitality of American intellectual inquiry, the editorial eructations of Holden Thorp would likely be at the top of the list.   Thorp is the editor-in-chief of Science, the weekly journal of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This makes him one of the most influential figures in the academy and in American science as a whole. Few weeks go by without an editorial from Thorp denouncing the havoc wrought by Trump. The May 8 issue is mildly titled, “The New Reality for American Academe,” but the mildness ends there.

“We do not need loud, forceful communication,” said Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born American prelate Robert Prevost – at his first press conference on Monday, “but rather communication that is capable of listening and of gathering the voices of the weak who have no voice.”  His Holiness, who opened by thanking the 6,000 attendees in English before delivering his remarks in superb Italian, also called for freedom for imprisoned journalists, urged members of the Fourth Estate to avoid “ideological or partisan” language in their work and admonished them to pursue a “path of communication in favor of peace.

Josh is a five-foot-tall aspiring priest with a prosthetic leg who wears half a dozen assorted crucifixes and medals, causing him to jangle as he lopes around on crutches. He also carries so many holy cards in his pocket that you’d think he was worried about being spontaneously challenged to the Catholic equivalent of a Yu-Gi-Oh duel.But most importantly for my purposes, Josh will talk to you about Church politics until you’re ready to jam an aspergillum through your eardrum.When I first approached him, purely out of curiosity, he sent me an article from the National Catholic Reporter suggesting that the odds-on favorite, Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, was a paper tiger.

Was the first American Pope ushered in on a wave of suspect, last-minute betting? Something odd seems to have been happening on at least one online gambling platform – Polymarket – in the minutes before the new Pope was announced. I know because I happened to place a bet just before Pope Leo XIV walked out on the balcony of St. Peter’s – and watched the odds dramatically shortening before my eyes.   Before his election as Pope, Leo was Cardinal Robert Prevost. I’d barely heard the name until a week ago, when I joined a tour of the Vatican laid on by the Holy See press office. We were not, disappointingly, to be shown the Sistine Chapel, the world’s most splendid polling station for the few days of a papal election.