Compact Magazine

This year, Lula da Silva, Brazil’s incumbent president, will run for a fourth term. The man he defeated in 2023, Jair Bolsonaro, is in prison, so the former president’s son, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, is running in his stead. An indication of how tightly contested the election will be came on June 24, when Jair’s wife, former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro, released a video on Instagram declaring she wouldn’t support her stepson because he was rude to her on a phon

Your daughter’s smile is dearer to you than that of a stranger half a world away. Of course it is. Human life is situated and embodied, and so are our obligations and loves. But the ideology that holds sway over many Silicon Valley elites diagnoses this preference for those near and dear to you as an evolutionary defect. Instead, according to the adherents of this worldview, every sentient being in every place, in every time, holds the same moral claim on every other. This philosophy is k

As the left in most Western countries digs ever deeper into its decade-long debacle, postmortems have become an increasingly prominent genre of left discourse. One of the few genuinely lucid practitioners of this genre is Maurice Glasman, the British peer and founder of Blue Labour, the socially conservative and economically socialist current within the British Labour party. In recent weeks, Glasman has frequently been asked to give his opinion on the implosion of Keir Starmer’s prime min

The Frenchmen: or, My Life in TheoryBy Emily EakinPenguin Press, 471 pages, $35Jean-Luc Godard called the French generation of the 1960s “the children of Marx and Coca Cola”; for my part, I am in some sense a child of French Theory. When I was a babbling baby, my graduate student mother wrote a poem chronicling my first efforts at speech laced with allusions to the ideas of Jacques Lacan; around that time, my father was finishing up a dissertation on the poetry of John Milton, unde

Although President Trump is often unpredictable, he has been consistent on one issue throughout his presidency: Iran will never be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump lambasted the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) as a “terrible” deal that gave Iran too much sanctions relief and protected its enrichment capacity. Once in office, he withdrew the United States from the agreement. Since then, Trump has used a combination of

For months you’ve heard that Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey is a debacle of woke, foisted on us as a mockery of the heroic age of the West. For the past few days, now that reviews are coming in, you’ve heard praise: It’s an epic spectacle, as moving as it is innovative, as intelligent as it is grand. Both are true. The movie is vast, ambitious, clever, and affecting. It is also highly subversive, a kind of study in using Homeric materials to serve radically different end

The financial outlook for many of America’s blue cities and states has become increasingly grim. According to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the cumulative debt of local governments has grown by $1.3 trillion, or almost 50 percent, over the past decade; states and cities run by Democrats over most of that period account for two thirds of the surge.Even more troubling is the sharp split between the way that Republican-leaning and Democratic-leaning jurisdictions are attempting to mana

There are people who go for runs, and then there are runners. Going for a run requires a pair of running shoes. Being a runner is a lifestyle, complete with social run clubs, non-alcoholic beer, influencers, gadgets, and even its own social media platform. This summer’s European heat wave has not stopped the runners from venturing out, either in the early morning hours or after dark, and the Strava feeds are full of sunsets and excess sweat. In fact, there are more of these runners today

There has been a Weekend at Bernie’s quality to the recent saga of former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The eighty-four-year-old lawmaker spent weeks in hospital, his diagnosis undisclosed, while Republican leaders emerged one by one to assure the public that they had personally spoken to him and found him fully engaged. One half-expected McConnell to issue a statement through a system of ropes and pulleys or, in the age of AI, a lifelike simulacrum.But this weekend, McConnell f

Americans do not care for artificial intelligence. Recent polling shows that their attitudes mostly range from ambivalence to horror. Some observers have suggested that opposition to AI is due to poor PR from industry leaders. If tech titans hadn’t been so convinced that boasting of their apocalyptic powers was the best way to raise capital, the argument goes, then the American public would be on board. Chinese public opinion, for instance, is considerably more favorable. But these d

Maybe the time has come for un-populism, in which men and women indifferent to power, riches, or acclaim preach hard and testing remedies to the voting masses. In the English-speaking world, we seem to have had quite enough of the other thing. All it seems to be good at, in practice, is war and lawsuits. The United States has its own populist melodrama, which I watch between my fingers from behind the furniture. The tension is quite hard to bear. Will JD Vance be eaten by the orange monster this

The US Women’s National Team is a major player in FIFA’s Women’s World Cup, having won two of the last three and four since the women’s World Cup was established in 1991. The US men’s team has gone beyond the Round of 16 only once in the same time span.Part of the reason for the US women’s dominance is that fewer countries emphasize women’s soccer. Male athletes also have more options in America, with football and baseball capturing much of the at

Debates over what it means when someone who was born a girl claims to be a boy, or vice versa, have raged in recent years. Many activists and some experts assert that internally felt gender identity is determinative and indisputable, like the fact that water makes you wet. At the other end of the spectrum are those who regard claims of gender nonconformity as false and harmful beliefs. There is another condition in which the reliability of self-definition fails, one that intersects with tra

Julius Evola: An Adventurous LifeBy Andrea ScarabelliArktos & Prav Publishing, 763 pages, $49.95Julius Evola died in Rome in 1974, and has since become one of the most important thinkers of the global radical right. T-shirts bearing his name and a 1940s photograph with a monocle in his left eye echo those adorned with Alberto Korda’s classic 1960 image of Che Guevara. Many of the graphics incorporate the title of Evola’s 1934 book Revolt Against the Modern World. It is hard to

In his new memoir Communion, JD Vance expresses regret over his 2021 claim that “childless cat ladies” were effectively “running our country into the ground.” Though the vice president now calls these remarks “boneheaded,” similar sentiments continue to resonate on the right. Just recently, many right-wingers took to X to complain that Anne Hathaway getting pregnant at forty-three showed the dangers of girlboss feminism, while others alleged that women p

At the beginning of Citizen Vigilante, a new film that has reached #1 on Amazon Prime, something shocking happens. A young white woman walking down the street of a European city is suddenly stabbed in the neck by an African migrant.The surprise that moment delivers marks Citizen Vigilante as the latest entrant in a genre I’ll call basedsploitation. A non-exhaustive list of basedsploitation films would include Bone Tomahawk (2015), Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017), Dragged Across Concrete (20

In early 2017, an expected hike in gas prices in Mexico—or gasolinazo, as it was informally known—caused a mass panic that resulted in fuel hoarding, with people lining up for hours to fill up their tanks. I remember sitting in my cold car in the middle of the night, in a line that stretched on for a few miles, terrified that it would run out of juice before reaching the pump. Then President Enrique Peña Nieto’s energy production reforms, which liberalized and open

On April 30, 2026, the OECD published a new report claiming that more than one in five people across OECD and EU countries experience a mental disorder, making mental ill health “one of the most significant public health and economic challenges” of our time. For this, the report offers the usual prescriptions: We need to invest in prevention, we need to intervene more and earlier to promote mental health. Indeed, to tackle the scourge, nearly every institution and policy area needs

In 2014, GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary to Dave Brat, a radical libertarian economics professor who had never held political office. Brat went on to win the seat and served two terms in Congress as a member of the Freedom Caucus before losing to liberal Democrat Abigail Spanberger in 2018, after his constituency was significantly altered by redistricting. After a decade plus of political upsets, Brat’s victory isn’t well-remembered. But it was a crucial

I was just speculating for a podcast. I had no personal information. I was just speculating for a podcast.” This was the testimony of Howard Lutnick, the sitting Secretary of Commerce, to the House Oversight Committee on May 6, 2026. For Lutnick, the word “podcast” seems to describe a media format in which aimless speculation is both expected and encouraged. Thus it was perfectly natural for him to hop on a podcast in October 2025 and muse with casual aplomb about Jeffrey Ep