Compact Magazine

So far America’s 250th celebration has the stilted air of the wedding anniversary of a couple quietly contemplating a divorce. Though formally acknowledging the milestone, we seem to have lost some of the emotional current that binds us to the founding moment. Any anniversary celebration acknowledges both continuity and change. But a comparison with the bicentennial celebration fifty years ago suggests that the cultural influence of the nation’s founding myth, its capacity to

However the conflict with Iran is resolved, it is already possible to see one of its transformative effects: the weaponization of money. In the future, battles will be determined not simply by military assets but by the ability to freeze, redirect, or erase valuable digital tokens with a keystroke.One of the sticking points in negotiations between Washington and Tehran concerns the release of billions in frozen Iranian funds held in international banking institutions. Less reported on has been t

During President Joe Biden’s term in office, the United States witnessed the largest surge in immigration in the nation’s history. The Congressional Budget Office found that the number of immigrants without legal permanent status grew by at least 8 million between 2021 and 2024. At the peak of this influx, I labored as a social worker at a humanitarian NGO. My agency was one of many within a larger, privatized ecosystem of NGOs contracted by the government to resettle and provide b

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas has been generally understood as a tech-critical document, but in fact, the text bespeaks an acquiescence to technological development as the natural course of human events. Indeed, the encyclical is remarkably “calm and moderate” in tone, as Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, and therefore stands in contrast to the polling and public debate in the pope’s native land, where the fervent enthusiasm for this new technology on t

A few weeks after Peter Magyar’s victory in Hungary’s elections, two competing narratives are already hardening around his new government. Liberals celebrating the end of Orbánism see a democratic turn, a country rejoining the European mainstream after years of apostasy. Others note—skeptically or approvingly, depending on where they stand—that Magyar spent twenty years inside Orbán’s machine, and suggest the change he represents is more cosmetic than

Obsession, the box-office sensation directed by 26-year-old Curry Barker, is a sign that the economics of Hollywood are changing, with internet-incubated stories overtaking superannuated IP. It also marks the arrival of a new film genre: heteropessimist horror, which channels the despairing view of relationships that is typical of Gen Z.In Obsession, Bear (Michael Johnston), a twenty-something music-store employee, tries and fails to ask out his friend Nikki (Inde Navarette). Everything changes

Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New YorkBy Dylan GottliebHarvard University Press, 352 pagesDylan Gottlieb, professor of history at Bentley University, describes Yuppies as “the first social history of financialization.” It lives up to the billing. The book is more than a nostalgia tour through the years of Perrier and disco. It chronicles a social and a moral revolution from which America is still struggling to emerge.The financial sector went f

Beginning in 2028, the University of Nebraska will sponsor women’s flag football as a varsity sport. The NCAA now officially recognizes women’s flag football as an Emerging Sport, with the promise of an NCAA championship in the near future if more schools adopt it. No men’s flag football programs exist in the NCAA, though men and boys make up the lion’s share of flag football players in all recreational leagues. The reason for this is simple: Title IX demands that sch

One of the year’s bestselling books contains a pivotal sex scene in which a time-traveling tradwife finds her impotent husband transformed into a domineering patriarch. She is terrified and unwilling and, wouldn’t you know it, satisfied for the first time in her life. In Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke presents antifeminist gender norms for our condemnation and titillation. You could say she pioneers the genre of tradsploitation. Our tradwife gets what she asked for, good and hard. S

Hollywood has always taken a permissive approach to adaptations. When Sam Zimbalist, an MGM producer, wanted a new movie of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben-Hur, he summoned Karl Tunberg to his office. Tunberg had served as president of the Screen Writers Guild, and Zimbalist wanted him to do the script. Tunberg demurred, saying he knew nothing about Ben-Hur. He hadn’t even read it. Sam waved him off. “Don’t worry about that,” Sam barked. “It’s a clas

In his posthumously published final book, The Rivers North of the Future, the social critic, philosopher, and renegade Catholic priest Ivan Illich argued that humanity’s relation to technology had undergone a profound shift in the late twentieth century. In the era stretching from the late Middle Ages through the Industrial Revolution, technologies had been understood as tools subordinate to human intentions—as “something … that can be picked up or not picked up by a

Somehow, Jamir Nazir’s “The Serpent in the Grove” slithered past 7,805 other entries for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2026 and became a regional winner. Sharma Taylor, who selected it as the best story from the Caribbean, described its language as “sublime—precise yet richly evocative—conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy.” Nazir’s story, however, has been called into question precisely for its language, which—s

In the introduction to theology course I teach for college freshmen, one of the assigned readings is the third-century account of the martyrdoms of Saints Felicity and Perpetua. For years, the text—which depicts the gruesome torture and death of these women, one of whom had just given birth—provoked negative reactions. It especially seemed to anger the feminists in my classes, who argued it was “patriarchal” and “glorified abuse of women.” But to my surp

As a graduate student at Yale in 1964, I enrolled in a course with Herbert Marcuse, the exiled German-Jewish Marxist philosopher. Although I was a member of Yale’s Party of the Right and Marcuse defended Fidel Castro and other Communist dictators, he became an intellectual role model for me, as I wrote in my memoir Encounters, thanks to his charisma and erudition. The same year I met him, Marcuse published his most famous book, One-Dimensional Man. Later that decade, he became a hero and

Ten years into Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican party, his opponents continue to misunderstand and underestimate him. The defeat of Thomas Massie in his contest for renomination to Congress on Tuesday is yet more proof of this. Trump is doing exactly what his critics a decade ago said needed to be done—he is restoring discipline to a party that had become institutionally weak. Massie was a symptom of that weakness. He arrived in Congress at a time when the GOP was divided

In the wake of several high-profile lawsuits related to teen suicides allegedly encouraged by AI chatbots, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously advanced a bill earlier this month to protect kids from AI-related harms. The GUARD Act, co-sponsored by Sens. Josh Hawley (R.-Mo.) and Richard Blumenthal (D.-Conn.), seeks to safeguard minors by age-gating AI companions designed to simulate human relationships. In addition to advancing young people’s online safety, the bill embodies the bes

The verdict is in: The United States has failed in Iran. Intoxicated by their hubris, the Americans and their Israeli allies assumed that they could use unrelenting force to neutralize a longstanding recalcitrant adversary—but that has backfired. The Islamic Republic, though battered and bruised, is still standing, surviving economic warfare, deceptive diplomacy, targeted assassinations, regime decapitation, and mass aerial bombings of military and civilian infrastructure. Tehran’s

Across two papacies, the Vatican has built up a rich and multifaceted framework for discussing artificial intelligence, rooted in historic Catholic teaching. As yet, the Holy See has placed little emphasis on the catastrophic risks of the corporate race to AI systems that can replace humans in their work, relationships, and decision-making. With these risks coming into focus, Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical could provide not just theological insights, but practical help for humanity.&#xA0

Korean Messiah: Kim Il Sung and the Christian Roots of North Korea’s Personality CultBy Jonathan ChengKnopf, 768 pages, $36In 1946, a young Korean nationalist named Kim Il Sung stepped onto the stage at the First Congress of the Korean Workers’ Party, held in the immediate aftermath of liberation from Japanese colonial rule. It was likely the first time many Koreans caught sight of the former guerrilla fighter, who would go on to lead the Democratic People’s Republic of Kore

Asked about the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak this week, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. expressed confidence about facing down the threat: “We have this under control and we’re not worried about it.” Unfortunately, his track record on infectious disease should give one no confidence in his confidence.We have had a bit more than a year now of a Department of Health and Human Services headed by RFK, Jr. The evidence is growing by the day that th