From the right: Buried Good Economic News

It hasn’t “attracted a lot of media coverage,” remarks the Washington Examiner’s Byron York, but Census figures show US poverty “fell to a record low in 2025.” Plus, “real median household income” was $87,460, up $2,250 and the highest since 1967. The White House should tout all that. The “bad news”: “Year-over-year inflation” is higher than when President Trump took office last year, “largely due to energy prices.” Yet “the poverty and household income numbers” could let him “argue that there are good signs in the economy to go along with the bad.” Vice President JD Vance is also wise to argue that electing Democrats to Congress would undo the progress. And, though voters might say no, to “ask for more time to fix remaining problems.”

Academic: AI Hastens Colleges’ Collapse

“It feels like artificial intelligence is wresting higher education apart,” argues Ian Bogost at The Atlantic, as “colleges are racing toward and away from AI simultaneously.” Atop “other recent college crises,” AI “amplifies a deeper truth”: “American college is incompatible with itself,” long being both a “credentialing service” and a “coming-of-age” service — “the American ideal for how a young person figures out who they are.” AI has “separated” these tasks, and “disconnected” the “output from the process” of “intellectual labor.” With no “reason to believe that the structural inconsistencies that have come to define higher education will resolve,” only a shell can “endure” as higher ed’s “spirit — a community organized for the education and formation of young people — comes undone.”

Conservative: Dovie Eisner Rebuked the Culture of Death

The late Dov Paul Eisner, 35, “spent his last conscious days railing against the assisted-suicide and euthanasia laws sweeping the democratic West,” recalls UnHerd’s Sohrab Ahmari about his dear friend. As New York lawmakers considered an assisted-suicide bill last year, Dovie denounced it in a viral UnHerd essay, writing: “As a young man with disabilities, I fear what this state should become if suicide-by-doctor becomes law.” “Dovie’s life was difficult and painful” due to a congenital “genetic disorder” that left him “unable to walk” and dependent “on an air tube” to breathe, yet his life “bore witness against the culture of death.” As did his adopted Catholic Church whose teachings extol “the value of life, all life.” 

Media watch: Times Breathless Over Radical Dems

“This year’s Democratic candidates are noticeably stranger and more radical than they’ve been in past elections,” observes The Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles, yet The New York Times’ “coverage of these uniquely nutty and terrorist-adjacent cranks has been as flattering and credulous as ever.” The paper has “fawned over” Angie Nixon’s hard-left senatorial run in Florida and praised Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed’s costume of “black T-shirt and jeans” for “exuding a vibe that was ‘less weekend James Dean and more bodybuilder with a military streak.’ ” Jersey House candidate Adam Hamawy’s links to the Blind Sheik is noted only “because his ‘opponents’ kept bringing it up.” The Gray Lady also “scolded Republicans for using words such as ‘communist’ and ‘anarchist’ to describe Democrats who have called for abolishing police departments, prisons and the American way of life.” 

Eye on Canada: Selling Sovereignty to Spite Trump

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney should decline European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s invitation to become “the honorary 28th member of the European Union,” warns The Washington Post’s Opinion Editorial Board. The push “to reorient Ottawa from Washington toward Brussels by integrating manufacturing, technology, security and energy” entails huge risks. “The EU has protectionist tendencies outside the bloc, putting up barriers to trade and requiring all member states to negotiate their trade deals through Brussels” — and Ottawa would be no exception. Is Canada’s relationship with Japan and Australia a “price tag” Carney can accept just to spite President Trump, when “Canada and the US are due for a reset in just over two years”? 

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board