Fast Takes: Buried good economic news, AI hastens colleges collapse, and other commentary

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.”“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.”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 ...