The Atlantic: What Happened When Hitler Took On Germany’s Central Banker. From the Atlantic’s July 2025 issue, Timothy W. Ryback looks at Reichsbank’s Hans Luther, who initially stood up to Hitler, demanding the Nazi flag be removed from the Reichsbank building in Berlin. After becoming Chancellor, Hitler purged the Weimar Republic’s civil service and then set his sights on Luther. Hitler had no legal way to remove Luther, so he threatened Luther’s life. After Luther resigned, Hitler had no problem accessing funds for his war machine. Ryback is a historian and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. He is the author of several books on Hitler’s Germany, most recently Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power.
The Atlantic: The Fight for Democracy Will Be a Long, Long Haul. In February 2022, Linda Hirshman argued America’s racist past keeps returning, but she insists there’s a pro-democracy playbook we need to follow to save our democracy and the individual freedom that comes with it: “1. Ideas—and publishing them—matter. 2. Weekly meetings build solidarity. 3. Talk and knock, far and wide. 4. Make injustice visible to the public. 5. Get control of the Supreme Court. 6. Don’t be intimidated. and 7. Never give up.“
The Atlantic: How Progressives Can Take Back the Constitution. Also in February 2022, Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath wrote “America’s slow-burning crisis of economic and political inequality poses a profound challenge to our constitutional system.” They worried America was heading toward oligarchy rather that a republic. Fishkin and Forbath are the authors of The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy.
The Atlantic: America is Watching the Rise of a Dual State. Aziz Huq, who teaches law at the University of Chicago, recaps the story of Jewish lawyer Ernst Fraenkel, who fled Berlin in 1938 with his manuscript for “The Dual State,” a front-seat look at how the Nazi regime “managed to keep on track a capitalist economy governed by stable laws — and maintain a day-to-day normalcy for many of its citizens — while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence in order to realize its terrible vision of ethno-nationalism.” Huq explains it’s important to see the parallels between Trump’s America and 1930s Germany. Dictatorships, Fraenkel argued, “create a lawless zone that runs alongside the normative state.” Huq argues the same dual state is in play in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, where political dissidents are punished, but the majority of citizens aren’t affected. “The peril of the dual state lies precisely in this capacity for targeted suppression,” Huq writes. “Most people can ignore the construction of the prerogative state simply because it does not touch their lives. They can turn away while dissidents and scapegoats lose their political liberty. But once the prerogative state is built, as Fraenkel’s writing and experience suggest, it can swallow anyone.”
The Atlantic: Why Americans Fall for Grifters. “As Trump’s first term comes to a close, A Face in the Crowd is worth revisiting—less for what it reveals about the president than for what it says about the rest of us,” writes Jake Tapper.
NYT: It Was Just a Rumor on Facebook. Then a Militia Showed Up. This New York Times story is one great example of what’s happened in America as traditional media/newspapers have died off (Facebook and Google took over most of the advertising revenue that fueled their business operations) and right-wing podcasters, Facebook groups and other influencers filled the void with far-right nonsense. I would take it further that Americans still struggle mightily to understand what is factual, and social media algorithms push people toward more sensational, less reputable sources of information. This is in part why so many Americans voted for Trump; other countries do a better job somehow of requiring social media, broadcast media and other platforms to adhere to fact-based publishing standards.
The Wall Street Journal won a 2025 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for chronicling the political and personal shifts of Elon Musk — the richest man in the world. The WSJ staff explored Musk’s turn to conservative politics, his use of legal and illegal drugs and his private conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This series is behind a wsj.com paywall, but you can read the full text of the winning stories at pulizer.org.
100 Ways in 100 Days: How States are Defending the Rule of Law in the New Trump Administration. There aren’t a lot of silver linings to note of late, but United States Democracy Center released its report on how states are pushing back on Trump’s most lawless orders. The list starts with 19 state attorneys general who are suing to stop Trump from making changes to how elections are run. It goes on to detail lawsuits to protect essential government services and government workers and the rule of law. And while it’s important to see how much essential litigation is pending that could protect Americans from tyranny, it’s also the case that Trump is starting to ignore court orders.
Hate Watch: Male supremacists entrench their ideas in the Trump administration, policy. So, “good read” isn’t the best description, but Southern Poverty Law Center’s research into the particular misogyny that fuels Trumpism/fascism.
WIRED: How to Avoid US-Based Digital Services—and Why You Might Want To. American democracy was quickly tipping to fascism by spring 2025, less than 100 days into Trump’s second term. Trump ignored court orders, conducted mass deportations without due process and threatened American lawyers, fact-based media outlets and nearly every country in the world (with tariffs). Dozens of countries started warning their citizens to be wary about traveling to America. Wired writes: “Amid growing concerns over Big Tech firms aligning with Trump administration policies, people are starting to move their digital lives to services based overseas. Here’s what you need to know.”
The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler. Timothy Ryback, historian and director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague, writes in The Atlantic that many of Germany’s businessmen who helped Hitler in pursuit of profit ended up in concentration camps or in prison for war crimes. “German corporations, large and small, helped retool the Weimar Republic as the Third Reich,” Ryback writes: Ferdinand Porsche designed the Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz provided Hitler and his lieutenants with bulletproof sedans, Hugo Boss designed the black uniforms for the SS, steelmaker and arms manufacturer Krupp A.G. supplied arms, Miele produced munitions, Allianz provided insurance for concentration camps, J.A. Topf & Sons manufactured crematoria ovens, The I.G. Farben company Degussa’s chemical subsidiary produced cyanide, and Deutsche Bank expropriated Jewish businesses. Many large firms used slave labor or used Jewish prisoners for medical experiments. Businessmen Fritz Thyssen and Hjalmar Schacht, who initially supported Hitler, ended up in concentration camps after crossing him.
AI can change belief in conspiracy theories, study finds. The Guardian reports AI could become a useful tool in fighting misinformation: “Conventional wisdom will tell you that people who believe in conspiracy theories rarely, if ever, change their mind, especially according to evidence,” said Dr. Thomas Costello, co-author of a study from American University, in which 2,190 participants were asked to describe a particular conspiracy theory they believed and the evidence they thought supported it. This was fed into an AI system called “DebunkBot,” after which participants had a back-and-forth conversation with the AI system. “About one in four people who began the experiment believing a conspiracy theory came out the other end without that belief,” said Costello.
Understanding democratic decline in the United States. The Brookings Institution researches two causes of democratic erosion in the United States: election manipulation (including extreme gerrymandering and efforts to reduce voters’ access to the ballot box) and executive overreach.
ProPublica: Friends of the Court. ProPublica’s award-winning investigation delves into the finances of the judges on America’s highest court. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ decadeslong friendship with real estate tycoon Harlan Crow and Samuel Alito’s luxury travel with billionaire Paul Singer have raised questions about influence and ethics at the Supreme Court.
The Atlantic: Trump is Becoming Frighteningly Clear About What He Wants. The Atlantic’s Peter Wehner explains Trump’s rhetoric is a permission slip for his supporters to dehumanize others just as he does.
The New Yorker: The World According to Elon Musk’s Grandfather. Jill Lepore chronicles the racist writings of Elon Musk’s grandfather, J. N. Haldeman, “a pro-apartheid, antisemitic conspiracy theorist who blamed much of what bothered him about the world on Jewish financiers.” Haldeman left Canada to live in and support apartheid South Africa, where Musk grew up. This family history is all but absent in Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Musk, who amplifies racism on his social media platform formerly called Twitter. Lepore explains if Haldeman were writing today, “he’d likely be distributing his ideas on Facebook and YouTube and Twitter and Reddit and 4chan and more. Algorithms would deliver them to thousands and possibly millions of people. He would find an audience. He would become bolder. He would find a bigger audience. He would become bolder still. Elon Musk’s grandfather’s political views are not Musk’s responsibility. But what would happen to those rantings, if they were posted on X today, really does lie at his doorstep.”
Scientific American: Citizens’ Assemblies Are Upgrading Democracy; Fair Algorithms Are Part of the Program. Math-based citizens’ assemblies have demonstrated an impressive capacity to uncover the will of the people and build consensus around the world.
The Atlantic: How Hitler’s Enablers Undid Democracy in Germany. Adolf Hitler wrote “the masses … more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one.” History Professor Christopher R. Browning explores Germany’s Big Lie leading up to World War II — that Jews, Marxists, democrats and internationalists had betrayed Germany in the first World War. “Not just Hitler and the Nazis but the entire German right latched on to this message and promoted it,” Browning explains. Conservatives thought they needed Hitler’s popularity with the base to win elections, and they thought they could control him, so they appointed him chancellor, even after Hitler’s failed coup attempt in Munich had landed him in jail.
Scientific American: U.S. Kids Are Falling behind Global Competition, but Brain Science Shows How to Catch Up. Scientific studies conclude paid parental leave (the norm in developed nations with the stark exception of the United States) and high-quality child care improve children’s brain development and prospects for a better future. “The U.S. is the only developed country in the world that does not mandate paid leave for a parent after childbirth. … Paid leave actually changes patterns of brain activity. … With no paid leave, no child care and limited child credits, it is glaringly obvious that a devastating divide exists between what science tells us children need and what U.S. policy actually does for them. It is time to start using our wealth of scientific evidence to guide our policies and practices. Healthy brain maturation represents the foundation of our country because it represents our future. That means there is nothing more important we can do as a society than foster and protect the brain development of our children.”
Washington Post Magazine: If Trump Runs Again, Do Not Cover Him the Same Way. Margaret Sullivan — the Post’s former media columnist and author of the upcoming memoir, “Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) From an Ink-Stained Life,” — writes “Journalists have to stand, unwaveringly, for the truth — and if that meant being attacked by zealots who wanted to call such a position evidence of bias, I could live with that. … Covering someone who doesn’t care about democratic norms — even something as basic as the peaceful transfer of power — requires different judgments about what stories really matter, and how we should or should not cover them.”
New York Times: What’s the Best Book of the Past 125 Years? We Asked Readers to Decide. No spoilers here, you’ll have to read the list! Let’s just say you’ll recognize these classics, many of which are showing up on lists of recently (and historically) banned books.
New York Times: The Joy of Finding People Who Love the Same Books You Do. Author Margaret Renkl explains great fiction is a lie that teaches us the truth.
