Elise Nicole

U.S. Congress alum. Christian. Girl mom. Midwesterner. Institutionalist.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Russia has lost more men failing to conquer a sliver of Ukraine than America lost in all of World War 2

https://t.co/GgGLJ6N33N

[Laura Robinson @LauraRbnsn]

Can we get the "save western civilization" people to start dealing with the very real problem that within one generation everyone under 25 lost the ability to read?
This is a man expressing skepticism that third graders used to be able to read The Hobbit.

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

I wrote about the issue of the Democratic Socialists of America and communism twice this week, but I didn’t fully scratch the itch. So here’s a thread. 1/

https://t.co/diLvM0SRZF

https://t.co/FxecbMHmD8

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

Not just Vance, btw. Almost all the GDP Truthers - left and right - attack it bc they love anti-growth policies.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

It's the 5th stage of protectionist grief.
1) Denial: Tariffs don't raise prices!
2) Anger: How dare these Unpatriotic & Greedy Corporations raise prices!
3) Bargaining: The tariffs helped us negotiate lower prices!
4) Depression: Maybe prices will fall once new domestic production arrives.
5) Acceptance: Actually, high prices are Good.

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

Parties are political associations and they can pick candidates any way they choose. Primaries, conventions, rock-paper-scissors. They have no government status and "the people" have no more right to pick their candidates then they do to pick the Exalted Ruler of an Elks Lodge.

[David French @DavidAFrench]

Birthright citizenship is especially noxious to the populist right. They scorn it as relying on magic dirt — the idea that there is something inherent in American soil that makes a person an American citizen.

Yet the same populists seem to believe in something like magic blood — that one’s lineage can make one superior.

America doesn’t have magic dirt, and it certainly doesn’t have magic blood. But it does have a magic idea — the creed that declares “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” https://t.co/lDocJeovCh

[Derek Thompson @DKThomp]

The Atlantic’s new cover story by @rosehorowitch is absolutely definitive on the end of the age of reading in America—and the emergence of a new post-literate age in modern life

Some core facts and anecdotes:

1. Reading is shrinking. The share of Americans who read for pleasure declined by 43 percent between 2004 and 2023. While Americans might see more words than ever—between all those texts, posts, emails, and captions—less than half of Americans read books, anymore. The average sentence in NYT bestsellers are one-third shorter than a century ago.

2. Americans can swallow words and sentences, but they’re losing the ability to think deeply about writing that’s longer than an Instagram post. Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.

3. It’s worse for the young. Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent.

4. “Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read”: Most high-schoolers consider reading for pleasure an alien practice. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, says some students view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, it's as if “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

https://t.co/kk8qktY6fd

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

Conventions are better than primaries. Parties are not public utilities.

[Bridget Early @bridget__early]

The lede on this NYT story is devastating. As more parents reject Vitamin K shots for their babies, docs are increasingly treating brain/abdominal hemorrhages for infants who hadn’t received the routine injection, per Maggie Astor:

[Elise Nicole @elisentj]

What.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Kevin McCarthy on Platner Allegations: That one thing I know about Republicans is when we had a very bad candidate, we didn't vote for that person. We walked away.

[David French @DavidAFrench]

How about we stop looking for "authenticity" in politicians and instead look for virtue?

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

Very excited to watch the guy who's taken significant and unprecedented US government equity stakes in 20-plus private companies (so far) pretend for the next 4 months that he's the last great bulwark against creeping American communism
https://t.co/vhfMTJ1ogw

[The Bulwark @BulwarkOnline]

"The fact that the more-or-less-trillionaire owner of a major social media platform is cosplaying a James Bond villain obsessed with brown invaders and 'white genocide' really should scare us all." ICYMI @CathyYoung63:
https://t.co/d1ktsqubVA

[Elise Nicole @elisentj]

@joshcarlosjosh This actually makes me feel so much better.

[alexlindsay @alexlindsay]

If you want to understand American optimism…

We celebrate the date that we declared independence, not the date that we achieved it.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

"The Founders did not stumble into a diverse, immigrant-heavy society by accident—they lived through it, debated it, and ultimately enshrined it in a Constitution that barred religious tests for office and left the door open to immigrants of every nation and faith"

https://t.co/FeSMvsQCej

[nxthompson @nxthompson]

"Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it." - JD Vance, ten years ago today. https://t.co/VO0oVhyHXj

[Jesse Singal @jessesingal]

.@elonmusk's actions led directly to the death of a 10-year-old girl whose life could have been saved by a bed net and/or anti-malarial medication, both available pre-DOGE. Musk, now sitting on a trillion dollars, bragged about eviscerating aid funding

https://t.co/meGCzA28V4