Dear Reader (Including you truly blessed souls who’ve dreamed of listening to Kevin McCarthy for eight straight hours. Congrats on your cowbell moment!), 

Okay, strap in, because we’re going for a ride. Well, you, dear reader, are figuratively going for a ride—I’m literally going for a ride. I’m filing this from a rest stop off I-70 in Somerset, Pennsylvania, en route to Washington state.

Yuval Levin wrote a brilliant piece for The Dispatch earlier this week. Two of our AEI colleagues, Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox, issued a fascinating report on fertility and family formation identifying the centrifugal forces dividing America. It’s worth reading.

“But,” Yuval writes, “I was most struck by something else about the portrait they paint. The report embodies a significant change in how we think about the basic character of social breakdown in America, and what we take to be the obstacles to human flourishing in our time.”