It has been quite a while now, but a jaded critic once referred to our site as The Bleep Bloop Review. We credit you! As far as we know, we have not money-laundered fake evidence for a needless war or mumble-mouthed justifications for a coup in Latin America, so I would say we’re ahead of the New York Times.

But these are weighty times. Friend-of-the-blog Betty Boop has been freed from her copyright shackles. (Now your weird tattoos are officially street-legal.) The fitful madness of the Trump administration proceeds apace, kidnapping the president of a sovereign nation and extorting our NATO allies to give up Greenland, for some reason. The man in the White House’s attention will probably flitter to something else in the next fifteen minutes, but only the Dear Lord and Diana Ross know what that will be.

In any case, 2026 is off to a great start. We welcome Murray Browne, the author of three books and a bookseller himself, as a senior writer at Tropics of Meta after several years of his great contributions (his latest is here). Below you will find our usual round-up of good reads from around the web, including our friends at Boston Review, Dissent, Aeon, and so forth.

• The Wall Looks Permanent Until It Falls (Data 4 Democracy)
• Americans by Name, Punished for Believing It (Bolts)
• Liberal feminism is collapsing. Who’s really to blame? (Boston Review)
• The Child-Care Challenge: To expand child care, New York needs more space, more caregivers, and more government workers. It can only happen if the city works closely with existing (and aspiring) providers. (Dissent)
• Kafka, Inc. (Liberties)
• The Struggle for Honduras: U.S. meddling casts a dark shadow over recent elections, following four years of left-wing government under Xiomara Castro (Boston Review)
• Betty Boop, Public Domain Day, and the Limits of Copyright (Inventors Digest)
• Survey reveals growing American distrust in vaccines for COVID, other infectious diseases (CIDRAP)
• Trump’s AI moratorium threatens state-level crackdowns on housing costs (Politico)
• Rethinking statistical significance (Reason)
• Public Debilitation: Rebuilding government decision-making power requires not just removing veto points, but also addressing the outsized corporate power that gives the wealthy the best access to policymakers (Dissent)
• States Are Raising Minimum Wages but Quietly Leaving Overtime Behind (Patrick Oakford)
• Hasbara with glitter: Israel’s politics of pleasure (Al Jazeera)
• The Last Useful Man: On Tom Cruise and the Case for Embodied Knowledge (Metropolitan Review)
• How “Cuckoo’s Nest” Sparked the Disability Rights Movement— with Dr. Steven Noll (Craig Patrick Reports)
• Labor’s share of US GDP drops to record low in data back to 1947 (MSN)
• Black holes may be hiding something that changes everything (Aeon Essays)
• Forget the far right. The kids want a ‘United States of Europe.’ (Politico EU)
• The Story John Darnielle Lived to Tell (GQ)
• Well-lubed and swerving all together: Drive-By Truckers get back to Decoration Day (AV Club)
• He Yanxin was the steward of a women-only language (Economist)
• Long live the aeonophiles! The discovery of organisms that have been alive for many thousands of years requires a revolution in how we understand life (Aeon)
• Gravity and motion push time on Mars ahead of Earth (Earth)
• The Long, Fruitful History of Music Piracy (Reason)
• Greenland shark eyes may hold anti-ageing secrets (ABC)