You’re reading the Today’s Opinions newsletter. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
The Editorial Board reports that the European Union just announced $550 million it will spend to increase arms production, along with the bloc’s “first-ever blueprint for updating the continent’s sagging defense industrial base.”
The board writes that these are encouraging developments, but it cautions that “the road to heightened European security will be long and difficult” no matter what. The European attitude toward paying more for defense is still one of fierce opposition, and recruiting and retaining military volunteers will be an even bigger challenge.
Meanwhile, NATO is also pushing more military spending, in particular a $100 billion package that Lee Hockstader reports is meant to “Trump-proof” aid for Ukraine. Lee says the idea to lock in assistance before former president Donald Trump possibly wins the White House again could indeed “help Kyiv withstand Russia’s onslaught.” But it, again, ignores all the defense work that needs doing across the rest of Europe, when a hot war with Russia could ignite before the decade is out.
Closer to home, Amanda Ripley has some ideas for defenses to deploy this election season. Her column explains how to Trump-proof, or Biden-proof — or, most accurately, Trump-Biden-proof — our own lives.
Start with her proposal for “demilitarized zones” wherein “certain core relationships … remain outside the zone of political debate.” Arguing political differences with loved ones in such a polarized environment can quickly turn sour, Amanda writes, and “severed relationships harden our hearts and freeze our minds in place.”
Her other tactics include figuring out exactly whom you can or can’t influence, keeping tabs on your bodily responses to election news and simply thinking longer-term. It’s a playbook worth checking out, because this autumn’s offensive is coming, and you owe yourself a solid defense.
From researchers Avik Roy and Gregg Girvan’s op-ed correcting the conventional wisdom that big pharmaceutical firms need to charge lots of money for their drugs so they can keep creating new ones. If you want a drug for Disease X one day, the argument goes, you better keep paying out the wazoo for the one that treats Disease Z.
Roy and Girvan’s new analysis shows “that the biggest drug companies largely fail to turn their enormous profits into discoveries,” they write. Most innovation occurs at companies that are not only small, but actually unprofitable.
Big companies often hamstring their labs with bureaucracy, overcautious risk aversion and, yes, a hyperfocus on profitability. Besides, they can just buy up the best drugs that start-ups create and take them to market themselves.
Thankfully, Roy and Girvan explain, that model is starting to change — and hopefully drug prices with it.
Less politics
When a chunk of the Pacific Coast Highway crumbled into the sea this week, Alexandra Petri knew it was time for another literary sendup.
Throw some ash and a little snow over the gorgeous California shoreline, then mix in a few more bleakeries and you’ve got a dead ringer for the world of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Thus was born Alex’s imagined excerpt from companion novel “The Infrastructure.” It’s a fun dig mostly at the speed of America’s infrastructure investment, but she can’t resist throwing an elbow at McCarthy, too:
Do I have a name, said the boy.
Possibly, the man said. You talk too much.
Am I talking, the boy said. Where are my quotation marks.
We don’t have those any more, the man said. They were a luxury of the before times. Anyway this is supposed to be about infrastructure.
Chaser: The United States is a big country with a ton of infrastructure, some of which needs updating, Chuck Lane wrote in 2021. That does not make it “crumbling.”
Smartest, fastest
- Karen Attiah writes that Beyoncé’s new album demands respect — and highlights an American travesty.
- Arizona is a model for school choice, George Will writes. Naturally, Democrats aren’t happy.
- Erik Wemple analyzes the fallout of the Ronna McDaniel/NBC News debacle and finds himself pretty sympathetic to the hired-and-fired contributor.
It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.
Fierce defense once meant
Fending off plaza pigeons
Europe’s before times
***
Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!
