We really need a Netflix series or a group of viral TikTok videos that show people the extreme difficulties of immigrating to the United States legally, or the insanity of an immigration system engineered for those least likely to immigrate.

Doubly so because there was really no secret as to what Trump planned to do or how awful it was going to be, and almost none of that penetrated the millions of voters who saw only one path to cheaper eggs.

Like many, many other things, this is a direct inheritance from slavery.

A specific reporter knowing something does not mean the institution knows. That is not how reporting works, not how newsrooms work, not how any of it works. Institutions are not omniscient.

The Cloisters in New York are very popular!

I think we make a profound mistake when we argue that culture went backwards in the early Middle Ages. It's more accurate to say artists were expressing different ideas and using different media to do so. Also have to remember that we don't have all of it.

Just a handful of examples to make the broader point that art and culture very much continued apace during the time; you could easily mention Sutton Hoo; Bede and more. There obviously were challenges and shocks from the shrinking population, but there were also new ideas emerging.

Certainly, someone living in the early Middle Ages compared to their late Roman ancestors has more reliable access to food; a more varied and iron-rich diet (until the Middle Ages, European women generally became severely anemic by their early 20s) and more labor-saving devices.

Culture didn't stagnate. The Book of Kells was illustrated; the Aachen Palace rose; poetry from the Song of Roland to Beowulf was composed; languages grew, shifted and changed with contact.

Would I want to live in the early Middle Ages? Of course not. But life did improve for most.

It's more about how life (slowly) improved over time. Literacy retreated to the church, but the early Middle Ages also led to the heavy plow, crop rotation and far more industrial development. Roman elites disdained labor saving devices; waterwheels were far more prevalent in medieval Europe.

I remember the medieval historian C. Warren Hollister writing that life in the Pax Romana could be pleasant enough if you were male, wealthy and immune to most diseases. "But if this was humanity's happiest era, God help us all."

It's far more interesting to learn how people reacted to these events and what ideas undergirded their view of the world. A moral framework doesn't work because misery and innovation always co-exist.

To take one example: lots of states, including Alabama, switched the sedative in lethal injection to midazolam once sodium thiopental and pentobarbital were withdrawn or unavailable. Midazolam, though, could not sustain unconsciousness, and was present in many botched executions.