| | | | | In today's edition: Do friendship bracelets count as reading? | | (frimages/Getty Images/iStockphoto) | | With fewer and fewer children reading for pleasure, there's only one person to call: Captain Underpants. The fixture of many millennials' youth (this one's included) is still going strong, columnist Alyssa Rosenberg reports; a president at children's publisher Scholastic told Alyssa that the skivvied superhero is what finally turned her kid into a frequent reader. And it will take some serious special powers to save childhood reading, which has been in decline since at least 1984. Today, just 14 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun. The benefits of reading are worth enumerating, which Alyssa does. She also provides some strategies for getting kids to fall in love with books. The most critical is also the simplest: Just let children pick their own books … even if they involve a battle between the protagonist and one Professor Poopypants. Kids are diving into music, at least to contributing columnist Ted Johnson's eye. He shares in his piece the story of his first show (the Fat Boys, in the mid-1980s), as well as how much joy it brings him to see countless children "making their own first-concert memories this summer," whether that's dancing along to Beyoncé's choreography or swapping bracelets with fellow Taylor Swift fans. Music, Ted writes, especially at that age, has the power to bring people together and to tell an otherwise ungainly tween that, here, you fit in. "At concerts," he says, "individually meaningful moments converge into collective joy." It is, he writes, like watching "social and civic magic." That wouldn't be half bad on a friendship bracelet. Chaser: Last year, Alyssa asked folks all across the political divide for kids' lit recommendations and ended up with a terrific 99-book starter library. A migrant bishop for a church on the move |  | | Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala in Landover Hills, Md. on July 2. (Greg Kahn/GRAIN for The Washington Post) | | Evelio Menjivar-Ayala didn't quite come to the United States in the belly of the whale, but trusting God all the same, he clambered into the trunk of an automobile in Mexico driven by an elderly American and stayed still and silent for hours until the car arrived in San Ysidro, Calif. Now, columnist Karen Tumulty writes in a profile of this singular pilgrim, Menjivar is a bishop, thought to be the first Central American-born one in the United States. Karen's essay tracks Menjivar's life from his bloody upbringing in El Salvador to his daring crossing and on to his pre-bishop ministry in Maryland. Mostly, though, it's a meditation on the sea change Menjivar represents within the Catholic Church. He is a man of the cloth who is also a man of color, when 9 of 10 bishops in the United States are non-Hispanic Whites. As a pastor, he celebrated milestones in the lives of his gay parishioners. And he devoted his final sermon before elevation to a lamentation that "religion is too often used as a cloak for fear and judgment and prejudice," as Karen writes. Menjivar's story is thrilling and unique, but in a way, it's Karen's, too. She is a Catholic, and the essay is deeply personal. My favorite passage is one that reveals something about not just the subject but also the writer: "As Menjivar told me his story one day," Karen says, "I suggested that, surely, there must have been times when he doubted Heaven's hand. 'No, I never put my faith in question,' he insisted. 'I mean, faith was what sustained me.'" Chaser: In 2018, amid another round of scandal within the Church, Karen answered for readers a tricky question: Why am I still a Catholic? |  | | From the Editorial Board's commendation of Alexei Navalny's refusal to be silenced, even as prosecutors in a new trial attempt to tack another two decades onto his 11-year sentence. In fact, the board turned most of its editorial space over to Navalny's own words, delivered at the conclusion of his latest trial. He decried the war on Ukraine as "the most stupid and senseless" of this century, and he criticized Russia's ruling class for relying on "intellect without conscience." The question he posed to his jailers — many of them hiding behind black masks — is haunting: "You have one God-given life, and this is what you choose to spend it on? … To help someone who already has 10 palaces to build an 11th?" Chaser: The Editorial Board has a plan to move beyond "vague commitments" and actually ensure Ukraine's long-term survival. More politics Nostalgia is as American as apple pie (which, of course, tasted much better in the good ol' days). Politicians of both parties traffic in the past because almost 6 in 10 Americans say that life was better 50 years ago for people like them than it is now. For many of them, that's just … objectively not true. But contributing columnist Ramesh Ponnuru has a theory of the case: Things might have been worse then, but they were getting better faster. Ramesh writes that "steady upward movement is a large part of what we miss" — a certainty that the moral arc of the universe was bending the right way. What Americans need is a more quickly rising standard of living and the optimism that comes with it. So politicians can't just convince us that yesterday was better, or actually worse, than we remember. They need to get the country once again excited about tomorrow. Smartest, fastest It's a goodbye. It's a haiku. It's The Bye-Ku. In the perfect past Tomorrow was yet better How'd we get today? *** Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow! | | | | | | | | |
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