How America recovers from all this | Yale Conversations with David Brooks
https://youtu.be/0YRTSA9q-6M
What does it take to rebuild a society fractured by distrust, populism, and eroding civic bonds? In his third Yale Conversations lecture, "How America Recovers from All This: A Hopeful Vision for our Common Future," author and columnist David Brooks traces the shifting cultural paradigms of the past 70 years to diagnose how America arrived at its current crisis. Drawing on philosophers from Aristotle to Max Scheler, Brooks examines how successive waves of cultural change have given way to widespread disillusionment — with institutions, with leadership, and with one another — and how that disillusionment hardens into resentment. The antidote, he argues, is not political but cultural: a renewed commitment to humanistic values, earnest admiration, and what he calls defiant humanism.
We Shouldn’t Need Accountants by Annie Lowrey (The Atlantic)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/tax-day-irs-filing/686805/
This is the case even though Washington could probably do your taxes for you. If you earn a salary or an hourly wage, the Internal Revenue Service already knows how much money you make. It likely knows how much you owe or how big your refund should be too. Nine in 10 households take the standard deduction, making their liability easy to glean from payroll and banking data.
Yet Uncle Sam demands that Americans fire up TurboTax, head to a storefront preparer, hire an accountant, or sit down with a sharp pencil and a strong cup of coffee to get their taxes done each spring. The average filer spends 13 hours on their 1040—a time tax that many of our wealthy peer countries have reduced to a couple of minutes, if that. Prepopulated documents and return-free systems are common everywhere but here. Sweden lets residents file by text. Canada prefills paperwork. Japan sends households a document summarizing their tax contributions. If everything looks copacetic, many workers get to do a blissful nothing. Denmark, Estonia, Spain, and Norway have similarly simple processes.