Facebook is putting more and more leftist posts on my feed. And it’s not just myself, correct? For over 14 years, this never happened–not once. Now it happens repeatedly, daily. Somehow, before 2026, Facebook’s algorithms were smart enough to figure out I have no use for leftist, Democratic, socialist, Marxist, Islamophilic or Communist sentiments, pages or posts. Now, almost overnight, that has changed. I cannot speculate on the technical aspects, but I know one thing for sure: Zuckerberg and Facebook have not moderated, not a bit. They are preparing for the totalitarian regime of a left-wing/Pope Leo/Mamdani variety, a regime they hope is coming and Meta will both support– and be part of — when and if that happens. Leftist corporations, what do you think you will accomplish by this? Changing our minds? Not a chance in hell of that.

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CHARLES GASPARINO writes: As a Catholic, I don’t buy the WSJ’s contention that President Trump is dividing most Catholics – at least in this country.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Most conservative Catholics agree with Trump because most American Catholics hate that the church has become politically progressive, obsequious to the left and at times openly Marxist.

The Pope-who is American–is literally suggesting that we should turn a blind eye to the murderous mullahs, and the American taxpayer should subsidize the world’s poor through open borders.

As a result, the Pope and the Catholic Church is losing its relevance for most American Cathloics who believe it should stay out of politics and focus its attention to matters of faith and its own problems, lest we forget how it ignored child abuse for decades.

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Vittoria Benzine, at Artnet (via Oliver Thomas):

The singular American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick saw the little details. He even saw the future. But, most of all, he saw people, with all their quirks. Kubrick’s films, from Dr. Strangelove (1964) to The Shining (1980), offer proof of this — as do his earliest photos, produced during the 1940s. One new trove of 18 such images will get its first-ever outing next week, when Los Angeles-based Duncan Miller Gallery presents the find alongside works by contemporary photographer Jacqueline Woods at the Photography Show in New York. [...]

The photos are some of the earliest images that the director made for Look. “New York’s subway trains are a reading room on wheels, a lover’s lane and, after 11 p.m., a flophouse,” Kubrick’s subsequent photo essay accompanying his subway visions opined.

I’ve seen some of these before, but not all. (Which makes sense, if some of them have only now been discovered.)

Mia Moffet, writing for Museum of the City of New York back in 2012 (where you can see more of these photos):

As you can see below, with the exception of iPods and smart phones, activities on the train haven’t changed much in the last 66 years, including shoving one’s newspaper in everyone else’s faces.

My favorite:

(Here’s another from the same scene, moments apart.)

Moffet then quotes from this 1948 interview with young “Stan” Kubrick, regarding how he captured them:

Indoors he prefers natural light, but switches to flash when the dim light would restrict the natural movement of the subject. In a subway series he used natural light, with the exception of a picture showing a flight of stairs. “I wanted to retain the mood of the subway, so I used natural light,” he said. People who ride the subway late at night are less inhibited than those who ride by day. Couples make love openly, drunks sleep on the floor and other unusual activities take place late at night. To make pictures in the off-guard manner he wanted to, Kubrick rode the subway for two weeks. Half of his riding was done between midnight and six a.m. Regardless of what he saw he couldn’t shoot until the car stopped in a station because of the motion and vibration of the moving train. Often, just as he was ready to shoot, someone walked in front of the camera, or his subject left the train.

Kubrick finally did get his pictures, and no one but a subway guard seemed to mind. The guard demanded to know what was going on. Kubrick told him.

“Have you got permission?” the guard asked.

“I’m from LOOK,” Kubrick answered.

“Yeah, sonny,” was the guard’s reply, “and I’m the society editor of the Daily Worker.”

For this series Kubrick used a Contax and took the pictures at 1/8 second. The lack of light tripled the time necessary for development.

When astronaut Christina Koch, the first woman to fly around the moon, reported an issue from space that could have been copy-pasted from any IT helpdesk ticket, something clicked for Americans. Her grievance? “No joy seeing the device in the list of available devices when I attempt to re-pair it after doing the Bluetooth forget.”

Commander Reid Wiseman, orbiting Earth aboard the Artemis II mission, radioed Houston with a problem millions of office workers share: “I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working.” So much for old “one small step for man…”

Internet commentators found these moments painfully relatable and shared them widely. Why did those quotes about tech maintenance go viral in April 2026? Beneath the comedy lies an underappreciated cost of modernity: we are wealthier, and that wealth means we own more things. More things means more things that break, more things that need updating, more things that require troubleshooting guides, more passwords to forget and recover. Even billion-dollar space hardware runs the same glitchy consumer software we all use every day. There is a certain democracy of frustration here.

The old problems never went away, either. The Artemis program has been plagued by a malfunctioning toilet. Even as we layer on new technology, the ancient headaches remain. We still have leaky pipes and dead batteries. We also now have Wi-Fi dead zones, incompatible Bluetooth drivers, and cloud storage accounts we can’t access because we changed our phone number.

Wealth and Happiness: The Running Debate

This raises the question that EconLog readers know well: does becoming wealthier actually make us happier?

It’s one of the site’s oldest debates. Arnold Kling kicked it off as early as 2003, arguing from revealed preference that higher income must produce more happiness. Otherwise, why would people choose to earn it? David Henderson complicated the picture further, expressing skepticism about cross-country happiness surveys.

Scott Sumner, in his review of Tyler Cowen’s book on economic growth, accepted the broad finding that wealth and wellbeing are positively correlated but noted that the relationship runs through many indirect channels: better health outcomes, a cleaner environment, reduced violence, expanded human rights. Growth, he argued, should be the default policy posture even when we’re uncertain about its direct happiness effects.

More recently, Bryan Caplan staked out an interesting position: calling himself an economic optimist but happiness pessimist. He looks at the data and sees genuinely robust growth. He also looks at the data and sees that income barely moves the happiness needle. He concludes that we’re materially richer, and should be glad of it, even if survey respondents don’t report feeling much better.

I believe that progress is good and that people pursue higher incomes for a reason. Having more makes us better off, but the astronauts’ complaints illustrate the cognitive tax that goes with it. This helps explain, in part, why the happiness gains are not even larger.

Consider the distribution of the more-stuff burden across a typical household. Parents contend with a level of domestic complexity such as choosing among subscription services and managing multiple accounts. Fathers who once needed to know how to change the oil and fix a leaky faucet might now also serve as the de facto IT department: managing family passwords and troubleshooting the smart TV. Children face being locked out of their schoolwork because they’ve forgotten a password.

None of this is a “skills problem,” as the astronaut examples make plain. It is structural. The NASA crew has a team of engineers on the ground to handle their tech problems, while most of us have a four-year-old YouTube tutorial.

Our devices connect us and entertain us. I will continue to enjoy syncing my phone to my car stereo and flipping through the entire Apple Music library until something breaks. Are we happier today with more stuff? I believe we are better off, overall. However, to paraphrase The Notorious B.I.G., “more money, more problems.”

Featured image, “Illuminated in Orion” from NASA.

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