Kevin Williamson’s just-published The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics (Regnery) includes excellent insights. Williamson recognizes that social media are primarily “a means of seeking human connection, not communication but communion.” He sees that those who have absorbed Darwinism need to distract themselves from their “eternal insignificance.” 

In our last issue, we profiled five Hope Awards finalists that help people leave poverty. Please go to wng.org/compassion and vote for whichever of those local ministries moves you the most. But I regularly get letters asking about the big, national picture: Do we need to reform the U.S. welfare system, and if so, how?

Daniel Darling is vice president for communications at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public affairs wing of the Southern Baptist Convention. He’s been a pastor in Chicago and Nashville and is the author of The Dignity Revolution. Here are edited segments of our Q&A.

Young adults in the United States are dying more often than they did seven years ago. That reverses the trend of the past 100 years, when public health, sanitation improvements, and the development of antibiotics led to longer lives. Now at a time of general peace, healthcare spending increases, and low unemployment, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report issued last week spotlights the bad news.

Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said Wednesday he would resign, effective Aug. 2. Protesters gathered around the governor’s mansion earlier in the day to call for his ouster. Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans marched earlier this week in one of the island’s largest protests ever. Publication of 900 pages of sometimes obscene online messages between Rosselló and 11 top aides triggered the crisis, but concern about misuse of Hurricane Maria recovery funds is an underlying cause.

This story is part of our 2019 Hope Awards contest. To vote for your favorite regional winner, go to wng.org/compassion.

About once a month a WORLD reader asks me, “What should I read to learn how to help the poor and how not to?”

Thirty years ago that question had an easy answer: P.T. Bauer’s Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion (1981) broke from failed World Bank perspectives. Charles Murray’s Losing Ground (1984) showed how the Great Society endeavor had failed. Two books: That was about it.