This week, AEI scholars evaluated long-term trends and recent news at the intersection of politics, culture, and education.

Weakness, writes Yuval Levin, is what unites Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Challenging the popular assumption of an "imperial presidency" and defining presidential weakness in Alexander Hamilton's terms, Levin makes the case that our current and most recent president have weakened themselves by neglecting "the chief executive's core work" in favor of "playing chief pundit and willfully blurring the line between rhetoric and action."

In a new report for AEI's Survey Center on American Life, Brent Orrell, Daniel A. Cox, and Jessie Wall measure the workplace's prominence in Americans' social lives. The coauthors find that workplaces play an important role in generating social capital by helping workers, especially women, form close friendships and professional bonds.

Writing in National Review, Samuel J. Abrams analyzes survey results showing that the fear of cancel culture extends well beyond campuses and universities. "Most Americans are not practicing these silence-and-shame techniques," writes Abrams, but the data "reveal that leftists are far more likely than others to end a relationship and cancel people based on politics."

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—also known as the "Nation's Report Card"—recently revealed significant declines in math and reading performance since 2019 among fourth and eighth graders around the country. Using data from AEI's Return to Learn Tracker, Nat Malkus explains how the NAEP's results reflect pandemic-era learning loss associated with remote learning and school closures.

The Campus Exchange podcast—one of the many ways that AEI brings university students and our scholars together—is back for a new season. In the first episode, AEI President Robert Doar speaks with Nick Tolbert, president of the AEI Executive Council at the University of Alabama, about poverty, the Civil Rights Movement's triumph, and great books.