We live in a partisan age, and our news habits can reinforce our own perspectives. Consider this an effort to broaden our collective outlook with essays beyond the range of our typical selections.

FROM THE LEFT

From “Who Owns Donald Trump?” by Jeet Heer in The Nation at tinyurl.com/4h98smm9.

The context, from the author: The former president’s financial troubles open up rich opportunities for political attack.

The excerpt: Despite having debts that no honest man can pay, (former President Donald) Trump has remained a favorite with lenders, maintaining opaque and troubling relationships with institutions like Deutsche Bank. Although superficially a bad loan risk, Trump remained attractive to lenders for most of his business career because his brand (Trump the dealmaker) had enough cachet that one could plausibly believe one of his endeavors would pay off. And in fact, Trump did ultimately hit pay dirt by winning the presidency in 2016. Since then, he’s been the favored child of money managers for another reason: Having a once and possibly future president in your pocket opens up all sorts of leverage possibilities. Imagine if you could call the standard-bearer of one of America’s two big political parties anytime for a “little favor.”

From “The Supreme Court Is Shaming Itself,” by New York University law professors Andrew Weissmann and Ryan Goodman in The Atlantic at tinyurl.com/5n994ch4.

The context, from the authors: No good legal reason exists to delay Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 trial any further.

The excerpt: Donald Trump is determined to avoid accountability before the general election, and, so far, the U.S. Supreme Court is helping him. Trump has no legal ground whatsoever to delay a ruling in his plea for presidential immunity. The reason Trump has nevertheless sought to slow down the immunity appeals process is obvious: to postpone the trial date, hopefully pushing it into a time when, as president, he would control the Department of Justice and thus could squash the prosecution altogether. The Supreme Court has shamed itself by being a party to this, when the sole issue before the court is presidential immunity. By contrast, Special Counsel Jack Smith has both law and policy on his side in seeking a prompt determination on immunity and a speedy trial soon thereafter. Yet the court has ignored all that.

From “What Have 14 Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?” by Sam Knight in The New Yorker at tinyurl.com/2y9n5w77.

The context, from the author: Living standards have fallen. The country is exhausted by constant drama. But the U.K. can’t move on from the Tories without facing up to the damage that has occurred.

The excerpt: (Here are) two basic truths about Britain’s experience since 2010. The first is that the country has suffered grievously. These have been years of loss and waste. The U.K. has yet to recover from the financial crisis that began in 2008. According to one estimate, the average worker is now 14,000 pounds worse off per year than if earnings had continued to rise at pre-crisis rates — it is the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars. “Nobody who’s alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this,” Torsten Bell, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, which published the analysis, told the BBC last year. “This is what failure looks like.”

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FROM THE RIGHT

From “About Those Empty Pews,” by Chris Stirewalt in The Dispatch at tinyurl.com/yrhzma59.

The context, from the author: The number of Americans going to church may be declining, but it’s still significant.

The excerpt: The idea that the “revival of American community” is anywhere near at hand seems even less likely today than it did when (Robert) Putnam issued his warning (in his book, “Bowling Alone”). Instead, let’s look at the glass half full. If 30% of Americans go to their church, mosque, synagogue, temple or dimly lit shrine to David Hasselhoff nearly every week, that’s 78 million people or so in an adult population of about 260 million. Add in the monthly worshippers, and you have more than 106 million souls gathering together on a pretty regular basis. That’s 57% more than the number who bet on the Super Bowl, more than triple the number who watched this year’s State of the Union address, and more than double the number of daily active TikTok users in the U.S.

From “The Tailspin of American Boys and Men,” by Brenda M. Hafera in The American Conservative at tinyurl.com/5t4k667c.

The context, from the author: American males are turning off, and tuning and dropping out.

The excerpt: Dad deprivation is especially disastrous for boys. As mimetic creatures, theoretical arguments about masculinity and virtue fall short of a father’s lived witness of their mastery. Boys learn how to become good men by imitating a good man, and the mentors of their lives are their fathers. Thanks to expressive individualism’s effect on our moral imagination, however, today many people dismiss the benefits of embodied play and assume that fathers and mothers are interchangeable. We have accepted the premises that the mind and body are disconnected and the body is unimportant.

From “The Four Questions of 2024,” by Matthew Continetti in Commentary Magazine at tinyurl.com/2c973xbv.

The context, from the author: Here are four questions — this is Passover season, after all — about the 2024 election that remain unanswered. The solutions to these four problems will decide the next president. No doubt there are other imponderables. These are mine.

The excerpt: (One of the four questions is, “Will Biden or Trump have a health episode?”) Actuaries say that both (President Joe) Biden and (former President Donald) Trump are likely to enjoy higher-than-average life expectancy, but you never know what might happen. Hillary Clinton’s fainting spell on Sept. 11, 2016, was the beginning of the end of her campaign. Trump’s three-day hospitalization for COVID in October 2020 compounded his poor performance in the first debate and threw the country into further disarray. Neither candidate is getting younger. A health scare late in the campaign could upend the race.