Weekend Beacon addenda: Be sure to check out the one and only Nicholas Eberstadt, who delivers a thorough takedown of the late doomsayer Paul Ehrlich: “One of the reasons worldwide life expectancy has been rising over the postwar era is that food is becoming steadily more plentiful—so plentiful, in fact, that overnutrition is displacing undernutrition as the globe’s principal dietary problem. By 2021, indeed, more women of childbearing age in India were measured as overweight than underweight. “For its part, the marked rise in worldwide caloric availability per capita has been facilitated by dramatic long-term declines in the cost of food. By 2024, the inflation-adjusted prices of the main cereals—corn, rice, and wheat—were less than half as high as when The Population Bomb came out. This means that food is actually less scarce today than when our planetary population was four and a half billion smaller. “Ehrlich was never able to understand this paradox—or why his constant prognostications about the human future were so unfailingly erroneous. But the reason is really very simple. Professor Ehrlich was a genuine expert in population: It’s just that he studied butterflies.” And congratulations to Meir Y. Soloveichik on receiving this year's Bradley Prize awarded by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Rabbi Soloveichik joins numerous contributors to the Weekend Beacon who have won this prestigious award, including Barry Strauss, James Piereson, Samuel Gregg, Allen C. Guelzo, Peter Berkowitz, Robert P. George, the aforementioned Nicholas Eberstadt, Lord Andrew Roberts, and the late Terry Teachout. It may soon be a prerequisite!