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The tragic news out of central Texas has been heartbreaking, but it’s also been maddening — because so many lives could have been saved if elected officials had done their jobs. They owe the families who lost loved ones — the death toll from the Fourth of July floods is now at more than 100 — more than thoughts and prayers. They owe them a sincere commitment to righting their deadly wrong, by ...
I’m generally optimistic about all the ways artificial intelligence is going to make life better – scientific research, medical diagnoses, tutoring and my favorite current use, vacation planning. But it also offers a malevolent seduction: excellence without effort. It gives people the illusion that they can be good at thinking without hard work, and I’m sorry, that’s not possible.
The political realignment has come for economics. At least since the days of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes in the last century, the divide in economic thinking roughly corresponded to the political split. In the mainstream, everyone was a capitalist and saw some role for government. The right/left divide was mostly over exactly how big that role should be. Now, in economics as in ...
For several hold-your-breath weeks, as spring sizzled into summer, the nuclear dealmakers of President Donald Trump’s USA and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Iran seemed astonishingly close to a deal. So close that it seemed they’d soon reach out and seize the deal. But no one was willing to reach out. First, on May 13, Iran’s chief proposer, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, ...
The notion that conservatism is “the new punk rock” has been a common trope of the Donald Trump era, repeated by alt-right college kids, thirsty politicians and headline writers. Progressives, the argument went, had become the uptight enforcers of taboos, while right-wingers were impudent insurgents pushing the bounds of permissible expression. As people on the left increasingly valorized safety and sensitivity, members of the new right reveled in transgression and cast themselves as the champions of free speech.
Former First Lady Michelle Obama is done with politics, at least in the traditional sense.
From Iran to Capitol Hill, President Trump is governing as if he believes all the constraints that limited him during his first term have collapsed.
There’s a lot to celebrate this Independence Day, as we mark the 249th anniversary of our national divorce from Great Britain and the abuses of King George III.
Zohran Mamdani got three chances to repudiate the expression “globalize the intifada” in a weekend interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker. It would have been easy, and politically smart, for the Democratic candidate for New York mayor to say that he’d been educated about the phrase’s violent connotation and that he regretted not rejecting it sooner. Instead, he ducked each time, saying that although he does not use those words himself, he would decline to “police” the language of others.
President Donald Trump’s coalition has always been a Frankenstein’s monster — stitched together from parts that were never meant to coexist. Consider the contradictions: fast-food fanatics hanging out with juice-cleanse truthers chanting “Make America Healthy Again” between ivermectin doses, immigration hardliners mixing with business elites who are “tough on the border” until they need ...
The McCain Institute just returned from a weeklong mission to Ukraine, visiting Bucha, Kharkiv, Dnipro and Kyiv, with a bipartisan delegation of senior staff from the House of Representatives. It was a critical opportunity to see an unvarnished view of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Most Americans have no choice but to rely on various and often unreliable sources for their information, and many ...
As America braces for another storm season, only the media storms are more predictable than upcoming hurricanes and tornadoes. Often before the dust settles after natural disasters, headlines warn that gusts of wind and funnel clouds are proof the Earth is boiling. Politicians run to blame carbon emissions while their supporters flood social media warning of the inevitable doomsday caused by ...
Regardless of their advisability, legality, or ultimate utility in the long sordid history of Middle East conflict, the American military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend gave Donald Trump an opportunity to compliment someone other than himself. “Congratulations to our great American Warriors,” the president posted. “There is not another military in the World that ...
In 2023, a branch of the Palestinian restaurant Ayat opened in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park, not far from where I live. The eatery trumpets its politics; the seafood section on the menu is headed “From the River to the Sea,” which I found clever but some of its Jewish neighbors considered threatening. An uproar grew, especially online, so Ayat made a peace offering.
Now that the United States has bombed Iran’s nuclear sites, many Americans are recalling the long-term war we got sucked into by invading Iraq in 2003. I spent weeks in Iran and Iraq just prior to that March 20, 2003, attack and logged a huge amount of time in Iraq over the next eight years, so the comparisons feel very personal. Yet, as the world waits to see how Iran responds to the U.S. ...
Donald Trump used to quip that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support. The same might be said of the royal palace in the Hague, where the U.S. president arrived to a hero’s welcome despite having relentlessly berated, humiliated and questioned the utility of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European allies.
For decades, a succession of American presidents pledged that they were willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But it was President Donald Trump who, by bombing three of Iran’s key nuclear sites Sunday morning, was willing to demonstrate that those pledges were not hollow and that Tehran could not simply tunnel its way to a bomb because no country other than Israel dared confront it.
The Supreme Court’s decision upholding a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth is a tragic abdication of the judiciary’s responsibility to protect minorities. In 1937, in United States vs. Carolene Products, the court famously explained that while courts usually should defer to the political process, deference is unwarranted when there is discrimination against “discrete ...
Nobody, perhaps even President Donald Trump himself, knows for sure whether the United States will wind up joining Israel in launching military strikes on Iran. “I may do it, I may not do it,” he said Wednesday. But with a third U.S. aircraft carrier on its way to the region and the president calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” the chance of war seems higher than ever – particularly now that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has gruffly rebuffed Trump’s demand.
It has been easy to dismiss efforts to raise the prospects of the world’s poorest as an abject failure. The United Nations reported 712 million people living in extreme poverty in 2022, 23 million more than in 2019. The share of the world’s population suffering hunger rose from 7.9% to 9.2% over the period. And 2.1 billion people still cook with dung, wood, charcoal and the like.
