President Joe Biden retired his “Bidenomics” brand as his popularity plummets, but the White House continues its breathless attempts to reshape voters’ abysmal perceptions of the economy. In a few sentences in a memo to the press, White House senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said that the president is fighting inflation by “standing up […]
Teenagers banned from malls without chaperones. Streets flooded with cameras to watch everyone while criminals go unprosecuted. People forced to take their tacos to go so employees don’t get assaulted. California is a bastion of wacky crime stories. Each time one of these stories rolls by, it is hard to imagine it being topped. And […]
The problem with pregnancy movies is that they never feel quite right. Waters break like fire hoses, and within seconds, a 6-month-old-looking baby is presented neatly and cleanly on the mother’s chest. If you’re childless, it’s unrelatable and boring. If you’re a mother, it’s unrelatable and irritating because it’s nothing like what actually happens. If […]
In his new book The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools, self-described “school choice evangelist” Corey DeAngelis makes an optimistic case that our floundering education system is not beyond repair. Invoking the slogan “let’s fund students, not systems,” DeAngelis’s cause advocates allowing families to take state-funded education dollars to the […]
The combination of highly visible protests combined with the varying university responses has lately reignited the debate over free speech on campus. Longstanding opponents of free speech have suddenly declared its importance, and have noticed how recent ideas about how to erode cultural and jurisprudential free speech norms might actually be used for ill — […]
Caroline Crampton’s cultural history of hypochondria begins with her own hunt for a tumor. She stares at her reflection in a bathroom mirror at work, fingers kneading her neck, searching for suspicious lumps. Tumors, she knows from experience, have “a certain texture … a hard kernel moored deep inside with a slippery casing that can […]
Greetings, graduates! It’s a gorgeous day out here on the Quad, and I’d like to thank the deans and the president of the university for inviting me to speak to you today. Or, I would thank them had they invited me. To be honest, I’ve never been invited to give a commencement speech, another sign […]
PITTSBURGH — It took 30 minutes and five seconds to read the introduction of Morning After the Revolution, written by former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles. It took exactly the same amount of time to listen to the audiobook, which I did because I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss a word Bowles […]
