Opinion

After months of bipartisan pressure from Colorado’s congressional delegation, President Joe Biden finally decided this week to keep Space Command in Colorado Springs, a decision that provides much-needed stability and continuity to a mission facing imminent threats from China and Russia.

More than 300,000 German civilians were killed by Allied strategic bombing in World War II. It was thought that it would break the German economy, but when U.S. economists surveyed its material consequences, they found, to their surprise, that it had impeded German industry only very little. Strategic bombing was, in the words of J.K. Galbraith, “perhaps the greatest miscalculation of the war.” The fact that little was gained by it should compound our horror, though, in the scope of the war and the emotions at play, it rarely does.

Here’s a life hack: If you’re always on the lookout, you can often find ways to rip off other people or take stuff that doesn’t belong to you, and not get caught.

The battle of the blockbusters between Barbie and Oppenheimer is the last stand for traditional moviegoing. It was almost nostalgic to sit through months of trailers as the studios ginned up an imaginary rivalry between Barbie and Bobby. Reading about the payoff, the fourth-most lucrative weekend in box office history, felt like a collective triumph. This was how show business used to work, and how mass entertainment once united a nation.

Maryland’s new Democratic governor, Wes Moore, has to play to his party’s increasingly left-wing base, but he also knows that problem No. 1 in much of the state is rising crime.

Joseph Epstein, at times, seems to forget that the novel is not static in form.

Since it opened its doors in 1905, the Metropol Hotel in Moscow has witnessed seismic events in Russia’s 20th-century history. In its early years it was a glittering playground for wealthy merchants, louche cavalry officers, and ladies of leisure and luxury. When the Bolsheviks seized power, Tsarist officers beat a retreat to the hotel to fight a last losing battle against the revolutionaries. Afterward, Lenin requisitioned it, renamed it the Second House of Soviets, and sent from it the telegram instructing the massacre of the deposed Tsar Nicholas and his family. The building became a hotel again under Stalin, but during his Great Purge not all residents made it through the night. Guests slept more soundly after the dictator’s death, and in 1991 some of them included exiles who enjoyed a celebratory dinner at the hotel to mark the thawing of the Cold War and the bitter end of Communist Party rule.

Jean Twenge’s 500-page tome, Generations, which spans from the Silent Generation, born in 1925, to Polars, born between 2013 and 2029, is exploding with insights that should have been obvious but, for whatever reason, have been obfuscated. Things that you didn’t know because … well, why would you know? Millennials aren’t trapped in a one-long financial “struggle session”: Many of them are actually doing quite well. The Silent Generation was anomalously happy, particularly when compared to the Greatest Generation and boomers. (By the way, it was also the Silent Generation that ushered in "free love," not boomers; the latter just get all the credit.) And yes, Virginia, the phones are making Zoomers depressed.