Opinion

PITTSBURGH — It should come as no surprise that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent declined to be the next Federal Reserve chairman. Spend any time listening to Bessent talk, and it is clear he is laser-focused on one thing, something he can only accomplish in his current job: lifting America’s economy into a position where both […]

There’s usually a fun element to fictionalizing history. Imagine a world where Dwight Eisenhower shot Adolf Hitler to end World War II in place of the führer’s bunker suicide, or John Wilkes Booth being stopped by a good Samaritan who saved Abraham Lincoln’s life and allowed the 16th president to deliver on his promise of […]

In a surprise move, CBS is sunsetting The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Colbert’s show debuted following the retirement of David Letterman, who hosted Late Night on the network from 1993 to 2015. Much has been made of the cancellation, and naturally, CBS is taking a lot of arrows from those claiming the move is […]

Gallup’s annual surveys on the moral acceptability of various issues have produced largely predictable results, with social conservatives remaining in the minority on most measures. The findings were generally unremarkable, except on the question of polygamy, which stands out as a growing point of divergence among younger respondents. It remains the case that a strong […]

A while back, I told you about Specialist Grundle, the annoying soldier who deployed with us to Farah Province, Afghanistan, in 2004. He was furious about not having been promoted and compensated by claiming superior soldier ability and quoting useless weapons statistics. I was disgracefully overweight when I began my tour, but the extreme desert […]

I emailed a young colleague a few days ago to ask about an upcoming project. We were supposed to have a meeting to discuss it this week, but I hadn’t received any confirmation.  It’s a delicate email to write. On the one hand, I’d like to get the project going as soon as possible. On […]

On a visit to Budapest in the 1930s, an unimpressed H.L. Mencken remarked that the former imperial capital had the feeling of “an empty ballroom.” Having been shorn of half its territory after World War I, Budapest’s grandeur was an awkward fit for a country of 8 million people caught between the rising totalitarian powers […]

Charmed as his life might be (stable and remunerative employment at a daily city newspaper!),  it’s easy to feel sorry for Superman. Having been around for now the better part of a century, the blue unitard-wearing hero’s name has become almost metonymic with an idealized, impossible conception of “goodness” (see: everything from the ponderous 2010 […]

Trend pieces rarely identify something brand new because there is nothing new in the lives of men and women. Likewise, when the New York Times explains the latest cultural developments to its readers, the features often tell them more about the cultural milieux of highly educated, white, feminist, 30- to 40-something-year-old, city-dwelling women — that is, […]

Is Thomas Chatterton Williams’s new book, Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, about wokeness, or is it the story of 2020? Yes. Is it a memoir, or is it advancing and building an argument? It’s both. Is it a treatise against “anti-racism,” or a general rebuttal of mad, […]

Five summers ago, we were told to wear masks, compelled to take vaccines, prohibited from looking at certain statues (which were helpfully torn down), and scolded for enjoying any movie or TV show that presented law enforcement officers empathetically or humanely. The May 2020 death of George Floyd not only birthed the so-called second “Summer […]