Finding waste, fraud and corruption in Medicaid is a lot like diagnosing illness in a human body. You do an initial check-up and if something seems off, you order...
The United States is about to plunge into recession, pulling much of the world down with it. The tariffs announced by President Donald Trump on April 2 will reverse decades of rising wealth based on specialization and exchange, based on little more than his unfocused feelings. Announcing his new rates, the president claimed they were […]
“Sex is for fun. Embryo screening is for babies.” That’s one motto of industrial eugenicist Noor Siddiqui, whose company makes babies in a lab, investigates their genes, eliminates the undesirable ones, and implants the desirable ones. If you make babies the old-fashioned way, Siddiqui warned, you could curse your child with mental illness, obesity, brown […]
In 1759, British Adm. John Byng was executed by firing squad for “failing to do his utmost” to relieve Minorca, a Mediterranean island besieged by the French navy. This minor episode in the Seven Years’ War, known in these parts as the French and Indian War, inspired a scene in Voltaire’s satirical novel Candide. When the naif Candide […]
The Star Wars franchise has fizzled as a cultural phenomenon thanks to the contempt Disney has for the franchise and its fans. Actor John Boyega, who played Finn in the latest trilogy, has almost come around to this position. In 2020, Boyega voiced his frustrations with Disney for hyping up his character just to make […]
If President Donald Trump’s goal was to stimulate the economy of Washington, D.C., or to maximize the number of CEOs, lobbyists, and foreign leaders who come begging for his favor, he could hardly have done better than creating a massive tariff regime. Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs on every country were made to be negotiated. The president can […]
To be honest, I had never heard of Chappell Roan until clips of her talking on Alex Cooper‘s Call Her Daddy podcast started appearing in my X feed. “A lot of them are married with children, and they have their own houses,” Roan said of her childhood friends who still live in southeast Missouri. “To […]
One Sunday morning in October 2007, I woke up without having seen someone brutally stabbed for the last time. I was 16, and along with a few other friends, I had stayed over at my friend Peter’s house in east Midtown Manhattan. Peter’s father took us all out for breakfast at a diner on nearby […]
This publication has for years urged Congress to take back the authority over tariffs that it needlessly delegated to the executive branch. Some legislators have introduced legislation to do so, but neither party’s congressional leadership has been interested in fulfilling their constitutionally charged power to set “taxes, duties, imposts, and excises.” This is unfortunate, to […]
Shortly before dusk on Nov. 3, 1870, Laura Fair approached Alexander Parker Crittenden as he sat with his wife and three of his children on El Capitan, a San Francisco-bound ferry. The newspapers described Fair as a mysterious woman who wore all black as if dressed in mourning. She had followed Crittenden onto the ferry. […]
When W.G. Sebald died in a car crash in 2001 at the age of 57, he was eulogized by the Anglophone literary world as the author of four singular novels. Artfully fusing fact and fiction and interlarded with grainy and blurry photographs, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, and Austerlitz revolve around real-life characters […]
A young friend of mine called me up the other day. He is in the venture capital business and feels he has reached what young people call “a career plateau.” Maybe he has, though in my experience, people his age — he’s about 30 — have outsize ideas about where they should be in their […]
My brother Rick and I grew up in a time and place ideally suited to the formation of lifelong baseball fans. The time was the 1950s and early 1960s; the place was Pomona, California, just a bit east of Los Angeles. The Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958; I had my 10th […]
“To mess with our pronouns is to mess with our sense of the order of things, what’s up and what’s down — life itself,” the Columbia University linguist, prolific author, columnist, and podcaster John McWhorter emphasizes in his new book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. “Pronouns are used so frequently, […]
In 1816, John Keats wrote in his poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” that when he encountered George Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, it filled him with limitless excitement. As he put it, “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken.” It is, unfortunately, more likely […]
