My wife, her sister, her sister's husband and I spent the weekend in Durham, North Carolina at the inaugural Biscuits and Banjos festival. I'm fired up! The festival was organized by Rhiannon Giddens, an amazingly talented musician who deserves your attention. Her Wikipedia page will fill
I wrote a while back about how to pay for the government we want. That raises the question: What kind of government do we want? Well, I want a government that does important stuff well, and quickly. America responded to the Great Depression by putting the unemployed to work on
The President endured setbacks and failure all week long. A week ago Friday, the administration sent a blustering letter of demands and threats to Harvard. It insisted that the school surrender its independence and bring on MAGA faculty and administrators to police the thoughts and speech of students and professors.
The media coverage has been considerable, so I'll state the facts briefly: On March 12, Kilmar Ábrego Garcia was driving his five-year-old son home when we was stopped and arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Garcia was in the country legally. He was, nevertheless, shipped to
I've written a couple of posts on the mechanics of US government debt. Today I want to dive into whether, why and how we should manage that debt. If you want to jump right to the conclusion, just re-read the title of this post. If you'
Something unusual has happened in the last few days. Trump's tariffs have whipsawed global financial markets. As of this writing, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (a measure of large US-based company stock prices) has fallen by more than 6,000 points – a total of 14.5% – since
I’ve been busy with some personal stuff lately, so less active on the blog than I like. Things are settling down, though, and I hope to return to my weekly-or-so cadence here. There’s been plenty of action in the last couple of weeks — more legal residents
On Monday this week, a group of senior officials in the Trump administration accidentally added a journalist to a chat group discussing attack plans in Yemen. It was a blindingly stupid and careless thing to do. All things considered, the reporter, Jeffrey Goldberg, handled it well – verifying authenticity and reporting
Two posts ago, I said I was worried about the Trump administration's attack on universities, but had more urgent things to write about. I want to return to that topic today. It's really important. Fundamental research in science pays enormous dividends to society. We're
This is a thing I need to hear. Maybe you do, too, so I'm gonna say it out loud: The good guys win. We're watching an autocracy act with impunity right now. The Executive branch ignores the Constitutional checks imposed by the courts. It's
The Trump administration comes at you fast. I planned this week to write about the widespread destruction of post-secondary education in the US. Top-flight research universities like Columbia, Berkeley and Harvard are targeted by investigations, advancing the MAGA agenda against "wokeness" and "DEI" and
Mahmoud Khalil Last Saturday, federal immigration agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a US legal resident who led anti-Israel protests at Columbia University in New York last year. It was a well-chosen opening move by a media-savvy administration, guaranteed to get saturation coverage on television and to go viral