Most of us are familiar with CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. You sign on (or in) to something and you then are confronted with weird letters or numbers or some other puzzle requiring you to slide one image on top of another.

CAPTCHA was first coined in 2003, although other ...Read more

This column evokes the idiom “The horse has already left the barn.” But, as one respected journalist (my brother David) has noted, if the horse has left the barn, the thing to do is to saddle up another horse, corral the first horse and return her to the barn.

Unfortunately, the horse I’m referring to, Iran, is long gone. We’ve chosen ...Read more

Politicians all over the world are showing renewed enthusiasm for public ownership of private companies. The methods range from modest government stakes to outright nationalization, but the trend is apparent.

Whether driven by concerns about supply-chain resilience, national security, deindustrialization or “profiteering” — often all of ...Read more

It happened in a moment so small that many viewers may have missed it. After a UFC fight, athlete Josh Hokit used his victory speech not to celebrate his win but to demean former First Lady Michelle Obama, repeating a long‑running racist and sexist trope by calling her a man.

Standing beside him, the president of the United States did not ...Read more

More than 100 recent protests across California and the U.S. over data centers represent the same fierce opposition that horse enthusiasts once mounted against Model T cars. Times change and so must we.

The talk of a new data center brings home how artificial intelligence is wrongly changing our future. The physical embodiments of this rapid ...Read more

In many ways, the race to be Wisconsin’s next governor is a microcosm of developments happening around the country.

The race features politicians from both parties pandering to rural voters. In one campaign ad, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in the state’s Aug. 11 primary, walks a cow with a halter to ...Read more

The Supreme Court closed out its term and issued decisions that could affect millions of Americans. Among them is Watson v. Republican National Committee, in which the court decided in a 5-4 decision to uphold longstanding Mississippi law and allow mail-in ballots received post-Election Day to be counted.

The legal implications of the decision ...Read more

Democrats attacked Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative with unusual vigor, but who can doubt that a federal behemoth which spends $7 trillion annually has ample room for downsizing? Consider one agency that bleeds millions each year, according to a recent audit.

Legislation passed in 2023 demands that federal workplaces have at least 60 percent ...Read more

Curious who‘s to blame for California’s housing crisis? Just look at who wants to kill the cure.

A measure to reform the chief impediment to building homes in the state just qualified for the November ballot, and the same week, labor unions and environmental groups dumped millions into the effort to defeat it.

Lawmakers in Sacramento often...Read more

A few weeks ago, my daughter and I went to Paris to visit family and celebrate her high school graduation. As a marine scientist working on the front lines of climate and oceans, I was hoping for a break from the doom and gloom. Instead, I found myself inside the biggest climate story of the year.

We knew it would be hot, over 90 degrees. When ...Read more

When the No Surprises Act took effect in 2022, it was a rare feat of bipartisan problem-solving. The law was meant to prevent a once all-too-common scenario: An insured patient would seek emergency care, only to face financial disaster because one of the providers involved was outside the patient’s insurance network.

Imagine, for example, ...Read more

A Supreme Court ruling and an outbreak of explosive diarrhea seem to have nothing in common, and certainly nothing to do with artificial intelligence. But they’re a warning to the AI industry about the danger of getting exactly what it wished for.

On June 29, in Trump v. Slaughter, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the president can fire the ...Read more

The early 1900s were a very bad time to be a bird. On average, more than 5 million were killed every year — not for sustenance, but to feed perhaps the most frivolous of trades: plume-topped hats.

Ostentatious headwear made of egrets and other animals — some of which featured an entire taxidermied body— was so popular at the start of the ...Read more

The United States is scaling up its aggression and conflict in the world with little to show for it but likely war crimes. It is inflicting pain and suffering on many communities and doing so in the name of the American people. Even if causing such civilian harm were achieving some U.S. national security goals, U.S. law, international law and ...Read more

Dozens of states accommodate a massive exception to the Fourth Amendment guarantees in the Bill of Rights. A recent case in Pennsylvania highlights the injustice and should provide impetus for legislative reform in Carson City and other state capitols.

The Bill of Rights protects American citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures” ...Read more

True story: The state that has led the nation in book bans is requiring all high school students to read the most famous literary attack on book banning. It’s stranger than fiction.

I’m talking about Texas, where state laws barring “indecent or profane content” and diversity, equity and inclusion programming have led to the purging of ...Read more

College sports have long been influenced by money.

These days, commercial gain appears to be the point. Some athletes are playing at a different school every season. Others are betting on their own games. Eligibility has become so loosely defined — and potential compensation so generous — that some professionals are trying to play for ...Read more

The annual report of the Social Security board of trustees, issued last month, has prompted Congress to return to one of its favorite pastimes: creating bipartisan Social Security commissions. More precisely, there are currently at least two bills in Congress to empower a commission to come up with a proposal to “save” Social Security, which...Read more

Ever wonder about the financial implications of your life choices? Taking one job over another, spending Christmas with your nephew instead of working through it at your financial firm, that time Bitcoin fell to $400 and instead of filling your boots with the stuff you wrote a column mocking it? We’ve all been there, right?

Such decisions ...Read more