ArcaMax

Mississippi leads the nation. That's not a typographical error. And it's not just a gotcha phrase, preparing the reader for learning that Mississippi leads the nation on all sorts of negative things.

Once upon a time, that was true, and in some respects it still is. Mississippi has the lowest or nearly the lowest income levels of any state.

It...Read more

If you are a graduate of Yale University, you can vote every spring for a member of the Yale Corporation, which selects the school's president. However, you can only participate if you vote for one of the two candidates nominated by the Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee, a group of university officials and graduates. There's no way to write in ...Read more

"It is the policy of the United States to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible to avoid violating the Constitution, Federal civil rights laws, and basic American ideals."

Those words, the operative section of "Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy," one of several executive ...Read more

Reality has a vote. That is one lesson administered to the body of politics in the first 100 days of President Donald Trump's second administration.

After the president gleefully announced his "Liberation Day" tariffs on April 2, stock market prices fell sharply, and the bond market became, as Trump put it, "yippy." So after just one week, on ...Read more

It hardly qualifies as news anymore, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, union membership declined from 2023 to 2024, going from 10% to 9.9% of wage and salary workers. Some 32% of public employees are union members compared to only 5.9% of private-sector workers, down from 6% in 2023.

This means 49% of all union members work for ...Read more

It has been hard this past week, of tariffs applied worldwide on April 2 to tariffs suspended except for China on April 9, to avoid reflecting on how much trouble could have been avoided if economists, instead of talking about countries' trade surpluses and trade deficits, had devised different words -- say, "buyer-dominant" countries and "...Read more

Is President Donald Trump bent on political self-harm? It often seems that way. His overall job approval rating still hovers within a point or two of the 50% popular vote he received last November. But he is losing support on the economy and inflation, the No. 1 issue last year, while his overwhelming success in reducing illegal immigration has ...Read more

"Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city," former President Barack Obama rhapsodized in April 2009. "No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public ...Read more

Now they tell us.

"We were badly misled about the event that changed our lives." So reads the headline on Princeton professor Zeynep Tufekci's March 16 article in The New York Times. The event was, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the bad misleading came from scientists who purposefully discredited the now widely accepted theory that the...Read more

Tendentious - Marked by or favoring a particular point of view; partisan.

Will the second Trump administration come undone by an economic policy based on what the British military historian Lawrence Freedman, describing Vladimir Putin's rationale for invading Ukraine, calls "tendentious history"?

This week, it started to look like the ...Read more

Some thoughts spring to mind after President Donald Trump's 100-minute address to Congress.

The first is that this 78-year-old man has amazing resilience and perseverance. Consider that in the past 12 months, he has had to spend hours listening to a kangaroo court proceeding before a hostile judge in New York, has maintained a campaign rally ...Read more

Sooner or later, The New York Times catches on to the news. In the case of immigration policy, the news it has caught up with is that mass immigration, legal and illegal, from less-developed countries is politically toxic.

That news was relayed in a Feb. 24 article and thread on X by reporter David Leonhardt, a writer of center-left sympathies ...Read more

If you follow these things closely, you may have seen a clip of the chairman of the Munich Security Conference breaking down in tears, unable to speak any further while reflecting on Vice President JD Vance's speech there. This breakdown is remarkable because the chairman, Christoph Heusgen, is not a minor apparatchik but a sophisticated and ...Read more