ArcaMax

Events are moving fast. Seven days ago, as I write, Israel had not yet launched its first attacks on targets in Iran. Seven days from now, things may well have changed -- significantly.

In such times, a historian's perspective may be helpful. Fortunately, the two most eminent English-language historians ( pace, Tucker Carlson) have ...Read more

"How'm I doin'?" the late New York Mayor Ed Koch used to ask constituents on his travels through the city. President Donald Trump, in the opinion of most Americans, is doin' pretty well.

His job approval, which jutted downward after he announced his "Liberation Day" tariffs on April 2, has recovered and hovers just below 50%. That's just about ...Read more

You see the same pattern over much of the world. In three consecutive presidential elections in the United States. In the latest polls in Britain, where the 2016 Brexit referendum was the first notable outbreak. In France's most recent national election and in Germany's. In Canada's election last month. And maybe in Poland and South Korea last...Read more

"I'm not happy with what Putin is doing. He's killing a lot of people, and I don't know what the hell happened to Putin," said Donald Trump on Truth Social over the holiday weekend.

"I've always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY! He is needlessly killing a...Read more

How does a political party with overwhelming advantages, including increasing support from the growing bloc of highly educated and affluent voters, almost monopoly support from the press and broadcast media, and with burgeoning financial and high-tech sectors of the economy, manage to lose just about everything across the board?

The Biden ...Read more

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