The digital economy has led to a U.S. trade surplus in services on the order of around 1 percent of gross domestic product. Yet recent advances in artificial intelligence have exposed new vulnerabilities that place every cyber system at risk of disruption.

Cryptography has been crucial to protecting cyber systems. Using hashing or encryption...Read more

Washington treats healthcare spending like a moral obligation and interest payments like an accounting nuisance. They’re linked: Federal spending that is wasted in the healthcare system forces higher taxes or more borrowing, leaving less money for Medicare, defense or anything else. To slow deficit spending and the ballooning costs of the ...Read more

From the founding, Americans understood that a republic depends on the character and judgment of its citizens. In the years after the Revolution, that insight took shape in what later came to be called “republican motherhood,” the belief that the success of the new nation required raising children with the virtue, knowledge, and discipline ...Read more

Most Saturday mornings, I stroll half a mile downhill from my tiny apartment in a bosky part of San Francisco to a farmers market. My usual reverie of anticipation (about carrots with their tops attached, about the price of berries) was interrupted recently by the sight of three bodies.

That is, I thought of them as bodies; it was not evident ...Read more

For a bunch of unremarkable warehouses, they’re generating a lot of controversy. Data centers — low-slung facilities that house the server racks and energy systems that underpin the digital economy — have become a heated issue on the campaign trail. Politicians from both parties are pushing bills to restrict them. Some want a nationwide �...Read more

Early signs of a recovery in Florida’s housing market should start to quiet the chatter surrounding the state’s real-estate and migration slump of the past few years. But Florida is unlikely to return to the model of rapid population growth and construction that have helped it boom.

A surge in the cost of housing and insurance since the ...Read more

If companies won’t pay their workers a living wage, the government will try to do it for them. I laid out this argument in a 2019 column and have since watched with dismay as ever more counterproductive policies are proposed — and some adopted — around the country to address affordability. These range from millionaire taxes and rent ...Read more

The most successful American train company of the last century may have been in “Atlas Shrugged.”

A recent audit of Brightline Trains Florida shows that the company is in serious financial trouble. Ernst &Young said it has “substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.” In other words, it doesn’t have...Read more

For more than a century, the Jones Act has survived on purported economic and security grounds. Its waiver by the Trump administration for Operation Epic Fury reveals serious flaws in both rationales.

Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, as it’s formally known, requires that goods shipped between U.S. ports travel on vessels that ...Read more

President Donald Trump recently described the U.S. naval blockade of Iran as “a very friendly blockade.” There is no such thing.

A blockade is an act of war, using armed forces to restrict another nation’s movement, commerce and access to the sea. It does not become peaceful because no one challenges it on a particular day.

Trump’s ...Read more

Who won the 2020 election?

Was the Capitol attacked on Jan. 6, 2021?

Can Donald Trump be elected to a third term as president?

No brainers, right?

The answers are, of course, "Joe Biden," "yes" and "no." Any fact- and reality-based American would say so. But that humongous class of people pointedly doesn't include the president of the United...Read more

In the ancient days of 2022, when the Supreme Court sledgehammered abortion rights with the Dobbs decision, the (Republican) party line was that the issue had returned to where it belonged: the states.

Fast forward to 2026 and it would now seem that the antiabortion crowd, faced with the aggressive pro-choice response of states such as ...Read more

Democrats have a huge opportunity to make a huge difference. But whether they’ll grab it is a huge question.

In 2020, I wrote that voters were “weary, anxious and looking for salve” after President Donald Trump’s first term. I said then that the experienced, reassuring Joe Biden fit the moment. Now I fear that if Democrats nominate a ...Read more

Ted Turner died Wednesday at 87, and the world feels a little less interesting, a little less imaginative and a little less fun without him in it — but also a lot better off because he was here.After hearing the news of his passing, one moment came to mind that embodied how he moved through the world: a very drunk Turner giving an interview ...Read more

Pregnancies can kill.

But Florida’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee would rather not talk about it.

The state Department of Health committee gathers and analyzes data on mothers who lose their lives to pregnancy. Understanding life-threatening pregnancies is the baseline for finding ways to treat them.

For five years, state health ...Read more

“Signed, Sealed, and Delivered.”

Those were the words Gov. Ron DeSantis wrote in a post on X after signing newly redrawn congressional maps into law on Monday.

The new maps are expected to give Florida Republicans an additional four seats in Congress. But the more troubling issue is how DeSantis achieved this.

In an effort to help the GOP...Read more

The White House directive to put psychedelics on a regulatory fast track is at once welcome and worrisome. The attention to psychedelics is overdue, and there’s a real opportunity to build a stronger scientific base for a promising field.

Yet this area of medicine also demands extra care — or the U.S. risks unleashing complex therapies ...Read more

We think of wars as conflicts between militaries, decided by force. However, as the German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously said, “War is … an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”

We see this in the current conflict with Iran. The United States has destroyed much of Iran’s military infrastructure and killed ...Read more

Democrat-run cities have found a way to reduce crime: adopt policies pushed by Republicans.

In April, Baltimore had four homicides. That’s its lowest monthly number in at least 50 years. It’s not just a one-month blip. In 2025, Baltimore endured 133 homicides. That was the lowest annual number since 1965.

Four years ago, these statistics ...Read more

The sharp rise in gasoline prices caused by the Iran war has led to bipartisan calls, and in some cases action, to reduce U.S. gas taxes. At least three Republican-run states have declared gas-tax holidays, and three Democratic U.S. senators have introduced legislation to suspend the federal gas tax until October. Several European countries have...Read more