President Donald Trump’s latest fantastic notion is to repurpose Alcatraz Island, one of the National Park Service’s most popular historical sites, as the remote, isolated California prison it used to be.

Nothing about it makes sense.

It was costing nearly three times as much to operate as other federal prisons, which is why Attorney ...Read more

When you break a promise as clear as “No new wars,” you shouldn’t be surprised when even your most loyal supporters revolt. And that’s exactly what is happening to President Donald Trump.

One such disillusioned supporter is Tucker Carlson — who on a recent podcast with his brother Buckley admitted, in essence, “My bad.”

“You ...Read more

The Trump administration's attack on gender-affirming care for minors bears all the hallmarks of its approach to healthcare policy.

Although it purports to reflect rigorous science, it's almost entirely fact-free — indeed, replete with misinformation and disinformation. It ignores the procedures required by law for issuing major policy ...Read more

This week Tucker Carlson apologized for unintentionally "misleading" voters into supporting President Donald Trump's return to the White House. The apology came days after the president called Carlson dumb and overrated on social media. We've seen this plot before: It's a different name but the same story.

Recall the president's first term was ...Read more

Our fraught national debate over immunization and public health has overshadowed some extremely encouraging advances being made by researchers in the decades-long battle against cancer.

Recent news of a potential breakthrough vaccine for one of the most lethal of all cancers — pancreatic cancer — demonstrates why continued federal research ...Read more

On paper, the economy’s numbers look robust. But for many Americans, the math isn’t working.

A family like Mike and Lisa Hernandez, a middle-class couple in suburban St. Louis, is doing everything right. He manages a warehouse. She works part-time as a dental assistant. They have employer-sponsored insurance, a new house, and two kids. They...Read more

In an outrageous decision issued yesterday, a federal court has upheld a Texas law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held that the displays would not have counted as an establishment of religion in 1791, when the First Amendment was ratified.

This is ...Read more

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposal on auto insurance prices has created a battle royale in Albany between two powerful interest groups that have lots of sway in the Legislature and usually get their way: the trial lawyers and the insurance companies.

We think that they should find common ground and join together on something that everyone should ...Read more

The White House last month announced that Vice President JD Vance will spearhead an effort to root out Medicaid fraud. President Donald Trump had previously signed an executive order forming a task force on the subject.

This more aggressive approach is long overdue and deserves bipartisan support. It should also be applied across the board to ...Read more

When Susan Burton lost her 5-year-old son after he was struck by a police vehicle in Los Angeles, her grief drove her into addiction. Crack cocaine became her way to cope, and California’s response was to lock her up again and again.

Over two decades, she was incarcerated six times, released each time without treatment, housing or support. ...Read more

Bans on social media for minors are having a political moment. Parents’ sincere concerns and politicians’ instincts to capitalize on those fears are driving federal and state legislation like the kind already in effect elsewhere in the world. But no amount of good intentions makes these efforts good policy.

At the federal level, bipartisan ...Read more

The men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were students of history, and it taught them a singular lesson: power corrupts, and unchecked power can destroy a republic.

They designed our experiment with overlapping safeguards to ensure that no single faction, branch, or man could hold the nation hostage. What remained unresolved was agency: who...Read more

It's not generally admirable to take pleasure in someone being targeted, troubled or taunted in some way. But schadenfreude is exactly what I've felt in recent weeks, unapologetically, about President Donald Trump finding himself for once on the receiving end of a dark conspiracy theory, including from some of his most prominent (former) ...Read more

At first glance, AI companions for lonely seniors can seem dystopian, looking less like innovation than a bleak sign of social failure.

Spending a couple days last week in Tokyo nursing homes, I watched plushie robots the size of human babies being handed to aging parents and grandparents, and prototypes of conversational dolls aimed to fill ...Read more

Elon Musk recently posted a pronouncement on X: "Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI." Andrew Yang cheered. Sam Altman concurred. Their message: AI is coming for your job, and only the government can save you.

This is not a new script. It is the latest ...Read more

Something strange has happened to the language of politics. Everything is now a “deal.” Not a framework, not an accord, not a negotiated architecture — just a deal. The word appears everywhere, from headlines to cable news chyrons, as if it were the most natural way to describe diplomacy.

But it isn’t natural. It is imported. And its ...Read more

On Israel’s Independence Day on Wednesday, as Israelis mark 78 years since the founding of our state, a word that once expressed hope and liberation has become, for many, a source of confusion and division. That word is “Zionism.”

In today’s discourse, “Zionism” is often used as a slur or stand-in for “Jew,” conveying prejudice ...Read more

I recently heard a terrifying prediction: Advances in defense technology will change the way war is waged today as much as industrialization did in World War I. If true — and I don’t know one way or another, my area of expertise is economics — then we could be facing casualties on an unimaginable scale, just as the mechanization of ...Read more

Chief Justice John Roberts was the driving force behind the rise of the Supreme Court’s emergency docket as a powerful tool to empower the activist conservative majority — that’s the main takeaway of a cache of memos leaked to the New York Times.

Roberts’ immediate motivation was to enforce the major questions doctrine, another tool of...Read more

The Democratic Party cannot win in rural areas without clarifying—not changing—its position on the cultural issues that are so important in rural areas across the country.

The reason why people in these areas consistently vote Republican and thus against their best economic interests is that these cultural issues are more important to them....Read more