It’s no secret that 2026 has tested our democracy. This year alone, the Supreme Court has continued to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, state legislators are rushing to execute a generational gerrymander in the South to undermine Black and Latino voters, and state houses across the country are considering more than 330 laws that make it harder...Read more

For 15 years, I worked in financial regulation and consumer protection, most of that time at the Conference of State Bank Supervisors. My job involved bringing Republican and Democratic state regulators together to go after payday lenders who were writing loans engineered never to be repaid and debt collectors chasing debts that did not exist.

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Gavin Newsom, the California governor who loves to heckle Donald Trump and talk about the “big swings” he’s taken at policy while in office, is now a lame duck.

Within a few short months, he will be termed out of office and return to being a regular citizen, if not an average one. Newsom’s presidential ambitions are stronger than ever, ...Read more

The next U.S.-China summit is scheduled for Sept. 24 in Washington, D.C., and expectations are low. It will be Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first White House visit in more than 10 years and will include a state dinner with all the related pageantry.

President Donald Trump will enter these talks considerably weakened by an Iran war that ...Read more

Earlier this month, as I was reporting a column about the unceremonious deportation to the U.K. of the immigrant-hating, right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, the world got word that a true political giant, Gloria Steinem, had died.

Ten years ago, Yiannopoulos made a splash with his "Dangerous Faggot Tour," courting chaos and violence on ...Read more

During a recent cable news appearance, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed no American lives had been lost in the Iran war, an error he blamed on confusion with President Donald Trump’s earlier invasion of Venezuela. And perhaps it is difficult to keep one’s wars straight in an administration that has attacked seven countries in less ...Read more

Years ago, I worked for a nonprofit focused on supporting the spouses and children of members of the U.S. military. The people I worked with and the people we served would sometimes stumble onto a topic that’s not supposed to be discussed, the third rail of American militarism: empathy for the families of civilians abroad who’ve been killed ...Read more

Kevin Warsh has rightly called into question the effectiveness of the Federal Reserve’s communications — but his arrival as chairman only seems to have made the problem worse. To put this right after the next Fed meeting this week, he’ll need to rethink his approach to explaining where things stand.

Friday’s release of inflation data ...Read more

It is an unintended feature of President Donald Trump’s Plan B for defeating Iran — economic strangulation — that the more successful the policy becomes, the more risk the men who run the Islamic Republic are willing to accept to fight it. Judged on that metric, the American blockade and sanctions are working, but they’re also raising ...Read more

The High Holy Days, observed by Jews worldwide, are a time of solemn resolution, remembrance and repentance. This New Year is particularly fraught for Israel and its closest ally, the U.S.

Yet there’s welcome news from Israel regarding the crisis in the West Bank, where fanatic settlers commit what the Times of Israel describes as “near-...Read more

Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, along with two orders of nuns, the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm and the Little Sisters of the Poor, filed a lawsuit to block Illinois’ assisted suicide law. These two orders operate eldercare facilities in Illinois, putting them on a clear collision course with a new Illinois law to ...Read more

As longtime participants in movements for social justice, we have come to realize that the threat posed by artificial intelligence is not separate from those posed by war, climate change, attacks on immigrants, economic inequality and authoritarianism. It has, in fact, the potential to accelerate all of these.

AI gives governments new tools for...Read more

The prevalence of uncontested elections in America—70% of all races in 2024—receives little attention. That’s partly because these races are often for local offices in small districts, but it’s also because many people don’t see these silent elections as a big problem. Some argue the absence of a challenger signals satisfaction with ...Read more

War in the Middle East. The hottest summer on record in the U.S. AI getting as scary as "Terminator 2: Judgment Day." An eroding coastline. A president who spends more time posting pathetic memes than improving the lives of everyday Americans.

It sure seems like we're living in the End Times, right?

Why, we haven't even reached the most ...Read more

The healthcare affordability crisis is crushing everyone, but it has become downright calamitous for small businesses. Survey after survey after survey shows that employers expect healthcare costs to rise nearly 10% on average in 2027, a figure that could be twice as high for small firms.

Those businesses — a key driver of the U.S. economy �...Read more

A lot of people used to think about college the way a lot of people now think about protein: good for you in any quantity, and the more the better. How times have changed.

Not only is the share of people who see college as a worthwhile investment in decline, but some smaller schools are digging into their endowments to stay afloat. Even popular...Read more

A popular metaphor for climate change is the boiling frog, the idea being that we’re getting cooked so slowly that we don’t realize it until it’s too late. In reality, if humans are the frogs, they’re not just being cooked alive and already feeling it, they’re reaching out of the pot to crank up the burner.

The United Nations ...Read more

Silicon Valley leaders keep painting artificial intelligence doomsday scenarios, yet they also can’t stop racing to build and sell it. They often point to China as the reason they have no choice, even as the post-ChatGPT era suggests the fiercest pressure comes from one another.

Yet the prevailing assumption is that cooperation with Beijing ...Read more

It’s becoming harder for Anthropic PBC to justify some of the most unfalsifiable circular logic to ever come out of Silicon Valley: the pursuit of artificial superintelligence, which by its own admission could kill a lot of humans.

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon recently resigned, saying that his previous employer and its rival OpenAI were ...Read more