There’s an episode of "The West Wing" where the White House tries to get the ailing chief justice of the United States, a liberal firebrand, to step down so that President Josiah Bartlet can appoint a younger replacement. Otherwise, as one staffer puts it, the chief might “be replaced by a paleo Republican.”

The episode comes to mind in ...Read more

Never in my lifetime has there been an easier political post-mortem. It’s obvious what caused the GOP’s midterm wipeout. The harder question for Republicans is what comes next. And no, it’s not just ending the war in Iran — although that would help.

The Republicans who remain in office are not only in a lame-duck, choose-your-own ...Read more

Each day seems to bring fresh havoc in the digital world. In recent weeks, researchers have uncovered security flaws in some of the most consequential corners of the internet, bugs that could put users at risk, jeopardize essential services and impose significant economic costs. Squint a little, though, and it looks like progress.

In August, ...Read more

Last week, Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old U.S. citizen held in Russian custody since 2022, was freed in what the Kremlin called a humanitarian goodwill gesture.

Hubbard’s release came shortly after a deal by Russian President Vladimir Putin to sell diesel to the United States. This has caused some to suggest the Kremlin has shifted tactics in...Read more

Wall Street delivered its verdict on the blue-wave midterms 48 hours later in the form of a red wave—red ink, that is.

After a brief relief rally the day after the election, the Dow shed more than 1,800 points, the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell more than 5% and into correction territory, and roughly $2.5 trillion in market value vanished in a single...Read more

Tariffs are not causing America’s inflation. If you want to know what is driving up consumer prices, look at the September Consumer Price Index. According to the latest data, prices rose 3.7 percent over the past year, driven by rising energy and services costs — not tariffs. In fact, gasoline jumped 9.1% in September — and is up 34.2% ...Read more

President Donald Trump fancies himself a farsighted man of destiny and if his vision has often proved lacking — witness the Iranian quagmire— he was right about one thing: 2026 was going to be a rough year for Republicans.

That’s typically how midterm elections work for the party in the White House.

And so Trump, knowing the GOP’s ...Read more

If there is one area where President Donald Trump has deviated significantly from Republican Party economic policy orthodoxy, it must be import tariff policy.

Rather than promoting free trade, Trump has pursued the most aggressive trade policy in the last 100 years. Indeed, he has taken a protectionist, largely unilateral approach to trade ...Read more

The shift to artificial intelligence models that can carry out tasks, not just generate content, hasn’t yet taken off in the way the tech industry desperately needs it to.

Salesforce Inc. has struggled to get traction with its nearly two-year-old Agentforce service for businesses. Australia’s Commonwealth Bank reversed plans to cut 45 ...Read more

Scrolling through the news, you might get the impression that mathematics is solved. A Wall Street Journal headline reads, “AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems — and Kill Us All.” Science says, “OpenAI breakthrough triggers ‘existential crisis’ in math.” Daniel Litt, a prominent researcher of mathematics at ...Read more

The shift to artificial intelligence models that can carry out tasks, not just generate content, hasn’t yet taken off in the way the tech industry desperately needs it to.

Salesforce Inc. has struggled to get traction with its nearly two-year-old Agentforce service for businesses. Australia’s Commonwealth Bank reversed plans to cut 45 ...Read more

It’s not a stretch of the imagination to say that last week’s midterm election was one the most embarrassing moments of President Donald Trump’s political life. At the time of writing, Democrats have flipped 44 House seats and seven Senate seats, earning a commanding majority in both houses of Congress for the first time since 2020. The ...Read more

The stunning results of last week’s midterm elections hold important lessons for both parties. They should stop crowing and crying and start facing up to them.

Shortly after the Republicans suffered historic losses, Vice President JD Vance issued a postmortem blaming Iran, inflation and Israel. He neglected to mention how much his own ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — When Angelenos chose Nithya Raman as their next mayor, Karen Bass wasn't the only establishment pillar that was resoundingly rebuked.

Here in the country's Latino capital, the metropolis that delivered California its first Latino U.S. senator and pioneered the type of winning political machine that Latinos across the country ...Read more

Make no mistake: Nov. 3 was a change election, driven by widespread dissatisfaction with the economy. What must come next is real change.

Americans have been struggling under the Trump administration’s tariffs, wars and cuts to safety net programs. Higher fuel prices from the Iran war alone are projected to cost U.S. families an extra $170 ...Read more

The newly Democratic Congress faces a lengthy agenda once it's sworn in on Jan. 3 — reversing cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, reestablishing premium subsidies for Affordable Care Act health plans, holding President Donald Trump's incompetent cabinet members to account, investigating the self-dealing and corruption of this White House, etc., etc...Read more

I saw my first picture of a Tesla Cybertruck at the big wooden table of our family’s northern Minnesota hunting shack. Except for myself, a soft-handed writer with a minivan, this was a gathering of men who drove pickup trucks their whole lives.

We passed around someone’s phone displaying the glistening stainless steel prototype while the ...Read more

For years after her sister Polly Klaas was murdered and the killer incarcerated on death row at San Quentin, Annie Nichol viewed the prison with dread, a place that contained the living embodiment of her unimaginable pain and fear.

"Every time I drove by San Quentin, I would kind of get a chill," Nichol told me Sunday. "It felt scary."

Last ...Read more

As I exited my office in downtown Chicago on Election Day, I had to excuse myself to pass through since there was a line of people in front. The line stretched from Wabash Avenue to Monroe Street, on to State Street and all the way to Adams Street.

These were people patiently waiting to vote. This was how I knew a blue wave was coming. In a ...Read more

They appeared like mushrooms after a rain. No announcement of their coming. No explanation. Like Stanley Kubrick’s monolith in the desert. No warning that they would promise to give us the world so they could take our jobs — our soul. Data centers — the home of artificial intelligence.

I’m a television journalist, a narrator. That means...Read more