I’ve never paid much attention to cars, but the Ford Edsel was already a punchline when I was a kid. I don’t know if I ever saw one, but any reference to it seemed to be accompanied by a smirk. “The Edsel is one of the greatest and most infamous flops in automotive history, but […]

Or both?

During the Cold War, the US and Soviet Union supported proxy wars in which their client states did the dirty work. Of course, the USSR is no more, but proxy wars continue. While the current war in Iran began with joint strikes by the US and Israel, Israel now acknowledges that the US is its […]

There are instructive parallels between the Trump administration’s trade war with China in the first year of this term and the Iran war that is consuming its second year. In both instances, the administration grossly underestimated its rival’s resilience and capacity to retaliate, then escalated quickly and sharply before learning that the other side controlled […]

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump wrote on his social media platform, saying he would call Canadian Prime […]

I’ve been reading and thinking about the idea of wealth taxes. In principle, it’s an idea I could support. Too much wealth is controlled by too few in America today. The chief argument I see made against wealth taxes is that they’re impractical. In a literal sense, this is easily falsified. We already have some […]

I recently read a history and a biography that are both centered on the American Revolution. It reminded me that for the founding fathers, the ineluctable reality was that they were risking their lives for their beliefs. Josh Marshall has a piece up at TPM about Trump’s effort to extort control over the 2026 elections, […]

I taught medical students for over 30 years. The bar to admission at Saint Louis University Medical School was pretty high for metrics like GPA and MCAT scores. But as a professor, I realized that crossing those bars was no guarantee of sound judgement. Erica Schwartz, Trump’s CDC director nominee, wasn’t a SLUSOM grad*, but […]

It’s another example of how we are in this weird and uncanny political moment in which Trump’s politics have broken free of the constraints of public opinion. (It’s reminiscent of a mob bust-out where you rapidly strip a business of its value with no concern for the future because you’re just going to burn it […]

Whenever you read the conspiracy theories about fluoridated water, it’s a good idea to remember that much of the world’s water is naturally fluoridated. Indeed, the correlation between natural fluoridation and lower incidence of dental caries is what lead to artificial water fluoridation. There are plenty of other things to fret about if that’s how […]