Count me among those who hope for the dawning of the driverless car age to happen soon. If I live long enough, the day will come when someone—my wife, my daughter—will extend their hand to demand the car keys. The prospect of being able to summon a driverless car to take me to the grocery […]
In a previous post, I mentioned an effective way to curtail illegal immigration—require all employees to be screened through E-Verify—and some reasons why it won’t be adopted. Another disincentive to deterring illegal immigration is that it subsidizes Social Security and Medicare: “ . . . illegal immigrants as a group are net contributors who partially […]
I see where the latest gambit by House Republicans is to tie Ukraine aid to immigration “reform.” Setting aside the fact that aid to Ukraine is, like most foreign aid, a subsidy for US business, the linkage to immigration is a red herring. All the current approaches are failing, are doomed, and are a waste […]
The October 30 issue of The New Yorker has a piece on Xi’s China called “China’s Age of Malaise.” While the mainstream media continues to promote the idea that China has become a wellspring of creativity and economic competition, the reality is that China is retreating into the rigid, sclerotic political dogmatism that characterized the […]
Vaccination is one of the great triumphs of humanity over infectious disease. Smallpox was such a plague that George Washington mandated inoculation for all Continental soldiers in 1777. Prior to the polio vaccine, most Americans knew a friend or relative who contracted polio; today, it’s virtually unheard of, just like mumps and whooping cough. The […]
Not to put too fine a point on it, the recent chaos in the GOP-controlled House isn’t a bug, it’s a feature for the modern GOP. There isn’t any daylight between Gym Jordan and Mike Johnson, politically, but policy no longer matters to the GOP. It’s just optics, and Johnson has (so far) mastered the […]
I first became a history autodidact in my 20s, trying to understand the difference between my worldview and those of my parents and in-laws. >100 histories and biographies later, I have a great appreciation of just how awful the 20th century was. In my lifetime, I remember political assassinations, race riots, the Vietnam war, recessions, […]
When we moved to New England last year, I looked forward to eating more seafood, locally sourced. The first clue I had that my expectations were not grounded in reality was when I discovered that the cod in grocery stores was Alaskan/Pacific cod. Turns out, a lot of the seafood on your plate was likely […]
Timothy Snyder is a Yale historian. I’ve reviewed his books “Bloodlands” and “Black Earth” about the holocaust here and elsewhere. Snyder isn’t Israeli and he isn’t Jewish. But I think the comments he posted today on his Substack blog “Thinking about” deserve reflection. Here are the money grafs: “In evaluating what Hamas has done, it […]
Before we moved to Rhode Island last year, I was familiar with Newport as the home of the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals. Indeed, we attended one afternoon of performances at the Newport Jazz Festival this summer. Newport is only an hour from our home in Rumford RI. Recently, I read in The New York […]