“There are many ways to measure the health of a country. One way is growth of gross domestic product. Another is economic productivity. But there’s a less conventional measure worth watching: Do the world’s most talented and ambitious people want to immigrate here? Throughout most of America’s history, the answer has been an emphatic yes. Scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists and strivers from around the world have chosen the United States because they believed they could build something, discover something or start a business while making a better life in this country. We should worry about the day when that is no longer true. Unfortunately, the Trump administration seems determined to make that day arrive sooner rather than later.” (07/31/26)
“Donald Trump is cheap in every sense of the word: cheap in that he is an infamous deadbeat who cheated his creditors; cheap in the sense of tacky; cheap in that he is the sort of man whose virtue, such as it is, can be overcome at no great expense — a cheap date. Trump is a $40 fake Rolex made copious flesh. … the CEO of Rolex, Jean-Frédéric Dufour, bought the whole Swiss watch industry a better deal on tariffs with a desk clock that was not even solid gold but merely gold plated, along with a 1-kg bar of gold engraved with the word ‘PRESIDENT’—in case Trump, who seems to believe that there is something called the Islamic Republic of Japan and who conflates Vladimir Putin with Volodymyr Zelensky, finally forgets which office it is he holds.” (07/31/26)
“Understanding history is tricky. Classes in grade school are generally uneven and whitewashed, if not outright sanitized. Fewer and fewer students are studying it in college at all. Textbooks focus on a select few figures who are painted as defining social movements, particularly those who are looked back on as favorable, or even palatable. In many cases, the more revolutionary commitments of America’s greatest trailblazers are often reduced to a footnote, if not omitted completely. I myself encountered this phenomenon recently when I was working on my contribution to the Prospect Patriots issue, a profile of Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), one of the country’s first muckrakers and a courageous civil rights activist.” (08/01/26)
“Somewhere in the thousand-plus pages of America’s annual National Defense Authorization Act sits a provision that started out as Section 224 and later became Section 219 in the House version. On paper it looks straightforward: expand technological and defense cooperation between the United States and Israel. In practice it has turned into one of the more revealing fights in current U.S. politics. The reactions on both sides make clear that this is not really about joint research projects or sharing a few more technical papers. It has become a proxy for bigger arguments about how far American security commitments should go, what role Israel should play in Washington’s strategy, and where the Republican Party is headed on foreign policy.” (07/31/26)
“The long-run trend has been this: necessities and an array of luxuries (which have become necessities) are spectacularly cheap by historical standards. This is seen clearly in terms of the time price of goods. Governments, of course, have kept the trendline from being smooth. In a thousand ways, politicians and bureaucrats impede the general fall in prices.” (07/31/26)
