“Some tales can cross cultures, continents, and even centuries to arrive in our own era … That’s particularly so for the immortal story of ‘an appointment in Samarra.’ It first appeared in the fifth century in the Babylonian Talmud, that ancient repository of Jewish rabbinical wisdom. Then it crossed over into Islamic literature … before popping up on the London stage in Act III of William Somerset Maugham’s 1933 play Sheppy. In Maugham’s retelling, the tale is rich in irony. Once long ago, he wrote, there was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to shop in the market. But the servant soon returned home in a panic and told his master about a woman in the crowd there who stared at him angrily. ‘It was Death that jostled me,’ the servant announced, pleading with his master for a horse to flee to the town of Samarra.” (02/23/26)
“Trump will forever be known as the president who was intent on sowing doubts about the integrity of America’s elections — despite a total lack of evidence and dozens of investigations and judicial findings. When all is said and done, this may be his greatest legacy. But as much as Trump has taken these cries of voter fraud and rigged elections to an extreme, it is not one of his narcissistic innovations. He merely took what has long been conservative orthodoxy and put his own deceitful spin on it. Decades before he came along, the right was pushing the voter fraud myth — and using it as an excuse to suppress the vote.” (02/23/26)
“With two U.S. carrier strike groups assembling in the Arabian Sea, the chances of an armed conflict with Iran are uncomfortably high …. Unfortunately, other contingencies loom that raise uncomfortable historical parallels. I refer specifically to June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his pregnant wife Sophie were shot and killed on a bridge in Sarajevo by 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip. That assassination triggered a series of mobilizations among the major European powers, based on faulty, outdated premises that whoever mobilizes first wins and that Prussia could easily and quickly defeat France by using railroads to mobilize. More than 110 years later, it is not mobilization that catalyzes catastrophe, but a series of crises that could ignite into a conflagration by a single spark or even a smoldering ember.” (02/23/26)
“After the Trump administration illegally kidnapped the legitimate president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, on January 3, 2026, we saw two distinct and divergent responses from Venezuelans. On the one hand, the Venezuelan diaspora, especially in the United States, celebrated President Maduro’s kidnapping and bombing of their birth country. They congregated in small gatherings the weekend of the abduction, including in Miami. These celebrations, alongside videos online, were widely disseminated in corporate and social media for a US-based (and broader Western) audience, all broadcasting the same message: Venezuelans support President Maduro’s abduction. On the other hand, inside Venezuela, for weeks after the illegal abduction, citizens engaged in (almost) daily and massive demonstrations to condemn the attack that killed and wounded over 100 people.” (02/23/26)
“Daniel Cox just shared 2025 polling data showing that 57% of US dating app users were male and just 38% were female. This data point is just one more indication of a much wider reality that I don’t think a lot of people have incorporated into their worldview. Men are a lot more interested in dating (and marrying) women than women are interested in coupling with men. Below, allow me to present a few more stats that point in this direction.” (02/23/26)
“Everywhere one looks today you see signs of the opposition between ‘conservatives’ and so-called ‘liberals.’ Sometimes conservatives are designated ‘far-right,’ and liberals ‘left-wing.’ Both terms appear to be self-explanatory, unless one keeps in mind that concepts do evolve historically. The term, ‘amateur,’ for example, used to have a very positive or affirmative meaning, namely someone who does something (like painting, or playing the piano) well, because they love doing it (‘amateur’ derives from the Latin for ‘love’), but today its meaning is pejorative, contrasting with the term, ‘professional,’ which means more or less what ‘amateur’ used to mean; namely, that it applies to someone who excels at what they do. Similarly, the term, ‘liberal’ has arguably undergone a semantic shift in recent times – one that places it at a considerable remove from its original historical meaning.” (02/23/26)
“I was quite heartened by the Supreme Court’s rejection of President Trump’s asserted authority to unilaterally impose and remove tariffs at will simply because he has declared an emergency, a determination that, the administration asserted, was not subject to review by the courts, and that could only be overturned by a supermajority in Congress. The power to levy tariffs is explicitly given to the legislative branch under the Constitution, and the plain meaning of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act under the authority of which Trump was claiming to operate did not obviously authorize such an extraordinary degree of delegated authority. Whether or not one chooses to embrace the major questions doctrine, and in what form if so, I agree with Chief Justice John Roberts that what the administration asked for is ultimately incompatible with small-r republican government.” (02/23/26)
“Policy analysts have been warning about Social Security’s funding shortfall for decades, while politicians have sat on their hands. But time is running out: the Social Security trust fund will run out of money in 2034 and, unless Congress acts, current and future beneficiaries will face a 23 percent benefit cut. Congress’s available options include raising taxes or reducing promised benefits, both of which are politically unattractive. The only way to finance promised benefits without raising current taxes is to borrow the money, which will be challenging given the already unsustainable path of the federal debt. In this context, Romina Boccia and Ivane Nachkebia’s new collection — Reimagining Social Security: Global Lessons for Retirement Policy Changes — represents an important contribution to the public discussion.” (02/23/26)
“Private investment can deliver new rentals at scale, but few will want to build if NYC makes it impossible to charge market rates or remove delinquent tenants.” (02/23/26)
