Donald Trump Needs Not to Be President Yesterday

Feature Article by , August 16, 2017

We’re done with the “Well, maybe it won’t be so bad and we should take what we can get” phase of this administration. It’s time for the “he’s a disaster and needs to go” phase. For everybody’s good, Donald Trump needs to not be president, and he needs to not be president yesterday. I say […]

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Notes on Our State of Emergency

Feature Article by , August 12, 2017

Virginia’s governor, Terry McAuliffe, just declared a state of emergency for Charlottesville after violent battles between white nationalists and far-left “antifa” counter-protesters. I made it into town Saturday evening, and it certainly did look like a place in a state of emergency, though without any sign of the emergency itself. The streets were eerily empty […]

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No One Expects the Google Inquisition

Feature Article by , August 10, 2017

We have already moved into the inevitable next stage of the James Damore “Google memo” saga. This is the stage where it’s not enough to fire Damore. We also have to fire everyone left at the company who might agree with him in any way. No one expects the Google Inquisition. This is something that […]

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Hey, Google, How Do You Prepare a Country for Totalitarianism?

Feature Article by , August 8, 2017

Millions of Americans—most of us, probably—have grown to rely on Google as our default search engine for finding information online. Thousands more have even gone so far as to buy Google Home, an Internet-connected microphone plugged into Google’s computers that is constantly monitoring your home, waiting for voice commands that begin, “Hey, Google.” To the […]

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The Self-Enforcing Police State

Feature Article by , August 4, 2017

Lena Dunham had a delayed flight and was walking through the airport when she overheard two American Airlines employees having an unapproved private conversation about transgender children. So she did what you naturally do when you are a well-known “liberal” who believes in free speech and distrusts big corporations: she ratted them out to their […]

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Socialism and Barbarism

Feature Article by , August 2, 2017

Has anyone else observed a striking pattern in the New York Times recently? They’ve hosted a series of fond, nostalgic recollections about the good old days of 20th-century Communism—the optimism, the idealism, the moral authority. Not to mention the gulags, the squalor, and the soul-crushing conformity. Actually, they don’t usually mention those things. These articles […]

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Lost in the Monkey House

Feature Article by , July 26, 2017

I’m going to ask you to bear with me while I tell a brief story that seems irrelevant but actually has a lot of application to our tumultuous politics, particularly after this past week. A while back—please don’t ask how—I happened to find myself watching an episode of the fashion-design competition show “Project Runway.” However […]

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The Management Secrets of Atlas Shrugged

Feature Article by , July 23, 2017

A Reader’s Guide to Atlas Shrugged, Part 10 Spoiler Alert: You do not need a reader’s guide to Atlas Shrugged—at least not for your first reading. Ayn Rand’s novel is clear, compelling, eminently readable, and perfectly comprehensible on its own terms. Yet Atlas is also a rich and complex novel, with an intricate plot in […]

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Net Neutrality Is Not About Censorship

Feature Article by , July 14, 2017

I opened my Firefox browser a few days ago and got a message warning me that, “Without Net Neutrality, big companies could censor people and perspectives online.” Does anyone have an idea why this might give us pause—why warnings about a corporation dictating what people can say might come off a bit wrong, especially when […]

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How to Bamboozle a Billionaire

Feature Article by , July 10, 2017

Continuing his “hey, let’s get to know normal people” tour, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife traveled to Alaska and came back with some musings on the “basic income,” the idea of giving everybody in the country a monthly check to live on whether they do any work or not. But in drawing on Alaska […]

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