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If Something Cannot Go On Forever, It Won’t

Commentary by , March 23, 2020

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. The Ultimate Resource In charting out the course of the coronavirus pandemic, there is really only one fundamental issue. It’s not the development of a vaccine. That will happen, but not soon enough to head off disastrous consequences, either economically or in terms of human life. The […]

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The Plague Year

Commentary by , March 16, 2020

What You Need to Know About the COVID-19 Pandemic Should you panic about COVID-19? That’s a trick question, because it’s too late. All the hand sanitizer and toilet paper (which is somehow necessary for dealing with a pandemic) has already disappeared from the store shelves. Judging from the state of my local Walmart, canned soup […]

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All They Had to Do Was Not Be Crazy

Commentary by , March 6, 2020

The Search for Sanity, Part 3 As many of us having been saying, all the Democrats had to do to have a good shot at winning back the White House this year was to not be crazy. Here’s a version of that argument from last June. Trump’s personal problems are myriad. He is as polarizing a […]

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Authoritarian Blindness

Commentary by , February 29, 2020

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Authoritarian Blindness How soon we forget the big lessons of the Cold War. There is a weirdly persistent tendency to think of dictatorships as strong, orderly, and effective, when all the evidence indicates that they are weak, chaotic, and hugely inefficient. This is not just a lesson […]

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Sharing the Good News

Commentary by , February 23, 2020

I was into optimism before it was cool. I think it was about fourteen years ago that I caused a bit of a stir in the Objectivist movement by arguing that civilization was not collapsing but seemed to be thriving instead, and that the movement hadn’t really taken this fact on board. I called it […]

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How To Be Irrelevant

Commentary by , February 16, 2020

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Donald Trump Learns His Lesson Explaining her vote not to remove President Trump in the impeachment trial, Senator Susan Collins of Maine expressed her hope that “the president has learned from this case.” The message she thought he would take from it is that “he will be […]

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The Man Who Was There

Commentary by , February 9, 2020

Impeachment Roundup 1. The Man Who Was There The impeachment trial is over, and the Senate voted against Donald Trump’s removal from office. I don’t like to say that he was “acquitted,” because this was not a criminal trial, and because all the facts presented confirmed that he actually did what he was accused of. […]

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The Contest of Ideas

Commentary by , January 26, 2020

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. “He Is Our O.J.” Like most people, I haven’t been following very closely the Senate impeachment trial. Why? Because we all know the fix is in. The trial is not revealing any new information, so instead it is just an opportunity for Republicans to present their rationalizations […]

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“My Soul Was Manufactured in the United States”

Commentary by , January 18, 2020

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Naked Foreign Policy So we didn’t have World War III, after all. I was skeptical that the US airstrike on Iranian terror master Qassem Suleimani would lead to a massive escalation, and now it looks like not much will follow–for better or for worse. Not much for […]

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What Is Autonomy?

Commentary by , January 14, 2020

From My Notebook Having published and sent out into the world my book on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, I have begun work on my next project, my book in defense of the “autonomous individual.” Some of you have asked me why I chose that term. Partly, it’s because that is the term chosen by the […]

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