City Journal

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Cold Comfort

In Wicker Park on Chicago’s near northwest side, at the Six Corners intersection of Milwaukee, Damen, and North Avenues, stands Flash Taco. In the taqueria’s windows, signs proclaim, “We feel your struggle #BLM. We Be About It. Not Talk About It.” Adorning one of its walls is a mural of a suited-up Colin Kaepernick, gazing […]

Losing Their Way

Few would dispute that the federal government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic was less than optimal. The FDA, CDC, and NIH were criticized for their initial inability to develop a reliable Covid test, their failure to collect key data and help states control the spread, and their inconsistent messaging to the public. As these failures […]

Free-Speech Entrepreneurs

When video-sharing platform Rumble announced in August that it had struck deals with such prominent figures as Glenn Greenwald and Tulsi Gabbard, it marked a significant milestone in the eight-year-old service’s rise. Founded in 2013 by Canadian tech entrepreneur Chris Pavlovski to help “the little guys” stand out in a crowded market dominated by YouTube, […]

Enemies of the School Board

School boards have always attracted their share of controversies: disagreements over curriculum, bitter election fights, and personality clashes. But in recent months, as parents express their frustration over Covid lockdowns, mask mandates, and critical race theory, local school districts and federal law enforcement have upped the ante by monitoring parents, requesting undercover agents at school […]

Leaving the Field

A new era in college sports governance is coming. On November 8, the NCAA released a revised draft constitution that radically shifts power from itself to the three college sports divisions and the athletic conferences. The new constitution, likely to be approved at the January NCAA membership meeting, leaves the most important work of rules […]

The Continuing Need for Immigration Reform

The prospects for meaningful immigration reform couldn’t be bleaker. Policy failure or inaction is the rule in almost every area of immigration policy, the only arguable exception being anti-terrorist legislation. In Congress, immigration reform has been pretty much a dead letter since the Obama administration’s failed effort. President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer […]

Mandates Won’t Immunize Against Crime

In recent weeks, police unions, in step with thousands of police officers in major American cities, have vigorously resisted and protested vaccine mandates, leading to the possibility that many departments will soon face crippling labor shortages. While providing questionable public-health benefits, mandates thus threaten to make the problem of rising violent crime even worse. In […]

Loan Giveaways Won’t Boost Family Formation

Those worried about the state of higher education tend to cite woke students and campus controversies, but others have pointed to another, long-term problem: rising student-loan debt allegedly preventing young adults from getting married and starting a family. “You shouldn’t have to take on a mountain of debt and get a four-year degree you don’t […]

#MeToo Comes to China

Pity the dictators. It’s harder and harder for them to rule by terror, to make people believe in their legitimacy, and to impose a single ideology. Despite all the new technologies at their disposal—Internet espionage, censorship of social networks, and facial-recognition software—the people no longer believe. Where it is too dangerous to protest, the people […]

How the News Got Woke—and Why It Matters

Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, by Batya Ungar-Sargon (Encounter Books, 234 pp., $28.99) As books go, 2020 was meritocracy’s annus horribilis. Daniel Markovits warned of The Meritocracy Trap, while The Tyranny of Merit earned Michael Sandel several book-of-the-year awards. Both books pointed to meritocracy’s potential to legitimize inequality beyond the point of […]

Building Babel

A host of organizations has sprung up to correct wayward attitudes, language, and thought.

A False Choice

Count President Biden’s top labor economist, Janelle Jones, as among the few who thinks that the Federal Reserve should keep its foot on the gas. At 6.2 percent, inflation is up to its highest rate in decades. Yet the Fed has not only set rates to near zero but is also still buying long-dated securities—quantitative […]

Choosing Civilization

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 704 pp., $23) Some years ago, I watched an interactive course taught by Yale political science professor Ian Shapiro. Shapiro posed a simple question to his two students, a young American man and a young woman […]

Pump Politics

The Biden administration can’t seem to decide how to respond to the approximately 50 percent increase in retail gasoline prices since October 2020 and the economic damage it has caused, including accelerated inflation. First, it denied gas prices were increasing, blaming changes on seasonal demand rather than diminished supplies, but that explanation didn’t survive scrutiny. […]

A Benefit, Not a Burden

At 9:45 AM on May 18, 1927, explosions ripped through the Bath Consolidated School outside Lansing, Michigan. At first, witnesses and survivors didn’t know the cause. But within half an hour, as rescuers worked within the school, a man drove to the scene in a truck loaded with dynamite and detonated it, killing himself and […]

Trial By Jury Needs No Fixing

The acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse on charges of first-degree murder has prompted anguish from commentators on the left, who characterize the jury’s acceptance of Rittenhouse’s self-defense claim as evidence of the corrupt, racist nature of the justice system and America in general. Protesters around the country condemned the verdict’s “white supremacy,” and cable news voices […]

Reject Racial Hysteria

On November 19, 2021, Damian Williams was sworn in as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. At 41, Williams is an impressive figure: A.B. from Harvard, M.Phil. from University of Cambridge, and J.D. from Yale Law School, followed by a prestigious clerkship with then-Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals […]

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

The policy represents a dangerously expansive vision of federal power over public health.

Strength in San Diego

The city’s leadership generally enforces the rule of law.

How Not to Combat Disinvestment

One of Baltimore’s favorite daughters, novelist Laura Lippmann, has said that her city “suffers from nostalgia” that “keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here.” And when we do talk about our city’s tragic decline, we’re often in denial about what happened. Though Baltimore has embraced progressive policies for generations—creating a […]

Undermining Pension Reform

The Biden administration is trying to prohibit California from receiving billions of dollars in new federal aid because, the administration claims, the state’s 2013 Public Employee Pension Reform Act (PEPRA) denied workers the right to bargain for changes to their retirement benefits. The move could undermine state-worker pension reforms passed over the last decade. In […]

Voting Is For Citizens

New York City’s political leaders are prepared to extend the franchise to noncitizens by creating a new class of persons called “municipal voters.” These new voters would include Legal Permanent Residents—LPRs, known familiarly as “green card” holders—and other noncitizens “authorized to work in the United States.” Municipal voters would be permitted to vote in all […]

Breathing Life into Urban Growth

Missing Middle Housing: Thinking Big and Building Small to Respond to Today’s Housing Crisis, by Daniel G. Parolek (Island Press, 328 pp., $40) When Nero’s opulent Domus Aurea was ready for occupancy, the emperor offered an unusual assessment. “At last,” he declaimed, surveying the resplendent frescos, soaring columns, and fixtures glinting with gold leaf, “I […]

Units of Indoctrination

Few parents of school-age children would recognize the name Lucy Calkins, but her English Language Arts curriculum, Units of Study, is used in thousands of classrooms across the United States. Calkins’s curriculum is “built on critical theories,” including critical race theory (CRT), which Democrats and the media have repeatedly denied is taught in K-12 schools. […]

On Received Ideas

Twenty years: that’s how long it took Gustave Flaubert to note and classify the approximately 1,000 definitions, aphorisms, and quotations that make up his Dictionary of Received Ideas. The unfinished work appeared long after his death. But is a dictionary ever finished? We should recall that he wrote in a century ravaged by epidemics, international […]

Guaranteed Murder

In recent years, law enforcement across the United States has been warning radical district attorneys and legislators that their bail “reforms” would get people killed. Progressive Milwaukee district attorney John Chisholm has spearheaded efforts to eliminate or substantially reduce bail since he was elected in 2007, even though he agreed with law enforcement that such […]

New York’s Parent Revolt

An activist fighting Bill de Blasio’s plan to scrap merit-based K-12 programs looks back on the last few years.

Hooked on Bad Pedagogics

Many fields suffer from the persistence of received ideas that are unsupportable, but the problem is especially severe in American education. In many cases, systematic research has illustrated that common current practices could be vastly improved on, but such improvements have not been implemented widely. A 2019 report by Emily Hanford for American Public Media, “At […]

The Genealogy of Woke Capital

American companies’ embrace of radical ideas appears both sudden and inexplicable. In internal trainings, companies from Disney to Lockheed-Martin ask their employees to “challenge colorblind ideologies” and “deconstruct their white male privilege.” Firms spend vast sums of money on such trainings, on diversity-related speakers, and on maintaining a progressive image. Employees find themselves wondering why […]

Back to Work

Cut red tape and encourage work.