This month, Professor Randall L. Kennedy, an eminent scholar of race and civil rights, published an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson denouncing the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in academic hiring. “I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice,” he wrote. “The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince.” More and more colleges started requiring faculty to submit these statements in recent years, until legislatures in red states began to outlaw them. They remain common at private institutions and in blue states. Kennedy lament ..read more

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out. Are you feeling a little guilty about reading this article? Not because of the content, of course—nothing scandalous here!—but rather because of the time it takes away from something else you feel you should be doing. Perhaps you are taking a break from work but feel that you shouldn’t because deadlines and obligations are nipping at your ankles this very minute. If so, that’s because you’re probably too busy. Not that this is some amazing diagnosis: Most people are too busy. According to sur ..read more

Chinese electric vehicles—cheap, stylish, and high quality—should be a godsend to the Biden administration, whose two biggest priorities are reducing carbon emissions quickly enough to avert a climate catastrophe and reducing consumer prices quickly enough to avert an electoral catastrophe. Instead, the White House is going out of its way to keep Chinese EVs out of the U.S. What gives? The key to understanding this seeming contradiction is something known as “the China shock.” American policy makers long considered free trade to be close to an unalloyed good. But, according to a hugely influen ..read more

Last year was widely hailed as a breakthrough for the American worker. Amid a historically hot labor market, the United Auto Workers and Hollywood writers’ and actors’ guilds launched high-profile strikes that made front-page news and resulted in significant victories. Strikes, organizing efforts, and public support for unions reached heights not seen since the 1960s. Two in three Americans support unions, and 59 percent say they would be in favor of unionizing their own workplace. And Joe Biden supports organized labor more vocally than any other president in recent memory. You could look at ..read more

On October 7, Hamas terrorists crossed the border into Israel and massacred more than 1,100 Israelis. The depths of Hamas’s sadism are almost too sickening to comprehend. Babies and children butchered. Parents murdered in front of their children. Families bound together and then burned alive. Others were tortured, and their bodies mutilated while both alive and dead. Even the harshest opponents of Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza acknowledge, albeit often half-heartedly, that Hamas acted with brutality on October 7 in killing innocents. But many of those same critics refuse to ack ..read more

“The entire world knows exactly why the U.S. is trying to ban TikTok,” James Li declared on March 16 to his nearly 100,000 followers on the social-media platform. His video then cut to a subtitled clip of a Taiwanese speaker purportedly discussing how “TikTok inadvertently offended the Jewish people” by hosting pro-Palestinian content. “The power of the Jewish people in America is definitely more scary than Trump,” the speaker goes on. “They have created the options: either ban or sell to the Americans. In reality, it’s neither—it’s selling to a Jewish investment group.” Li, who calls himself ..read more

“I JUST STORMED OUT OF BIDEN’S KANGAROO COURT!” Donald Trump wrote in an to supporters late yesterday afternoon, shortly after the end of the first day of his trial on charges of hiding hush-money payments during the 2016 campaign. The statement led off a fundraising appeal, and it was, somewhat predictably, a lie. Trump had walked out of the courtroom when the proceeding ended, made a few comments to reporters, and left. In historical terms, what happened in the Manhattan courtroom was momentous: the start of the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president. But in particulars, it was ..read more

On February 15, Ron Ruggless was sitting in his home office in Dallas, listening to a Wendy’s earnings call—something he does every quarter as an editor and reporter for Nation’s Restaurant News. When the new CEO of Wendy’s mentioned that the company might introduce “dynamic pricing” in 2025, Ruggless wasn’t surprised; many restaurants have started adjusting prices depending on the time of day or week. It seemed like minor news, so he wrote up a brief report. He didn’t even bother to post it on social media. About 10 days later, Ruggless saw that Wendy’s was going viral. The Daily Mail and the ..read more

In late March, months into the Free Application for Federal Student Aid–rollout debacle that has thrown millions of students’ college plans into a state of flux, the Department of Education let universities know there was yet another issue. The data that the IRS automatically fed into the form were inconsistent. In some cases, those inconsistencies led to students being awarded more aid than they are eligible for—in other cases, less. The department had begun reprocessing the applications with missing data points that it believed would result in students receiving too little aid—but stopped sh ..read more

Photo-illustrations by Gabriela Pesqueira Chugging through Pacific waters in February 1942, the USS Crescent City was ferrying construction equipment and Navy personnel to Pearl Harbor, dispatched there to assist in repairing the severely damaged naval base after the Japanese attack. A young ensign—“real eager to get off that ship and get into action,” in the recollection of an enlisted Navy man who encountered him—sat down and wrote a letter to his younger brother, who one day would be my father. Philip Alvan Shribman, a recent graduate of Dartmouth and just a month away from his 22nd birthda ..read more