When a faulty door plug explosively blew out the side of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 three miles above Portland, Oregon, back in January, leading to the massive recent corporate shakeup at the company, it wasn’t just shoes, cell phones, seat cushions, and the gasping breath of terrified passengers that got violently sucked into the cold, thin air. Out through that gaping hole in a spanking new 737 MAX 9 flew the last tattered shreds of Boeing’s once lofty reputation. And whatever the proximate cause of the aircraft maker’s latest self-described “quality escape,” the root cause was clear: It w ..read more

Much of the debate around the rights of students to protest and of universities to enforce rules of conduct has become repetitive and frustrating. The well-worn arguments over who ought to be platformed or deplatformed, who was canceled or allowed to foment hate, haven’t gotten us anywhere. We need a better conversation, one that illuminates the deeper issues underlying our daily screaming matches. So we recruited Erwin Chemerinsky and Sigal Ben-Porath—two longtime scholars of campus speech policies—to debate how students’ rights conflict with universities’ responsibilities, and in the process ..read more

The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta • 2023 • Harper • 512 pages • $35 Several years ago, I answered a phone call from a national newspaper reporter working on a story about evangelical churches in the United States. One of the more intriguing aspects of our conversation was discovering that although the reporter’s primary beat was American evangelical Christianity, she did not identify as a Christian. She had never studied religion, much less American Christianity. Her academic background was in political science, and her knowled ..read more

To hear the Biden Administration tell it, U.S. agriculture represents a shining beacon for the world’s farms at a time of accelerating climate chaos. In December 2023, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack made the case in Dubai at COP28, the latest iteration of the United Nations’ annual climate talks. Hailing the success of his country’s “incentive-driven and market-based” policy mechanisms for keeping farmers on a “climate-smart” path, Vilsack insisted that “there’s no need for us to be defensive” about the American way of growing food. “We can articulate proactive leadership in the climate spa ..read more

Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew by Avi Shlaim • Oneworld Publications • 2023 • 336 pages • $30 In his 1979 book, The Question of Palestine, the academic, literary critic, and Palestinian-American activist Edward Said observed of Palestine that “[O]ne of the features of a small non-European people is that it is not wealthy in documents, nor in histories, autobiographies, chronicles, and the like.” Partly for this reason, the traditional Zionist narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict predominated in Western countries for decades, even in North American and European universities, no ..read more

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein • 2023 • Farrar, Straus and Giroux • 416 pages • $30 Long before everyone else figured it out, feminists knew that Naomi Wolf had wandered into the woods of unreality. In 2012, I was at a party at the Brooklyn apartment of a popular feminist writer, and in the kitchen a small group had gathered to bitch about how much we loathed Wolf. The most recent provocation was her book Vagina: A New Biography. The book didn’t just attempt to torch decades of feminist work in demystifying sexual health. Despite the sex-positive marketing, it took ..read more

In 2019, five long years ago, I argued in these pages that “[a]fter decades in the wilderness, critics of neoliberalism have reason to hope.” Neoliberalism had failed on its own terms empirically, delivering neither growth nor stability. Then-President Donald Trump had destroyed the last vestiges of the Republican Party’s rhetorical fidelity to free markets, despite his neoliberal policies (tax cuts, opposition to government regulation, and attacks on labor unions). On the Democratic side of the aisle, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were running popular insurgent presidential pri ..read more

The Biden Administration spent much of 2023 making the case for its industrial policies. In speech after speech, senior Administration officials argued for the economic virtues of what they would alternately call “modern supply-side economics,” a “new Washington consensus,” or simply “Bidenomics.” Yet, as we entered the 2024 election season, the topline message was different. In his campaign kickoff speech on the third anniversary of the January 6 insurrection, President Biden argued, “Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the ..read more

Seventy-seven years ago, the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society laid out a stark landscape. “The central values of civilization are in danger,” wrote the newly formed group of neoliberal thinkers. “Over large stretches of the Earth’s surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared.” The society’s solution was to advance “an international order conducive to the safeguarding of peace and liberty.” They went out of their way to emphasize that they were not espousing a worldview or seeking to change hearts: “The group does not aspire to conduct propaganda ..read more

The Biden Administration has made root-and-branch reconstruction of antitrust law and competition policy a centerpiece of its economic agenda. This moment was overdue. For decades, big business-friendly lawyers and economists have dominated antitrust and remade the law to reflect their own policy preferences. They targeted trade restraints between competitors, no matter how small, when the restraints were likely to raise consumer prices and reduce output in the near term—what they called the “consumer welfare” approach—and otherwise generally respected the prerogatives of corporations, no matt ..read more