How symbiotic relationships between colleges and their communities have reaped rewards in Erie, Pennsylvania, and Waterville, Maine.
January/February/March 2023
Posted inMagazine
The New Political Economy
In the immortal Federalist No. 10, James Madison wrote, The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like […]
Posted inMain
Everyday High Prices
For years, the only supermarket serving the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in southwest South Dakota was run-down and a threat to public health. Inspectors from the Indian Health Service repeatedly cited its distant corporate owners for food safety violations, such as mixing rotten hamburger with fresh meat and repackaging it for sale. So leaders of […]
Posted inMagazine
Manufacturing and Liberty
As Biden strives to break China’s hold on the West, it’s time to relearn America’s no chokepoint strategy.
Posted inMagazine
Need a New Economic Vision? Gotcha Covered
The American Promise isn’t looking too promising to a lot of Americans. Many young people, especially those with a college education, think the country is basically irredeemable. In their view, it was founded on racism, sexism, and genocidal colonialism, and all the Framers’ fine words about equality of opportunity are sick jokes played on marginalized […]
Posted inBooks
Emancipation Relocation
In 1848, at a time when Black families were routinely ripped apart and Black bodies were bought and sold in public squares as chattel, a Black man and his mixed-race wife pulled off one of the most daring and ingenious feats of self-emancipation imaginable. Defying conventions of race, class, and gender, William and Ellen Craft […]
Posted inBooks
Medicine at the Mercy of Wall Street
The pharmaceutical industry is the great white whale of American medicine. No matter how many harpoons activists, progressive politicians, journalists, and scholars hurl at its bloated body, it not only survives, it grows fatter by feasting on the patients and payers that are the krill of the U.S. health care system. The drug price controls […]
Posted inJanuary/February/March 2023
The Plumbers Who Couldn’t Fix a Leak
For me, the puzzle of Watergate is why Richard Nixon, who wasn’t responsible for the Democratic National Committee break-in, decided to lead the cover-up just days after the burglary undertaken by a band of White House–led dirty tricksters known as “the Plumbers.” What made the president order the CIA to shut down the FBI probe […]
Posted inBooks
The Courage and Compromises of George P. Shultz
When he died, at the age of 100, in 2021, George P. Shultz was widely hailed as a consummate pragmatist who represented a type of sober conservatism that has been almost entirely eradicated in the modern Republican Party. A charter member of the foreign policy establishment, he occupied four cabinet positions, including secretary of labor […]
Posted inBooks
Donald Trump Is No Grover Cleveland
We are cursed to live in a time when Donald Trump’s grotesque shadow hangs over almost any topic of political or cultural conversation. So if you read Troy Senik’s new biography, A Man of Iron, about the life of Grover Cleveland, you can’t help but try to detect any relevant parallels between the one person […]
