The Silence of the Atlantic
As Europe charts its own strategic course and Washington turns inward, the transatlantic alliance enters an era of polite estrangement that neither side is willing to name.
The Last Steelmakers
In the Mon Valley south of Pittsburgh, a handful of mills still pour American steel. Their survival is a testament to stubbornness, skill, and the irreducible fact that some things cannot be outsourced.
The Constitutional Question of Our Age
The balance between executive authority and congressional power has shifted so dramatically that scholars now debate whether the framers' design has been fundamentally altered.
Dispatches from the New Silk Road
Along the ancient trade routes from Xi'an to Istanbul, China's Belt and Road Initiative is rewriting the geography of global commerce — and the political allegiances that follow.
The Return of Sound Money
After a decade of extraordinary monetary intervention, a new generation of Federal Reserve governors is quietly dismantling the intellectual framework that justified unlimited central bank activism.
The Cathedral Builders of Our Time
A new generation of architects is challenging modernism's half-century dominance with buildings that aspire to beauty, permanence, and the radical proposition that public spaces should inspire civic virtue.
In Defense of Democratic Patience
The gravest threat to self-governance is not external subversion but the corrosive impatience of a citizenry that has forgotten why deliberation matters more than speed.
The Nordic Experiment
Scandinavian social democracy, long held up as a model for the American left, reveals itself on closer inspection to be something far more complex — and far less transferable — than its admirers suppose.
On the Death of the American Novel
Reports of literature's demise are greatly exaggerated — but the American novel's retreat from public consequence is real, self-inflicted, and not yet reversed.
Why Manufacturing Still Matters
The post-industrial thesis held that advanced economies could prosper on services alone. The pandemic, the supply chain crisis, and the return of great-power competition have rendered that thesis untenable.
The Case for Civic Architecture
Public buildings are not mere shelters for government functions. They are the physical expression of democratic values — and their design determines whether citizens feel honored or processed.
A New Doctrine for Federal Lands
The Interior Department's proposed reclassification of 200 million acres of public land represents the most significant shift in conservation philosophy since Theodore Roosevelt.
The Judiciary at a Crossroads
The Supreme Court's current term may determine whether the federal judiciary functions as a constitutional guardian or a superlegislature — and neither outcome is without risk.