Something felt different about the political and media climate in late April and early May 2026. A late-night joke, a streaming platform’s editing room, and the federal government’s broadcast regulatory arm all collided in a matter of weeks. The collision pulled Melania Trump back to the center of one of the most charged press freedom...
Few presidents in modern American history have managed to ignite fury on both sides of the aisle, and across both sides of the Atlantic, quite so quickly. In the space of just over a year, the second Trump administration has set off a chain of events that has left diplomats scrambling, lawmakers demanding emergency hearings,...
Few moments in modern business history are as prescient as a single Q&A session at a Midwestern university in the spring of 1991. A student stood up and posed a deceptively simple question to one of the world’s most respected investors. The answer that came back was brief, calm, and, as history would eventually confirm,...
Few people who study history for a living expect to become internet celebrities. Fewer still get dubbed the next Nostradamus. And almost none of them find themselves in the position of watching, in real time, as the specific catastrophes they warned about begin to unfold. Yet that is exactly where Jiang Xueqin finds himself in...
Most of the vitamins you know as a “hair and nails” supplement have never made headlines in an oncology lab. For decades, biotin (vitamin B7) has lived quietly on the shelves of drugstores, associated mostly with thicker hair and stronger nails. It is not a dramatic nutrient. It’s not associated with cancer prevention or cancer...
Every decade or so, Washington rediscovers the federal gas tax. The last time a U.S. president seriously floated suspending it was 2008, when Barack Obama was running against Hillary Clinton and John McCain, and gas had briefly crossed $4 a gallon. Congress ignored all three of them. The tax stayed put. Now, with pump prices...
When the most powerful person on earth also controls the largest nuclear arsenal in human history, the question of cognitive fitness stops being a matter of political opinion. It becomes a public health question. And in the spring of 2026, that question erupted into the open in a way that was hard to ignore. A...
A Quick Overview: On May 12th, President Donald Trump announced that he is “seriously considering” making Venezuela the 51st state of the United States, citing the country’s enormous oil wealth as his primary motivation. The statement comes roughly five months after a U.S. military operation captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and brought him to New...
Nearly 600,000 people handed over $100 apiece to pre-order a gold-colored Android smartphone bearing the Trump name, an American flag on its back, and a promise that it was built right here in the United States. Almost a year later, not a single one of them has received a phone. What many of them have...
Tens of millions of Americans haven’t thought about their passport in years. It sits in a drawer somewhere, maybe a little dog-eared, maybe close to its expiration date, and mostly forgotten until a trip is a few weeks away. That’s precisely when the complications begin. Right now, in the spring of 2026, new rules, record-breaking...
There is something almost philosophical happening at the borders and naturalization offices of the United States right now. The question of who gets to be American has always generated heat. But in 2025 and into 2026, the Trump administration has moved from political rhetoric to concrete, sweeping policy action in ways that are reshaping the...
Few economic policy debates of this era have generated as much noise, or generated as much genuine confusion, as the question of who actually pays when the United States raises its tariff rates. The White House has offered one answer consistently and loudly. Independent economists, trade researchers, and nonpartisan think tanks have offered a very...
