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...

There are moments in American political life when the most consequential things get said not before committees or at press conferences, but on a late-night television stage. On a Tuesday evening in early May 2026, former President Barack Obama sat down with Stephen Colbert for one of the final broadcasts of a show that has,...

The 2028 presidential race is nearly two and a half years away, and yet the jockeying has already begun in earnest on both sides of the aisle. Town halls in New Hampshire, donor meetings in Manhattan, book tours that barely hide their real ambition. Politicians rarely announce this early, but they don’t wait around either....

Something is quietly happening on the eastern edge of the European Union, and most Western observers are only just beginning to notice. A country that spent five decades trapped behind the Iron Curtain, written off as a peripheral state in the post-Cold War order, is now drawing more American military hardware, more foreign technology investment,...

For many parents behind on child support payments, the consequences are no longer limited to wage garnishments, tax refund seizures, or court notices. Beginning May 8, the federal government is ramping up enforcement in a way that can directly impact a person’s ability to travel internationally: valid U.S. passports can now be revoked over qualifying...

Somewhere in the Persian Gulf right now, roughly 20,000 seafarers are waiting. They’ve been waiting for weeks, stranded on vessels that can’t move, in a waterway that the world depends on but that one nation has, in effect, locked shut. They didn’t start the war. Most of them have nothing to do with it. Yet...