Once upon a time in Italy, a prominent citizen declared: “It is unacceptable that sometimes in certain parts of Milan there is such a presence of non-Italians that instead of thinking you are in an Italian or European city, you think you are in an African city.” In case the message was not crystal clear, […]

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The scarcely 22,000 voters of Ohio’s Ottawa County, nestled on the south shore of Lake Erie, have picked the winning presidential candidate for more than half a century, rarely straying more than a few points off dead center. The county’s largely working-class voters twice favored George W. Bush by between two and four points and […]

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Over the years, many prominent economists have advocated taxing financial transactions. During the Great Depression that followed the 1929 stock market crash, John Maynard Keynes advocated such a tax to curb financial speculation and help ensure that investments went to productive endeavors rather than short-term gains. Nobel laureate James Tobin proposed a financial transactions tax […]

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It was easy enough to find out what the pundits thought about the Sept. 12 Democratic debate, but what about the candidates themselves? How did they position their candidacies in the days that followed? A scroll through Instagram was instructive and also provided a glimpse of how that platform is being deployed as source for […]

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One day in August 2004, as I drove down the street in my hometown of Stillwater, Okla., I tuned the radio dial to a new station. I settled on a random call-in show and sat back to listen. The host was denouncing the candidacy of John Kerry in terms that went something like this. “He […]

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