“Texas is the national testing ground for bad public policy,” the journalist Molly Ivins used to say. It was a Texas attorney general, Gregg Abbott, who sued in federal court in Brownsville, Texas, challenging Barack Obama’s 2014 executive memorandum that attempted to provide temporary legal status for undocumented parents of children born in the United […]

Read more

We are at a moment of profound societal transition, not just with respect to science and technology, but in the way we work, live, and think. No sector will be spared. No one’s life will go unaltered, even if the impacts are uneven. With advances in computing power and storage and improvements in machine learning […]

Read more

In February 2016, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) announced that, with the help of some European partners, it had partially busted a “massive” drug trafficking and money-laundering operation being conducted by “Lebanese Hezbollah’s External Security Organization Business Affairs Component (BAC).” Observers familiar with repeated U.S. attempts to stigmatize Hezbollah with the narco-terrorist label should […]

Read more

The Pentagon has bet the farm on an airplane championed as a “super fighter” that can do everything for everybody. The F-35 is intended to replace and improve upon several current—and aging—aircraft types with widely different missions. To achieve this, the airplane must meet the mission requirements of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marine […]

Read more

For years, carbon tax advocates scoffed at the notion that Exxon-Mobil would back a tax on climate-damaging carbon pollution. We saw through the vague hypotheticals in which the oil giant cloaked its occasional expressions of support. Rather than invest political muscle in carbon tax legislation, Exxon for decades funded a network of deception that blocked […]

Read more