Author: nick

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair The Trump administration’s appetite for cruelty and its wanton disregard for wasting taxpayer funds has shown itself again – this time in its proposed regulations for implementing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s (OBBBA) Medicaid eligibility requirements. But as new details emerge, there are some possible ways that states could protect eligible populations from losing health care. The proposed regulations, which were officially released on June 3, require many individuals with serious illnesses or medically complex situations to prove they are unable to meet work requirements. This upends months of guidance to states from an…

Say the powers-that-be determine to site something truly noxious—a radioactive waste dump, a halfway house for child molesters, a data center—in your neighborhood. (These almost inevitably will be government projects or enabled by corporate welfare and subsidies to developers.) You protest. Instead of meeting your sincere remonstrations with arguments, you will be sneeringly called a NIMBY—a Not in My Backyard obstructionist. This epithet can be disorienting. Not in My Backyard? Well, yeah—not in my backyard. What’s wrong with caring about my backyard? This objection never occurs to the smearers. For they are likely to be the sort of placeless people…

Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It by Samuel Moyn. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 288 pages. Here is the first paragraph of Samuel Moyn’s book on gerontocracy: For two centuries, Democracy in America, published by the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville starting in 1835, has been the most famous book about the United States. It deserves to stay that way. But it might need an update. What do these sentences mean? Do they mean anything? Of course, I get the joke—or what is meant to be a joke. Tocqueville wrote a book…

Image by Planet Volumes. The US, with Donald Trump as president, has become a bizarre place. The country is at the moment in a sort of lull in a major war that Trump and his Israeli sidekick Benjamin Netanyahu launched against Iran over three months ago—not quite a cease-fire, but not full-blown war. Nearly $50 billion dollars spent on it, and the global economy is reeling from the shutdown of one-fifth of the world’s supply of oil and natural gas, and Trump still can’t explain why the war was necessary and how and when he’s going to end it….if he…

The American Book of Fables by Matthew Mehan, illustrated by John Folley. Sophia Institute Press, 396 pages. I’m certainly not the first person to remark upon this, but the chief moral fable of the United States—young George Washington admitting he chopped down a beloved cherry tree because he “can’t tell a lie”—is a far cry from the trickster tales passed down by peoples like the Yoruba in Africa, the Norse in Scandinavia, and the Apache in North America. The author Matthew Mehan acknowledges this in his new book for children and families, The American Book of Fables, writing, “In the…

The German government is considering a new law that would require social media platforms to give greater visibility to content from news organizations that government regulators classify as “reliable” or serving the “public value.” According to a leaked planning document, government officials would decide which outlets qualify, and platforms could even be required to meet quotas for how much approved content appears in users’ feeds. Supporters argue the idea would help counter misinformation and promote trustworthy news, while critics worry it would give politically connected regulators too much influence over what information people see online and could disadvantage independent or dissenting…

The Banker Who Made America: Thomas Willing and the Rise of the American Financial Aristocracy, 1731–1821 by Richard Vague. Polity. 448 pages Thomas Willing is a name that few people, even those well-versed in the history of the American Revolution, will probably recognize. Those who do will likely associate Willing with only two achievements: voting against American independence as a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress of 1776, and serving as the head of the first Bank of the United States, established in Washington’s presidency under the aegis of Alexander Hamilton and his ascendant Federalist allies. Richard Vague’s new book,…

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair America’s 2025 National Security Strategy calls for gaining control of the world’s oil trade. Toward this end, Donald Trump’s Oil War aims at depriving Iran, Iraq and its neighboring OPEC countries of their sovereignty over whom they may sell their oil to, just as he has done to Venezuela. There is no remorse for the collateral damage being caused by the disruption in energy trade that is plunging most of the world’s economies into depression. Such reckless (and wreckful) behavior conforms to the letter of what psychologists call a sociopath. The Mayo Clinic applies this…

Imagine me and my wife coming to the realization that we just can’t give our kids the safe, happy life in America all children deserve as a human right. The healthcare is lousy and expensive. The neighborhood school is full of drugs and gangs, and the kids don’t learn much there anyway. What can we do? We’ve never been to Switzerland, but we’ve heard it offers opportunities. We just want a better life for our kids. So we hire someone who knows how to wrangle kids into Switzerland—a sleazy travel agent, coyote guide, human smuggler—and send our two off to…

By the summer of 2000, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević appeared firmly entrenched in power. A decade earlier, he had risen to prominence by harnessing Serbian nationalism as Yugoslavia began to fracture. Over time, he consolidated control over political institutions and much of the media while leading Serbia through wars, sanctions, and NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign. Yet beneath the surface, public frustration was growing. The economy was struggling, unemployment remained high, and many Serbians had grown weary of international isolation and authoritarian rule. When Milošević changed election rules in July 2000 to allow the presidency to be decided by popular vote,…