Author: nick
It was a Tuesday, January 29, 1850, and Sen. Henry Clay had set himself the none-too-modest goal of solving the seemingly intractable problem of American slavery once and for all. By the Kentucky Whig’s own none-too-modest reckoning, he had nearly done that very thing once before. Thirty years earlier, while serving as speaker of the House of Representatives, Clay had been the driving force behind the landmark legislation that came to be known as the Missouri Compromise. That storied law had admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state while simultaneously admitting Maine to the Union as a free…
Allen Ginsberg in 1979. Photo: Michiel Hendryckx. CC BY-SA 3.0 The postwar Beat generation – and the ensuing counterculture — is remembered now, three-quarters of a century later, for one word, Howl, the title of Allen Ginsberg’s 1956 poem. It begins with the following lines: In a tender introduction to the poem, William Carlos Williams reminds readers, “We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness.” But, he adds: “Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels. This poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in…
Defending the rich nowadays is a tricky business. Vulture capitalists have given the rich a very bad name, especially as some don’t build businesses but break them up for profit. Back in the good old days, a boss made 20 times a workers salary; now it’s 400 times minimum. Yep, defending the rich is not for the fainthearted, especially if one has inherited moolah, as is my case. In the PC world of today, people are ashamed and frightened to even acknowledge the slightest difference where wealth is concerned. There are, of course, those like The Donald and his family…
There is a growing bipartisan consensus that the state of our semiquincentennial is FUBAR. “I’m actually pretty pissed at how badly they’ve bungled America 250,” tweeted conservative culture warrior Matt Walsh (no relation) on Saturday, in reaction to President Donald Trump’s proposal to replace an increasingly musicianless Great American State Fair concert series on the National Mall with “the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE…
Scott Bessent may well be the most consequential secretary of the Treasury since Alexander Hamilton – not simply because of the policies he advances, but because of the conditions he confronts and the clarity with which he is executing President Trump’s broader economic vision. Like Hamilton before him, Bessent has stepped into an economy weakened by a long period of policies that, however well-intentioned, failed to serve the enduring interests of the American domestic economy. Before entering public life, Bessent operated at the highest levels of global finance. As a key figure alongside Stanley Druckenmiller, he helped execute one of…
It remains to be seen whether Graham Platner, the by turns troubled and troubling Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, sees his campaign end like Joe Biden after that ill-fated 2024 debate performance or, instead, like Donald Trump after the 2016 release of the “Access Hollywood” tape (or any number of other controversies). The Democratic establishment never wanted Platner to be the nominee to take on Sen. Susan Collins, would probably still like to push him out, have a long history of ruthlessness on this front, and may have a Biden-like path for doing so. Democrats have also at times been…
First, the bad news: The Iran War shows no signs of ending soon. Tehran on Monday said it would suspend peace talks with the U.S. in protest of Israeli strikes in Gaza and Lebanon. Now, the even worse news: The Iran War is linked to the Ukraine War in myriad disturbing ways, and the longer the former drags on, the more dangerous the latter becomes. Talk of “World War III” tends to be ludicrously overwrought—crafted to generate clicks and grab eyeballs on social media, rather than highlight geopolitical risks—but the connections between these two wars have, if anything, been underdiscussed.…
Much of the climate anxiety shaping millennial and Gen Z attitudes toward the future was manufactured through exaggerated predictions that are now being abandoned. Source link
Why a college degree is still worth it, even in 2026. Source link
From Friday’s decision in Watts v. Jones, by Seventh Circuit Judge Frank Easterbrook, joined by Chief Judge Michael Brennan and Judge Diane Sykes: Two detectives investigating an inmate at the Wisconsin Secure Program Facility tried to speak with David Watts, another inmate, who had sent letters suggesting that he had valuable information about a murder and an attempted murder. One detective appeared at Watts’s cell. He feared that the inmate under investigation would get wind of anything he said, so he refused to talk. Watts relates that, even so, he was threatened and harassed. Though no physical harm came to…