April 28, 2025
Letter to the Editor: Sugary Treats Shouldn’t Be on the SNAP Menu
Allysia Finley is right to question the logic of allowing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, beneficiaries to spend billions of government dollars earmarked for nutrition on sugary beverages and candy (“Do Food Stamps Make People Fat?,” Life Science, April 21). Critics maintain that government-mandated SNAP restrictions would threaten personal freedom. But SNAP is an…
April 28, 2025
You Autor Know
Along with many other controversial issues in 2025, Americans are at odds over the merits of tariffs. Underlying this debate is a more specific one—the impact of increased trade with China over the past 25 years on American manufacturing employment. Advocates of tariffs hope they will bring back blue-collar jobs, to which they ascribe special…
April 24, 2025
Musk’s High-Tech Polygamy Is a Dead End
Elon Musk told a conference in Saudi Arabia last year that his listeners “should view the birthrate as the single biggest problem [we] need to solve. If you don’t make new humans, there’s no humanity, and all the policies in the world don’t matter.” In this way, he spotlighted his commitment to the pronatalist cause—the idea that…
April 15, 2025
Utah Hands Parents the Keys to the App Store
Two devoted Utah parents experienced the unthinkable in 2022: They lost their 14-year-old son—a warm, football-loving boy—to suicide. In the painful days that followed, as they searched for answers, they discovered something chilling. Despite their best efforts to set up parental controls and screen time limits, their son had been relentlessly fed pro-suicide content by…
April 9, 2025
Measuring and Building Human Leadership in an AI World
A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Measuring Human Leadership Skills With AI Agents, presents evidence that artificial intelligence may soon play a central role in evaluating human soft skills—long considered too complex and subjective to measure objectively. Conducted by Ben Weidmann and David Deming et al. at the Harvard Kennedy School,…
March 17, 2025
How State Policymakers Can Save the Nuclear Family
Blue states are better for families. That is what many academics contend. In their classic book “Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture,” law professors Naomi Cahn and June Carbone argue that blue states have the liberal values and policies they believe make for strong and stable families. Scholars like…
March 17, 2025
Progressives Are Starting to Come Around on the Importance of Marriage and Fatherhood
Progressives and conservatives rarely agree. But there’s a growing consensus about this one data point: America’s men are not OK. This isn’t exactly a political phenomenon — although men are changing politically, too. Last summer, economist Tyler Cowen detected a “vibe shift” in American culture, noting people were drifting rightward. Among his 19 reasons for the shift,…
March 17, 2025
Trump Should Put an End to Rent Control
We are in a time when what would have seemed to be unimaginable domestic policy changes — from the abolition of the Department of Education to cutoffs of federal support for universities — are on the table. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is involved in this creative destruction — having pulled back a Biden-era program called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, which tied federal assistance for…
March 12, 2025
Why Alabama Needs The Success Sequence
“The American Dream is beyond my reach.” This is increasingly the view that many young men and women take regarding the long-held belief that anyone can succeed in the United States. In fact, over half of young adults today believe the American Dream is no longer within their reach. What many of them do not know is that…
March 3, 2025
It’s Time for Time Limits on Public Housing
Like other Cabinet agencies, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is moving quickly to undo long-standing progressive policies. New HUD Secretary Scott Turner has asserted that the agency is now “DEI-free.” Perhaps even more significantly, the agency is considering implementing time limits and work requirements for tenants of public and subsidized housing. Although we should expect howls of protest from tenant…