KAMALA HARRIS’ MOST consistent political trait may be a lack of consistency. Over the course of her long career, first in California and then in Washington, D.C., the Democrats’ 2024 presidential nominee has been plagued by plausible allegations that

FOR TWO WEEKS in April, the top movie in America explored what would happen if Texas and California seceded from the United States. The answer, as foreshadowed in the title Civil War, was brutal internecine violence leading to probably thousands of g

FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, bitcoin was an experimental obscurity mainly popular among cypherpunks and libertarians, trading for less than a U.S. dollar. Since then, it has proven its success as a mostly swift and affordable way to move value globally, while

AS A YOUNG medical student, I admired Tony Fauci. I bought and read Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, a vital textbook that Fauci co-edited. In reading his new memoir, On Call, I remembered why I admired him. His concern about his patients’

THE FEAR THAT millions of newly arrived illegal immigrants are swaying federal elections by voting unlawfully has become a recurring theme in debates over immigration. The idea has so much buy-in that earlier this year, House lawmakers passed the Saf

JOE LANCASTER American Rounds has rolled out vending machines in a halfdozen grocery stores in the South, with plans to expand later in 2024. The machines are not for lottery tickets or gumballs, but for bullets. I trekked to a Fresh Value grocery st

1. Prefix with “colon” or “conductor” 5. D.C.’s NHL team, for short 9. “And more like this”: abbr. 12. What’s often missing behind politicians’ promises 14. Bohm of the Phillies 15. Seized via eminent domain, perhaps 17. Zola who wrote “J’Accuse…!”

TWO TO THREE miles below our feet lies a nearly inexhaustible source of energy, and a number of startups are working to harness it to provide carbon-free electricity. Unlike solar and wind generation, which depend upon a shining sun or a stiff breeze

KAMALA HARRIS’ MOST notable foray into health care policy was when she endorsed an idea she now says she doesn’t support. In 2017, she co-sponsored a single-payer health care plan developed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.). That plan would have cost ab

THE NATIONALIST CONSERVATIVE obsession with blue-collar manufacturing jobs often ignores the interests of workers and the will of consumers. Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) provided a perfect illustration in an early August campaign speech in Nevada on “the

IS KAMALA HARRIS running the first ever YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) campaign for president? She’s certainly talking like she is, even though her housing platform is riddled with policy proposals that will make high housing costs worse. “There’s a se

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY made history this year by nominating a presidential candidate who supports marijuana legalization. And when Vice President Kamala Harris picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, she doubled that distinction. Walz, who

IN A DECISION issued at the dawn of Prohibition, the Supreme Court quietly gutted a freedom guaranteed in the Bill of Rights: the protection against unwarranted search and seizure. The 100th anniversary of that decision is a perfect time to kill the

IN 2021, ON April Fools’ Day, Manistee County, Michigan, took the title on Chelsea Koetter’s home because of a small debt she owed on her 2018 property taxes. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a prank. Four months after seizing her home, which she shared wi

DESPITE SUFFERING A decisive defeat at the Supreme Court last year, the Biden administration is making a second attempt at sweeping, automatic student loan forgiveness. These new efforts are less ambitious than the previous attempt but still might co

November 2014 “On July 14, The New York Times reported that scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had mishandled dangerous strains of anthrax and bird flu, failed to follow correct safety procedures after employees were e

THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE of two decades ago seems almost unrecognizable now. Back then, opposing wars and the surveillance state was so completely coded as left-wing that Republicans regularly denounced Ron Paul as a liberal squish. Some of the same c

ASELF-DESCRIBED POLITICAL junkie since birth, Libertarian presidential nominee Chase Oliver’s activism started on the left in the 2000s, pushing back against Republicans for starting two wars in the Middle East. Once President Barack Obama took offic

When Kelly Titchenell of Greene County, Pennsylvania, called 911 to report that her mother was unresponsive and turning yellow, dispatcher Leon Price at first agreed to send an ambulance but then repeatedly said he needed her mother’s consent, even t

A DECADE AGO, it passed for common wisdom that the Republican Party and maybe the Democrats too were captives of a wealthy donor base that could lock up electoral results by burying rivals in campaign spending. It all seems long ago. As populist ener

IN APRIL 1980, two candidates were leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination—Ronald Reagan, who went on to win the election, and George H.W. Bush, who became his vice president. They participated in a presidential forum that month i

ON JULY 10, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Pittman in the Northern District of Texas ruled in the case of Hobby Distillers Association v. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau that the longstanding federal ban on home distillation of alcohol for d

IT MIGHT SEEM at odds with Florida’s hard-partying reputation that uptight states like Virginia and Missouri legalized recreational pot before it did. After all, Florida is a place where sea turtles get entangled in floating bales of cocaine and the

BILLIONAIRE ENTREPRENEUR, CO-HOST of ABC’s Shark Tank, and Dallas Mavericks co-owner Mark Cuban’s latest venture is the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. It aims to tackle the high cost and lack of transparency in the pharmaceutical industry by offe

AT THE START of the summer, it looked like the 2024 presidential election might come down to the double-haters. Roughly 25 percent of voters told Pew pollsters they had unfavorable views of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. (And this was before Trump’

ONE OF WASHINGTON, D.C.’s best cocktail bars is Silver Lyan, the only U.S. outpost for award-winning British bar maestro Ryan “Mr Lyan” Chetiyawardana’s cocktail empire. The bar, which is located inside a subterranean vault in a bank that has been co

ROSE WILDER LANE—novelist, journalist, founding mother of the modern libertarian movement, and very likely uncredited co-author of her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books—was also, less famously, a columnist in the early 1