Gig companies such as Uber, DoorDash and Instacart portray themselves as brave and brilliant innovators, underdog entrepreneurs whose explosive growth simply reflects that they’ve built a better mousetrap. But the companies have been sued again and again, in the United States and around the globe, by workers who say these businesses prosper by violating their workers’ basic legal rights.　That charge invites a question: Can gig companies survive without breaking the law? Apparently not, according

Humanities education in the US is in free fall. And the decline probably shows that the nature of what American students want out of college education is changing -- more young people are in it for the money.　University of Washington history professor Benjamin Schmidt recently wrote a long blog post in which he showed, very convincingly, that the number of American undergraduates majoring in the humanities has dropped in the last decade. Five years ago, Schmidt thought that it might be a tempora

Sadly, the proposal for a new US Space Force has become a punchline on late-night TV. It is being battered as a needless new bureaucracy, a competitor for the private sector, and an idea that will lead to a vicious militarization of space. None of these arguments is correct.　Many of those denigrating the idea are under-informed and spring-loaded to dislike the idea because it is proposed by President Donald Trump. I have plenty of policy disagreements with the Trump administration, but on this i

Latin America’s judiciaries are engulfed in corruption scandals. In Colombia a former Supreme Court member was arrested on charges of corruption and bribery. In Peru multiple judges stand accused of trading favorable rulings and shortened sentences for money and perks. In Guatemala, lawyers and justices face charges of rigging Supreme Court appointments. And in Mexico the attorney general’s office fired one of its own for delving too deep into alleged bribes to the former head of the national oi

If you are a believer in free markets, you might be tempted to be pleased by some of the more positive policies of the Trump administration: Lxower corporate tax rates, more market-friendly judges, a greater emphasis on deregulation. Resist (the temptation, if not the administration). When it comes to ideas, the lifeblood of capitalism, the influence of President Donald Trump isn’t nearly so benign.　In fact, even without considering its policy on free trade, advocates of dynamic capitalism shoul

It sounds like a spy novel. A former CIA case officer joins a cabal of pro-Russian rebels attempting to kill the prime minister of a small Balkan country. The coup fails, the officer returns to the US -- and now authorities in the Balkans want the former spy for questioning.　Last week Montenegro announced it is seeking extradition of the retired US spy, Joseph Assad, for his role in an attempted coup there in 2016. If the allegations are true, this story has a twist worthy of an airport-bookstor

I might be the only person on Earth feeling sorry for the big boys of technology. Jack Dorsey from Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, all those Google nerds: They’re monumentally screwed, because they have no idea how to tame the monsters they have created.　The way I see it, these guys -- and they are mostly guys -- were arbitrarily chosen. They started with some good ideas, some luck, great timing, got lots of people to believe in their rosy vision, and they won the unicorn lottery. Little

What makes really smart people tick? Why do some end up earning so much more than others? And how much do these disparate outcomes have to do with their personalities? A new study by Miriam Gensowski, at the University of Copenhagen, sheds fascinating light on these and other questions.　Gensowski revisits a data set from all schools in California, grades 1-8, in 1921-1922, based on the students who scored in the top 0.5 percent of IQ distribution. At the time that meant scores of 140 or higher.

Some social problems are blatantly obvious in daily life, while others are longer-term, more corrosive and perhaps mostly invisible. Lately I’ve been worrying about a problem of the latter kind: the erosion of personal ownership and what that will mean for our loyalties to traditional American concepts of capitalism and private property.　The main culprits for the change are software and the internet. For instance, Amazon’s Kindle and other methods of online reading have revolutionized how Americ