For three of the nation’s most prominent political figures, today is still yesterday. Two years later, they’re still re-fighting the 2016 campaign.　President Donald Trump is constantly replaying -- and exaggerating -- his 2016 success, as if he needs to convince himself he really did win, and did so without the help that even some Republicans concede he got from Vladimir Putin.Similarly, Hillary Clinton is still trying to explain why she lost what should have been a sure thing. She’s blaming alm

Gina Haspel, President Donald Trump’s choice to take over the CIA, is a well-respected figure within the intelligence community, by most accounts. But she is inextricably tied to two very dark elements of the spy agency’s past: She ran a secret, post-Sept. 11 overseas “black site” where detainees were subjected to torture, and she participated in the willful destruction of 90 videotapes of some of those interrogation sessions.　Her role in those shameful moments in American history must be centra

Climate change is profoundly unfair: By failing to address it, today’s leaders are imposing what could prove to be an unbearable burden on future generations. But how can they be made to recognize the danger and act? Using the US legal system, a group of children has found a novel way to do so.　The 2015 Paris Agreement on reducing carbon emissions looked like a big step forward in addressing global warming. But since then, the US has pulled out, and many other governments have fallen short. Tota

Facebook is being hammered for allowing data firm Cambridge Analytica to acquire 50 million user profiles in the US, which it may or may not have used to help the Trump campaign. But the outrage misses the target: There’s nothing Cambridge Analytica could have done that Facebook itself doesn’t offer political clients.　Here, in a nutshell, is the scandal. In 2014, Aleksandr Kogan, an academic of Russian origin at Cambridge University in the UK, built a Facebook app that paid hundreds of thousands

Suppose President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is random. I mean really random: Like random luck, designed only in so far as to fluctuate wildly between different, opposing strategic views.　In this thought experiment, it’s not a bug but a feature that the US is pulling away from a nuclear nonproliferation agreement with Iran even as it seeks to negotiate one with North Korea. Similarly, it’s an intentional accident that Trump might replace the realist national security adviser H.R. McMaster wit

There are many good economic reasons why President Donald Trump is wrong to obsess over the US trade deficit with China. One is that this bilateral deficit isn’t as severe as he thinks -- and, in any case, the structural factors that caused the imbalance in the first place are changing. Before launching a US-China trade war, the White House needs a more accurate picture of how the world, in fact, trades.　America’s goods deficit with China indeed hit a record level last year -- around $375 billio

In recent years, productivity growth in developed economies has been stagnating. The most prominent explanations of this trend involve technology. Technological progress is supposed to increase economies’ productivity and potential growth. So what’s going on?Harvard’s economist Martin Feldstein has argued persuasively that productivity growth is actually higher than we realize, because government statistics “grossly understate the value of improvements in the quality of existing goods and servic

 In 1967, riots erupted in cities throughout the United States, from Newark, New Jersey, to Detroit and Minneapolis in the Midwest -- all two years after the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles exploded in violence. In response, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a commission, headed by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, to investigate the causes and propose measures to address them. Fifty years ago, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (more widely known as the Kerner Commission), issue

In Beijing sits Xi Jinping, the Red Emperor. His project is to make totalitarianism work. Already in complete control at home, his global influence increases by the day. Other nations are falling over each other to pay tribute to the People’s Republic.　Beijing does not impose its political model on others, but demands something else: silence. If you want to collaborate with China, you are not allowed to say anything unfriendly. Crossing the regime risks retribution or expulsion.　After the Nobel