In May 1897, the Arkansas Gazette placed an unusual scene on its front page. Alongside a sketch of Little Rock’s new B’nai Israel synagogue, the paper described the dedication in vivid detail: the governor rose to speak, Christians filled the pews, and Rabbi Charles Rubenstein read aloud the United States Constitution from within the sanctuary. “Representatives of the national, state,...

　　The “girlboss” is back. The term, popularized in the 2014 book Girlboss, once positively connoted a woman who adopted traditional male-coded modes of doing business, but without discarding her aesthetic femininity. Very much a compliment to Sheryl Sandberg’s advice to Lean In (2013), the theory behind girl-bossing was that differences between women and men were mostly aesthetic and stylistic, not...

　　As President Donald Trump prepares for the upcoming summit in Beijing with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, Taiwan has entered the forefront of American discourse again. Some Americans fear that the two leaders will emerge with a grand bargain that undercuts the island democracy’s freedom of action. Others might wish the Taiwanese well, but they see little reason for Americans to...

　　The United States has reached a milestone, and unfortunately, it’s not one to celebrate. For the first time outside a genuine crisis, Americas national debt now exceeds the size of its entire economy. There is nothing magical about the 100% line; its more of a psychological threshold than a hard cliff. Indeed, debt hawks have sounded alarms for years, and...

　　As the global intellectual community commemorates the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) this year, the lens of history often focuses on the industrial heartlands of Europe or the early expansion of the United States. However, one of the deepest and most successful applications of Smithian philosophy occurred...

　　National League baseball has just marked its 150th Opening Day. As plans to commemorate the centennial of American Independence took shape in the spring of 1876, a sport that more than any other would embody our national identity was formally organized by Chicago businessman William Hulbert. For fifteen decades since that first Opening Day in April, baseball has been the...

　　At national academic conferences, law professors sometimes play a variant of a game of “one-downsmanship.” It’s a contest to determine whose state supreme court is the worst. It is sad to report that when I was on the faculty at the University of Montana law school, I always won those contests. 　　While all state high courts have their flaws, the...

　　There are many reasons to celebrate the 250th year of American independence, but among the best is the tradition of religious liberty. Rather than merely tolerating dissent, the Founders achieved the great unshackling of human conscience. Among their number, this revolution in human sentiments may be best observed in John Adams, specifically with regard to his evolving views of Catholics....

　　If the celebrations of this year’s semiquincentennial of independence are any indication, most Americans take pride in the revolutionary birth of our Republic. July 4, 1776, marked the birth of a “novus ordo seclorum,” and this nation seemed to have the power, as Thomas Paine wrote, “to begin the world over again.” Conservatives have always been somewhat ambivalent about those...

　　The ESG movement—Environmental, Social, and Governance—achieved the rare feat of moving from business schools and boardrooms into mainstream public and political discourse. What began as a technical framework for evaluating firm-level risk has, over time, evolved into a sweeping set of expectations about what corporations owe not only shareholders but also society at large. In that evolution, ESG has taken...

　　There is a question that legal systems have answered, with remarkable consistency, for centuries: when a decision cannot be undone, how much institutional gravity should surround it? The death penalty, the severing of parental rights, the deportation of a citizen—around these acts, civilized orders built their most demanding procedural architectures. Adversarial hearings. Independent judges. The obligation to exhaust every alternative...

　　Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026) dominated post-war European liberal philosophy. He dedicated his life to the rational foundation of a global liberal order and the post-national European Union. 　　Loaded with philosophical terms, his writing does not invite the reader, yet there is pathos in the background. Habermas addressed the question of whether the Enlightenment was the cause of the German genocides and...