The election of 2016, both Donald Trump’s shocking victory and Bernie Sanders’s socialist insurgency, created a sudden swell of ideological ambition. Conservative thinkers rushed to fill in the outlines of Trumpian populism, building various intellectual frameworks for an incipient “post-liberal”…

One of the Biden White House’s greatest achievements, from the perspective of its staffers, if not necessarily the country, has been to deny the press the kind of juicy leaks that were constant under Donald Trump and frequent under his predecessors. Save for a very narrow period of time, that is,…

Let me tell you a medical story; you decide what you make of it. A person has a routine medical experience, the kind that all their neighbors have had as well. But afterward they have weird symptoms, odd forms of pain, fatigue that just goes on and on and on. The medical system can’t help them, so…

For all the ways that our political coalitions have changed over the last few generations — Southern Democrats joining the G.O.P., Northeastern Republicans turning Democrat, “Reagan Democrats” moving right, suburban Republicans voting for Joe Biden — there are patterns that persist across the…

In February there was a flurry of discussion about whether President Biden’s advancing age and seeming weakness in a matchup with Donald Trump meant that he should step aside. I wrote a column on that theme, but the more notable (that is, nonconservative) voices arguing that Biden should consider…

Foreign policy can make a mockery of moral certitude. You’re trying to master a landscape of anarchy policed by violence, where ideological differences make American polarization look like genial neighborliness, where even a superpower’s ability to impose its will dissolves with distance, where any…

When I was a college undergraduate 25 years ago, the fancy school that I attended offered what it styled as a “core curriculum” that was really nothing of the sort. Instead of giving students a set of foundational courses and assignments, a shared base of important ideas and arguments, our core…

It’s unusual when you find a strong dose of pessimism about the future of technological progress highlighted by one of the world’s leading techno-optimists. But if you follow the combative venture capitalist Marc Andreessen on X, you would have seen him giving wide circulation to this passage from…

My newsroom colleagues Jason Horowitz and Gaia Pianigiani have a lovely report this week about family-friendly policies in the Italian province of Alto Adige-South Tyrol, which has the highest birthrate of any region in an aging, depopulating Italy. Their story is a portrait not just of a…

About 18 months ago, Donald Trump suffered one of his worst political defeats, when many of his loyalists and handpicked candidates were defeated in a midterm landscape that clearly favored the Republicans. A lot of people — I was one of them — thought that this might be the beginning of the end…