Ross Douthat

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…

Joe Biden is one of the most unpopular presidents in modern American history. In Gallup polling, his approval ratings are lower than those of any president embarking on a re-election campaign, from Dwight Eisenhower to Donald Trump. Yet an air of mystery hangs around his lousy polling numbers. As…

The flare of inflation reported this week, the unwelcome guest still hanging around when everyone was hoping he’d been shown the door, is a useful reminder of one way to understand the Biden era’s frustrations. The administration’s defenders often argue that it has been more successful at…

In UFO arcana, one of the figures claiming a whistle-blower’s knowledge of a secret US program to reverse-engineer recovered alien technology is a man named Bob Lazar. Here’s how Lazar has told the story: As a physicist educated at MIT and Caltech, he was hired by the US Navy in the 1980s to…

At a time when Europe as a whole looks stagnant relative to the United States, Britain has joined Italy as the continent’s sickest patient: its living standards falling well behind its neighbors, its economy stuck in a 15-year torpor, and its public services, including the vaunted National Health…

In U.F.O. arcana, one of the figures claiming a whistle-blower’s knowledge of a secret US program to reverse-engineer recovered alien technology is a man named Bob Lazar. Here’s how Lazar has told the story: As a physicist educated at M.I.T. and Caltech, he was hired by the US Navy in the 1980s…

In recent months, there have been several instances of elite universities or their faculty members offering some kind of institutional pushback to a censorious progressivism. Prominent examples include Cornell’s refusal to create a trigger warning requirement demanded by the undergraduate student…