Once again, I offer my predictions for the year to come. But first I will perform the ritual that every prognosticator should: reviewing how I did at predicting the year now ending. So before I get to my predictions for 2021, let’s see how I did in 2020. 1. I predicted that most of the…

Here’s a question we’re sure to see in the courts before long: What if your employer mandates a Covid-19 vaccination and you’d rather not take it? President-elect Joe Biden might insist that he has no plans to compel the shots, but one imagines that lots of employers will come to the opposite…

When should the Covid-19 pandemic — or the restrictions imposed in its wake — excuse you from a contract? The courts have been struggling with this issue for months now, and the answer until recently has been ... almost never. That’s in keeping with a long US tradition under which each party to…

When pondering the liability shield proposed by congressional Republicans to protect businesses against Covid-related claims by their employees, I find my attention drawn to the revolt of the restaurants. Across the country, eateries are in all-but-open rebellion against new shutdown orders. Here…

Democrats and Republicans alike missed the point on Wednesday, when members of the Senate Commerce Committee had their last chance before the election to grill the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google. With the GOP on the hunt for partisan bias and the Democrats urging greater efforts to reduce…

We’re still waiting to see what’s going to happen to the TikTok deal — at the moment, the ball’s in Beijing’s court — but as China ponders, I’d like to offer three reasons that the whole contretemps may be less serious than it appears: 1. The US isn’t exactly the superstar of data protection…

One casualty of the current pandemic is likely to be good manners. True, manners and civility have been dying for ages, but Covid-19 is sure to finish them off. Which is too bad. We often think of manners and civility as the same thing, but the first is only a part of the second. Civility is the…

Picture this scenario: You walk nervously into the office of the oncologist to whom your primary physician has unexpectedly referred you, and as soon as you see the specialist’s facial expression, you know the news is bad. You’re right. “If only we’d caught this six or eight weeks earlier,” the…

Much of the commentary about Michael Kremer, named this week as one of three winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, has justifiably celebrated his pioneering work in studying poverty — even now, many of us believe, the planet’s greatest moral challenge. But an important 2011…

When I remember the moon landing, I think about my father. Fifty years ago, on the evening of Sunday, July 20, 1969, we sat together in Dad’s capacious study in our house in Ithaca, New York, holding our breaths, hardly uttering a word as the Eagle touched down. My father, raised in Barbados,…