It can be said of the remarkable gumbo of New Orleans that not only is there no other city in America like it, there’s no other city in America even remotely like it. Something of the same can be justly…
Great leaders rise to the challenges of the times. Franklin Roosevelt, who knew very little about economics, tried “experimentation” to end the Great Depression, but those experiments extended the Depression’s effects. Roosevelt, allegedly ahead of the American public, sensed the…
The writers’ mission statement for the spring/summer print edition of The American Spectator calls for speculations on the state of the American Dream in this melancholy and totally nutso spring. Other than to state the obvious, that most Americans are…
I recall reading an account of the Passenger Pigeon Project, and a related effort called Revive & Restore, the latter being an effort to genetically reproduce and bring back the now extinct Passenger Pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, long gone for over…
Having poured out about $5 trillion in economic stimulus packages, Congress is actively planning to pour out more. Most in Congress and, apparently, President Trump, believe that only an endless flood of federal spending can counteract the effects of the…
The 1930s were a public health disaster. It is true that in that troubled decade, death from infectious disease was far less than it had been in the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. Infectious disease wasn’t the main vector…
The latest labor market report showed 3.3 million Americans signing up for unemployment benefits — almost five times higher than any other month in history. Without a smart and medically responsible reopening of the U.S. economy soon, that number could…
Dwight Yoakam had me in tears Sunday night. I was watching the new Ken Burns PBS documentary series about the history of country music, and Yoakam quoted a Merle Haggard song, “Holding Things Together,” which is about a man trying…
In 1985, Ronald Reagan “jawboned” the Japanese into accepting “voluntary” restraints on exports of Japanese cars to the United States. At the same time, he drew a line in the sand between himself and U.S. congressmen calling for much stronger…