Biden’s King Lear Moment | Compact
Concerns about “gerontocracy”—rule by the old—are roiling American politics after President Biden’s disastrous performance in last week’s presidential debate.| Compact
Concerns about “gerontocracy”—rule by the old—are roiling American politics after President Biden’s disastrous performance in last week’s presidential debate.| Compact
How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement By Fredrik deBoer Simon & Schuster, 256 pages, $29.99 The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics By Richard Hanania Broadside, 288 pages, $32 The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time| Compact
Spengler shared the anti-American prejudice of many of his German contemporaries, and it is safe to assume that he would have disparaged us as a rootless “population of trappers on the hunt for the dollar,” as he did in his final published work.| Compact
Media reports generally give the impression that families with a stay-at-home parent fit a particular mold: white, rich, and Republican.| Compact
Amid all the talk of “breakthroughs” in the swirl of summitry to settle the Ukraine war over the past several days, by far the biggest was the recognition, at long last, that none of the players in this long-running tragedy will be secure until they all are.| Compact
America’s repeated failures in China policy have been rooted in misapprehension.| Compact
Japan’s July 2025 Upper House election delivered a humiliating drubbing to the long-dominant center-right Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).| Compact
Although the 1950s Red Scare has never entirely left popular consciousness, it has returned to prominence lately as the subject of George Clooney’s celebrated Broadway drama, Good Night and Good Luck.| Compact
In February 2016, Donald Trump scandalized Republican Party elites at a CNN town hall event in Columbus, Ohio, when he dared to call George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq “a big fat mistake” and “the worst decision any one has made, any president has made, in the history of this country.”| Compact
The University of Chicago is in crisis. Under extraordinary financial strain, it has diminished its faculty-student ratio and hired hundreds of “lecturers”: teachers whom it pays little and whom it does not expect to do research.| Compact
Of all the technical flaws in the badly broken international trade system, the one most intuitive to the layman is the race to the bottom on labor.| Compact
This Friday, Donald Trump will host Vladimir Putin for a summit in Alaska, the first time an American president has met the Russian leader since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.| Compact
“But crime is going down!” That’s what many liberal thought leaders are bleating lately, and who can blame them?| Compact
Catherine Lacey is a writer of extraordinary gifts, with hard-earned adult wisdom and the kind of effortless sentence-to-sentence felicity that makes any writer reading her strongly consider pursuing alternate careers.| Compact
While the Gaza Strip lies in rubble, the cause of Palestinian freedom seems on the verge of a global breakthrough.| Compact
Millions of people worldwide are turning to LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT for mental health support.| Compact
When I started trying to get into journalism in the early 2010s, the old newspaper business model was in terminal crisis.| Compact
Donald Trump is no stranger to the rise and fall of great love affairs. One could ask his former wives and girlfriends—from Ivana Trump to the infamous Stormy Daniels—who each saw his interests pass to a new flame.| Compact
For the extremely online political junkies who remember it, the “post-left” moment that blazed brightest during the pandemic was supposed to mark a departure from the usual script of American politics.| Compact
On July 17, an artillery round struck the Holy Family in Gaza. Three civilians inside the church were killed. Others were injured. Outcry ensued.| Compact
Every recent wave of mass migration into Western countries began in optimism and ended in tears.| Compact
A small but powerful literary sub-genre is the novel of pagan intoxication breaking forth in a modern, secular milieu.| Compact
All over Europe, farmers, especially smallholders, are revolting against the growing economic and bureaucratic burdens associated with the European Union’s climate agenda.| Compact
If an extraterrestrial—or, for that matter, a human being from anywhere else—were to land in Silicon Valley, the traveler would encounter a distinctive dialect of American English.| Compact
At a time when the West is doubling down on militarism, Slovenia briefly challenged the status quo.| Compact
On July 18, after declaring “Crypto Week,” President Trump signed into law the GENIUS Act, in a major legislative win for the burgeoning cryptocurrency lobby.| Compact
Compact, an online magazine founded in 2022, seeks a new political center devoted to the common good.| Compact
Of all the policy areas in which Donald Trump’s return to the White House will mark a dramatic shift, energy is arguably the most crucial for the nation’s prosperity and security.| Compact
In the early 2000s, Sydney was rocked by a series of gang rapes. Victims were ordinary Australian girls, some as young as 13.| Compact
The Epstein mythology can be roughly defined as the popular belief, nearly ubiquitous on social media and adjacent outlets, that the deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein orchestrated a sprawling child sex-trafficking operation.| Compact
For a while, the story about contemporary publishing has been that men are out.| Compact
Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.| Compact
In 2019, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced Europe’s “Green Deal.” She described the climate plan as a “man on the moon moment,” a revolutionary transformation of the European economy that would lead to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and changes to nearly every sector of| Compact
The trouble with clichés is you forget they’re actually true. For years I have nodded along with thinkpieces explaining that there is a split in the contemporary left—between a politics of solidarity and economic justice, which is Good, and an individualistic, libertarian impulse, which is Bad. After a| Compact
One of the most striking visuals from the inauguration was the presence of America’s grandest tech moguls on the dais with the new president.| Compact
During the 2020 Covid lockdowns, the privately owned realms of the internet became the obligatory venues for public life.| Compact
Right-leaning critics of America’s wars are in despair today at the thought that President Trump has betrayed them.| Compact
The Trump administration’s campaign against higher education has proceeded on so many fronts, and at such breathtaking speed, that it is hard for individual elements of it to capture the news cycle for long.| Compact
WelcomeFest, held at DC’s Hamilton Hotel on June 4, was the largest post-2024 election gathering to date of self-described centrist Democrats seeking to revive their party’s fortunes.| Compact
The most recent Los Angeles riots reflect, among other things, the response of immigrant activists to President Trump’s crackdown, and the latest resurgence of organized left-wing activism, which had been relatively quiet in the early months of the new administration.| Compact
Frederick Forsyth, who died on June 9 at the age of 86, was a man of action—Royal Air Force fighter pilot, reporter in postcolonial Africa’s civil wars, even an MI6 spy—who became a novelist of action.| Compact
Earlier this month, Ohio State University unveiled its new “AI Fluency Program,” a campus-wide initiative designed to ensure that every student graduates fluent in artificial intelligence.| Compact
The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) founded in New York City in 1987 by Larry Kramer, defined itself as a “non-partisan group of individuals, united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis.”| Compact
The strangest things we do are also the things we think least about—for example, drinking cows’ milk, handing our children over into the care of paid strangers, going to gyms, wearing neckties, enjoying war as spectator sport, and shaving.| Compact
In a column published shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Compact’s editor-at-large Gregory Conti characterized the newfound alliance between MAGA populists and Big Tech oligarchs as an “anti-clerical coalition.”| Compact
If you are inundated this fall with campaign ads alleging that “Republicans claim to support the working-class, but they cut food stamps for low-income kids to pay for a tax cut for millionaires,” just remember that outcome could have been avoided.| Compact
In the prologue to his new book The Last Supper, Paul Elie remembers being a young man in the 1980s, “riding the D train with The Village Voice and the Pensées in a black messenger bag.”| Compact
James Walsh’s viral recent New York article, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” was not notable because it revealed the extent to which AI has taken over education; that much was already obvious to anyone who has been around a school or college lately.| Compact
There is a genre of popular media history that traces the rise of the propaganda-saturated reality we now inhabit to the influence of particular individuals who had (or claimed to have) novel insights into major shifts in communication technology.| Compact
Earlier this month, President Trump became the most pro-nuclear executive our nation has seen in over half a century when he signed four separate executive orders dedicated to quadrupling American nuclear energy capacity by 2050.| Compact
Nearly every major figure in the conservative movement has a biography.| Compact
President Andrew Jackson has always been the favorite historical figure to compare with Donald Trump. The similarities are familiar and recognizable to Trump’s warmest admirers and worst enemies.| Compact
Imagine a 23-year-old recent college graduate working a gig job, managing multiple subscription services, and with only $50 left in her checking account. She might seem unlikely to splurge on a $550 ticket to Coachella, California’s annual pop-spectacle music festival.| Compact
Liberalism, that’s the enemy! Thus we could summarize the opinion that, in a diffuse and insistent way, inspires the works of those who offer their views on our political, social, and economic situation. At the same time, we agree to recognize that the alternatives to liberalism have lost all| Compact
Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) had all the signs of a restless mind. Few philosophers changed their views as much as he did.| Compact
For more than a decade, we have been told that insurgent populists are challenging a complacent post-political technocratic establishment.| Compact
The past decade or more in American politics witnessed a breakdown of the party system.| Compact
During his unsuccessful foray into California politics, the muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair used to tell audiences that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”| Compact
In an extraordinary and unprecedented move, Romania’s constitutional court announced last week the annulment of the results of the first round of the presidential elections held on Nov. 24.| Compact
In August, the San Francisco’s District Attorney’s office’s chief of staff sent a memo to the MacArthur Foundation that declared, “Our office will not be used as sharecroppers to a foundation’s vision of criminal justice reform.”| Compact
It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s “Notable Fiction” list.| Compact
While Elon Musk was chainsawing at CPAC, his ex-girlfriend, the singer Grimes, pleaded with him to attend to their child’s medical crisis.| Compact
There’s been a dustup over love. No, I’m not talking about Taylor and Travis, who seem to be doing swimmingly. It’s JD Vance.| Compact
In the debate pitting defenders of racial preferences in college admissions against proponents of meritocracy, both sides implicitly accept the premise that there must be a single national elite. What divides the two sides is how the members of this single national elite are to be selected in their late| Compact
The oddity of Megalopolis is that it is neither as far-reaching nor as demented as its reputation suggests.| Compact
Who exactly is Kamala Harris? What would she do as leader of the most powerful country in the history of the world? It’s a question she herself seems hesitant to answer.| Compact
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien’s speech came as something of a shock at the Republican National Convention Monday night.| Compact
At Columbia, we can most readily perceive the jarring dissonance between the spectacle of unrest over Gaza and the realities of the conflict that has been overshadowed by the spectacle.| Compact
Student protests are roiling college campuses across the nation. Some of the goals of these protests are beyond what universities can deliver, such as a ceasefire in Gaza. But others—like divestment from companies doing business in Israel—are not.| Compact
