Republicans Should Stop Pandering about Charter Schools
The Right - “I have no idea why Republicans and the GOP media fall over themselves rallying to the cause of those who hate them and who would never vote for them, no matter what.” 2/9/2023

Arguments Against School Choice Presume We Have Options
The Center - “In short, if public schooling on average is so woefully inadequate, how can we take seriously the argument that if a family cannot afford or otherwise access private or home schooling, public schooling is a perfectly sufficient choice?” 2/3/2023

Stop Pretending All Cultures Are the Same
The Left - “So I will say it with my heart, and others should too: If a culture persecutes LGBT people, is overtly racist, or makes women second class citizens, then to hell with that culture. My culture is better than that one.” 1/27/2023

Understanding Why Netanyahu Won
The Center - “Whatever else one may think about the unholy trinity of Prime Minister Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich, they are, among other things, willing to discuss the serious internal security concerns that much of the country outside of Tel Aviv faces.” 1/11/2023

Work Is About Knowledge That Pays and Relationships That Are Priceless
The Center - “And both wages and relationships advance worker opportunity, the essential elements of which are what individuals know (i.e., profitable knowledge) and whom they know (i.e., priceless relationships).” 12/15/2022

On the Inevitability of Racism
The Center - “As psychoanalysis long ago has perspicaciously demonstrated, prejudice is universal to human nature and is evolutionarily informed.” 12/5/2022

COVID-19 and the Banality of Evil
The Left - “Compulsory obedience can especially be seen in how the Democratic Party has changed since the election of President Biden in 2020. Before he entered office, COVID-19 was more accepted as an important and legitimate issue.” 12/4/2022

Russia Will Pursue Desperate Strategies After It Exhausts Its Missile Supply
The Center - “Aside from the fact that history shows that rockets are far more useful at inflicting damage against military than civilian targets, their misuse may indicate an underlying strategic desperation in the Kremlin.” 12/1/2022

The First Metaverse Nation
The Center - “What is new, in this case, is that the people of Tuvalu are hoping their future metaverse-based civilization will continue to function as a state and will be recognized internationally as a proper nation.” 12/1/2022

The Complexity Paradox
The Center - “We are great at handling complexity until things get really, really complex.” 10/27/2022

Putin’s Nuclear Threats Show that Jacinda Adern is Wrong About Nuclear Weapons
The Center - “[Prime Minister Ardern] is correct that nuclear weapons arsenals carry with them great risks of widespread destruction. However, the greatest risk lies in committing not to use them.” 10/14/2022

Iran’s Uprising: Precursor to a New Revolution
The Center - “The unrest that flared up in response to [Mahsa Amini’s] death has been virtually unprecedented and provides the international community with perhaps the clearest reminder that the Iranian people abhor authoritarianism.” 10/12/2022

Why I Support Australian Republicanism
The Left - “A republic represents the ability for Australians to recognize formally what has been long known: that we are willing and capable of charting our own future released from the bonds of the past.” 10/11/2022

Friendships as Pathways to Upward Income Mobility
The Center - “For example, if poor children grew up in a neighborhood where 70% of their friends were wealthy, their future income on average will increase by 20%, similar to the effect of going to a four-year college.” 8/16/2022

Salman Rushdie: The Antithesis to Moral Cowardice
The Center - “Leading by example, Rushdie refuses to be intimidated into silence.” 8/15/2022

When It Comes to Iran, Say “No” to Appeasement
The Center - “Without an enemy to demonize, the Islamic Republic would have to answer for its many and grave failures.” 8/3/2022

Peter Buxtun, the Hero of Tuskegee, 50 Years On
The Center - “In later interviews, Buxtun would shrug off the accolades he later received for his whistleblowing. ‘I don’t want to be embarrassed by an oversupply of compliments. I am who I am,’ he would tell bioethicist Carl Elliott in 2017.” 7/25/2022

The Acute Danger of Iran’s Belligerence
The Center - “Our collective inability to push back against such a hateful worldview by holding Tehran accountable for the terror it is has funded and weaponized could soon prove to be a costly mistake.” 7/14/2022

If the Horseshoe Fits: Illiberalism Across the Political Spectrum
The Center - “While far-right ideologues make no secret of their illiberalism, their counterparts on the Left tend to cloak theirs in the language of equality.” 7/10/2022

On Finland’s Memorandum with Turkey
The Left - “Finns should decide their own fate. Their pact with Turkey signals the opposite.” 6/30/2022

Like in Ukraine, We Must Recognize Iranians’ Right to Resistance
The Center - “Political leaders in the United States are increasingly recognizing the vitality and capabilities of the Iranian resistance movement and are looking for ways to empower it.” 6/7/2022

The Great American School Tragedy: The Coronavirus and Students
The Center - “So while parents are generally satisfied with what schools did under trying and unprecedented circumstances, they have good reason to be worried about the pandemic’s effects on their children’s academic and emotional well-being.” 5/31/2022

Narrative Ethics: A Modest Proposal
The Center - “I wryly refer to the universal adoption of narrative ethics as a ‘modest proposal’ because while telling stories is a fundamental part of human nature, telling stories in perfectly ethical ways is, unfortunately, too often alien to our nature.” 5/25/2022

On “The Diversity Paradox”
The Center - “Similarly, while professional hockey is considered to have an under-representation problem, the same is not considered true for the National Football League or National Basketball Association, in which African Americans are very over-represented.” 5/19/2022

Why the Left Is Accepting Finnish NATO Membership
The Left - “With that said, however, as a country with a 70-year commitment to welfarism, it would not be desirable to substitute this for Russia’s brand of plutocratic capitalism.” 5/18/2022

When Anti-Israel Bias Finds Its Way into Coverage Choices
The Center - “Our media’s acceptance of anti-Semitic narratives is eroding Israel’s standing in the world and, in turn, the nation’s ability to defend itself against an enemy that has long ago broken its borders and used its very liberalism against it.” 5/11/2022

The Term Woke Is Losing Its Punch
The Right - “It was a linguistic indication that revolutionary consciousness had made ‘the long march through the institutions.'” 4/30/2022

The Pandemic Is a Chaos Narrative
The Center - “Chaos narratives, however, defy our narrative expectations. There is no order, sense, or logical chronology but, instead, suffering without an apparent purpose or meaning.” 4/29/2022

Do David Brooks and the New Right Share Common Threads?
The Left - “The general public—and not the elite—is, in fact, the primary obstacle to the New Right’s political project.” 4/19/2022

Why Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China Are Cozy Bedfellows
The Center - “Why is there this close bond? Why does China do nothing in response to President Putin’s bloodlust?” 4/18/2022

Nuclear Iran—Why the Islamic Republic Is Not the Actor We Think It Is
The Center - “As the only Western journalist allowed to enter Iran prior to its presidential elections back in 2017, I followed then-candidate Ebrahim Raisi on the campaign trail. Whatever illusions I had about Iran and its ambitions melted under the sheer brutality of his war rhetoric.” 3/30/2022

Kids and the Coronavirus: Unintended Consequences Two Years Later
The Center - “So, we have been living in two pandemics, but only one has dominated our public health discussions.” 3/12/2022

Ukraine and “The Fog of War”
The Center - “Amid the memes and rhetoric, there has been much in the way of propaganda, unverifiable information, and outright lies that seem, at times, not to be appreciated for what they are.” 3/7/2022

What Whoopi Goldberg Got Wrong about the Holocaust—and Why It Matters
The Center - “Only days before Goldberg made her ill-informed comments, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) changed its definition of racism to ‘The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.'” 2/5/2022

No to Money for Hostages
The Center - “When I was imprisoned in Iran, I made it clear to the Swiss ambassador to let the Trump administration know not to offer any money in exchange for my release.” 2/4/2022
