The Commons

The Biden administration is trying to launder widespread support for emergency COVID relief into irreversible changes to the nation’s economic policy. Upon signing the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) in March, President Biden explained that “everything in this package is designed to relieve the suffering and to meet the most urgent needs of the […]

Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam, by Vivek Ramaswamy (Center Street, 320 pp., $15.99) Vivek Ramaswamy opens his book on the perils of woke capitalism by declaring himself a traitor to his class. He’s got the perfect elite resume: Harvard undergrad, partner at a hedge fund, Yale Law School, and founder of a […]

Opposition to globalization. Efforts to weaken intellectual property protections. Pushing for municipal broadband. Calls for the National Institutes of Health to develop drugs. What do these positions have in common? They are all examples of the recent turn toward anti-corporate progressivism. This shift is defined by a fierce determination to expand government provision of goods […]

The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism, by Benjamin Holtzman (Oxford University Press, 331 pp., $34.95) New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation, by Thomas Dyja (Simon & Schuster, 523 pp., $30) New York’s four-decade success story is showing its age. Even before COVID-19 bared […]

A college degree has long been the key that unlocks success in America—the good job, the high salary, the professional networks. But many individuals reflecting on their educational experiences today conclude that their preparation for college and career was disappointing. In short, there’s a disconnect between what young people expect from education and what they […]

As a father of young children, I have been shocked by the rapid growth and impact of gender ideology within our society, reaching human resource departments in practically every major corporation and recalibrating the relationship between parents, children, and public schools, both in the realm of curriculum and in policy.

Privacy is another major casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments instituted expansive surveillance programs to enable contact tracing and corral the disease. Many of these programs are here to stay, as citizens get used to them or welcome them to avoid future quarantine and lockdowns. More generally, the pandemic accelerated our growing dependence on digital […]

The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America, by Sarah Damaske (Princeton University Press, 336 pp. $28) As I was reading sociologist Sarah Damaske’s new book, The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America, I was struck by a realization: though I’ve spent […]

Every day is a struggle when you’re living in poverty. You never know when you might lose your next meal or a place to live. You never know if something unexpected will come around the corner and knock you down, and how you’d find the strength to get back up again. I never had an […]

There are highs and lows in everything, and many of us experience both. We are all just one decision or one missed paycheck away from seeing a different side of life. That should be humbling for us all. But too often people assume the worst about people in difficult circumstances. I’ve been faced with an […]

Coming to terms with the importance of free speech means coming to terms with the reality that free speech will sometimes be used for abhorrent purposes. We protect bad speech on the grounds that the alternative—censorship—is even worse. But the rise of social media as both a powerful distribution framework and disseminator of content has […]

When I was in my 20s, I was confident I’d be a stay-at-home parent if I had children—I simply didn’t give the alternatives much thought. But sometimes life goes in different ways than you expect. I got married in November 2019 at age 33. Three months later, in February 2020, we had a surprise positive […]