Tag: public policy

How to Tackle Truth Decay

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When then-President Donald Trump was briefed on the California wildfires in 2020, the scientific opinion he heard was that climate change was real and had contributed to the conflagrations that ended up consuming more than 4 million acres and killing 31 people. His response? “Science doesn’t know.”

Millions of Americans trusted Trump, a fact he leveraged to attack the trustworthiness of science itself. Trump’s actions are part of a larger pattern of assault on expertise. People need to trust that

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The Wildfire Survivors Who Didn’t Want to Be Climate Models

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Everyone says Lytton was a beautiful place to live. The small Canadian town sits at the confluence of two rivers and was built on one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in North America—the Nlaka’pamux people have called it home for more than 10,000 years. About 250 people lived in the Lytton of the recent past, on a few cross streets and several dozen lots—you could take it in all in one breath. One blistering June evening in 2021, a

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Don’t Just Assume That Language Is Harmful

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In my work as a senior editor at a scientific journal, the most challenging arguments I mediate among reviewers, authors, other editors, and readers are not about research methods, empirical data, or subtle points of theory but about which terms describing vulnerable groups are acceptable and which are harmful. My field—addiction and drug policy—has a tradition of savage infighting over language. Are the people whom earlier generations derided as vagrants or bums more appropriately termed homeless people, people who

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What Overturning Roe Did to the Anti-abortion Movement

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In a normal year, the March for Life would begin somewhere along the National Mall. The cavalcade of anti-abortion activists in Washington, D.C., would wind around museums and past monuments, concluding at the foot of the Supreme Court, a physical representation of the movement’s objective: to overturn Roe v. Wade. The march happens in January of each year to coincide with the anniversary of the Roe decision.

But this is not a normal year. Tomorrow’s march will be

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How to Fix American Higher Ed

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American higher education is the envy of the world, and it’s also failing our students on a massive scale. How can both be true simultaneously? Our decentralized, competitive system of research institutions is a national treasure, unparalleled in human history. We have the best universities, best professors, and best systems of discovery, and we attract the best talent. But the American educational system leaves many high-school graduates woefully unprepared for work or for life, whether or not they go

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The Domestic Political Stakes of the War in Ukraine

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Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine confronts President Joe Biden with complex challenges at a time when he is already beleaguered—but it also presents him with an opportunity for a reset on the core foreign-policy promise he made to voters during his 2020 campaign.

As a candidate, Biden offered voters not so much a change in specific international policies as an alternative approach to interacting with other nations. In managing America’s foreign policy, Biden pledged to be steady and stable,

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Republicans Are Trying to Suppress More Than Votes

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The accelerating red-state offensive to censor what public-school students are taught about racism is emerging as a critical companion measure to proliferating race-based voter restrictions in many of the same states.

The two-pronged fight captures how aggressively Republicans are moving to entrench their current advantages in red states, even as many areas grow significantly more racially and culturally diverse. Voting laws are intended to reconfigure the composition of today’s electorate; the teaching bans aim to shape the attitudes of

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