public-policy
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An underrated strategy for urbanist persuasion, powered by open source tools
Operation Breakthrough, a 1970s federal moonshot to build 26 million homes using advanced manufacturing methods, has lessons for today’s abundance movement.
Cannabis officials courted a rising pot star to join New York’s legal market. Then a stunning police raid upended everything and shattered her family.
Over the course of 2025, the average tariff rate on U.S. imports increased from 2.6 to 13 percent. In this blog post, we ask how much of the tariffs were paid by the U.S., using import data through November 2025. We find that nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on U.S. firms and consumers.
Land Report 100 Explore the 2025 Top 100 U.S. Landowners. View Top 100 Presented by: Land Report 100 Explore the 2025 Top 100 U.S. Landowners. View Top 100 Presented by: Land Report 100 Who is America's Largest Landowner? This question is the quest
They are draining the economic potential of our cities. We need to make them financially unsustainable.
Removing them can turn a service people tolerate into one they’re happy to use.
Buka Town in Bougainville shows how bureaucratic states could be reimagined, not as concrete buildings but as living gardens
Competition makes capitalism work. A new method for measuring it may be the holy grail of economic regulation.
In the early 1980s, in Tucson, activists and religious leaders joined forces to protect refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border. Their collaboration galvanized the Sanctuary Movement.
In the 1930s, private utilities balked at the task of bringing electricity to rural America. A New Deal agency figured out how to do it more quickly and more cheaply than anyone expected.
A threat on a school bus from an alienated young man united dozens of agencies to answer a single question: Is it possible to stop potential mass shooters before they commit a crime?
The major decline in city fires, explained in two charts.
We disinfect water before we drink it. Why don’t we disinfect the air before we breathe it?
America's largest non-profit had a broken distribution system. University of Chicago economists fixed it.
What began as a convenience rule in the 1930s grew into a key component of global ecommerce.
The only way out of our wreckage is to rewrite the cultural script, to make excellence in character admired again.
Evidence for the impact of Trump’s trade war has shown up at the popular China-founded online retailer.
On February 14, 2025, the Vice President of the United States, J.D. Vance, accused European countries of being too restrictive in their approach to freedom of speech at the Security Conference in Munich. The message: the United States should be taken as an example, especially under the Trump administration. In fact, the United States has
London’s Highgate Cemetery shows us just how hard it is to keep the dead buried.
Earlier this month I came across the following graphic, originally posted on Reddit in 2022, showing the state of housing affordability in the US.
Japan faced some of the world’s toughest planning problems. It solved them by letting homeowners redesign neighborhoods together.
Monroe County has three new bus routes operated by the Mountain Transit Authority as a result of grassroots organizing efforts.
We know how to produce clean water. Why don't we have enough of it?
Earlier this month the Trump administration announced hefty 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports, along with an additional 10% tariffs on Chinese imports.
The U.S. was once the world’s most geographically mobile society. Now we’re stuck in place—and that’s a very big problem.
Let politicians know what you want.
I’m already looking to buy an EV.
Volunteers, not FEMA, are the bedrock of disaster response. How do we best support them?
How AI Could Transform the World for the Better
Minor-party candidates are a waste of time. But minor parties that can cross-endorse major-party candidates have real juice—and can make a huge difference.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding a hearing tomorrow on “sunsetting” Section 230. Despite facing criticism, Section 230 has undeniably been a cornerstone in the architect…
Datacenter GPUs and some consumer cards now exceed performance limits
Beijing will be thrilled by this nerfed silicon
Ten states have uninsured rates below 5 percent. What are they doing right?
As of now, the West Virginia Department of Education boasts that the state has one of the most effective school-entry vaccine preventable laws in the nation.
From Australia to Ontario, cities are taking up unnecessary stretches of concrete and asphalt, allowing nature to take hold in their place.
These days, when you work as a librarian in America, there is no lack of emergencies.
Ranked-choice voting could be on the November ballot in four states, a sign of the system’s rising popularity. Most conservatives have opposed it. But some say that could be changing.
Ethanol is a comically inefficient form of solar energy—and a toxic one. Putting regular solar panels on some of that land would be better.
Farmers in Missouri are opposing the Grain Belt Express, a transmission line that will connect wind farms in Kansas with cities in the East.
A seismic change is coming to American transportation.
by Thomas SIMON
The United States and our allies have every legal right to transfer frozen Russian assets to Kyiv.
An Appalachian school district’s daring experiment in economic integration.
A grass-roots movement aims to recast urban living in Paris and other cities around the world through a hyperlocal prism of neighborliness.
Economic dynamism is vaulting the southern portion of the vast region ahead of its northern cousin.
“We've had a love affair with paving things for several generations." The Depave movement is trying to change that.
One of two gun stores owned by Representative Andrew Clyde in Georgia, Clyde Armory in Athens, was placed in a monitoring program in 2020 and 2021.
It’s fueling the affordable housing crisis, worsening flooding, and driving us nuts.
In southwest Colorado, a cooperative and a land trust partnered to preserve affordable housing.
Oregon decriminalized all drugs, and overdoses have surged.
The Biden administration thinks it can preserve America’s technological primacy by cutting China off from advanced computer chips. Could the plan backfire?
Voter suppression isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.
Bill Gates writes about visiting Kemmerer, Wyoming, the future site of the fourth-generation Natrium nuclear power plant being designed by TerraPower.
The decision would allow an enormous $8 billion drilling project in the largest expanse of pristine wilderness in the United States.
A major advance in translation technology means that Ukrainians can inform and debunk in real time. The world hasn’t seen a weapon quite like it before.
Reports of their inevitable collapse are greatly exaggerated.
The tech giant had already remade the virtual world. For a brief period, it also tried to make it easier for people in the Bay Area to get to work. Then it gave up.
The latest American trade restrictions could significantly set back China’s semiconductor ambitions.
Earlier this summer, a group of anti-Trump and moderate Republicans and Democrats launched a new political party called the Forward Party. On the surface, this movement echoes recent polls indicati…
If the U.S. had had a single-payer universal health care system in 2020, nearly 212,000 American lives would have been saved that year, according to a new study
Insurance companies are successfully dictating reforms in police departments, a movement driven by the large settlements out of use-of-force cases.
What are letters of marque and reprisal, and who is on the US’s list of Block Persons?
Ignore the haters: living standards have improved a lot since the 1980s.
After a year of reporting on the tax machinations of the ultrawealthy, ProPublica spotlights the top tax-avoidance techniques that provide massive benefits to billionaires.
The ubiquitous dollar store is the American dream writ small.
Americans are rightly angry about inflation. A strong labor market is not enough reason to celebrate. But, we are coming out of, not going into the hurricane.
Wildlife crossings cut down on roadkill. But are they really a boon for conservation?
It's not always easy to predict the timing of a recession and what that means for the stock market.
Some charts on what's good and what's bad.
Cops have been given an incredible set of legal powers immunizing them from the fatal errors of their own decisions—including their decision to do nothing in Uvalde, Texas.
Citizens’ assemblies can help us better address societal challenges, overcome polarization and strengthen trust.
We are a community of activists, artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars committed to using mechanism design to inspire radical social change.
This article is part of the contribution made by the US Army War College to the series “Compete and Win: Envisioning a Competitive Strategy for the Twenty-First Century.” The series […]
Putin’s military moves are rallying Ukrainians and unifying NATO.
The political, moral, and visceral considerations behind assassination.
The Biden Administration faces a potential confrontation with a longtime rival that is better armed and more hard-line than at any time in its modern history.
No. But we can give America a big economic boost while boosting our moral image.
Sewage epidemiology has been embraced in other countries for decades, but not in the U.S. Will Covid change that?
With the right federal response, it could become a model of renewal for other places around the country that prosperity has left behind.
DPD Chief Pazen, who is fond of the STAR program, says it frees up officers to do their jobs: fight crime.
If America wants to keep China from setting the global course of science, we need a crash program to recruit international talent.
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Streetcar, bus, and metro systems have been ignoring one lesson for 100 years: Service drives demand.
Deep reinforcement learning has trained AIs to beat humans at complex games like Go and StarCraft. Could it also do a better job at running the economy?
It’s theoretically possible to become invisible to cameras. But can it catch on?
The question of walking distance in transit is much bigger than it seems. A huge range of consequential decisions — including stop spacing, network structure, travel time, reliability standards, frequency and even mode choice — depend on assumptions about how far customers will be willing to walk. The same issue also governs the amount of […]
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If you decide to drive in downtown Oslo, be forewarned: You won’t be able to park on the street.
There’s a language for talking about hot-button issues. And we’re not learning it.
Wherever you find advocates for saner transportation, their dream scenario usually hinges on the same outcome: making cities blissfully free of cars. To this end, the Spanish city of Pontevedra, population 84,000, has done something remarkable: it has reduced car use in its historic core by 90 percent, and citywide...
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The Congress for New Urbanism ranks the most-loathed urban freeways in North America—and makes the case for tearing them down.
There is a “brain gain” afoot that suggests a national homecoming to less bustling spaces.
Eric Klinenberg is the author of a book called Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. The phrase “palaces for the people” actually comes from Andrew Carnegie who was known as a titan of the Gilded Age and one of the wealthiest people in
Only the Netherlands has a higher average compulsory payment wedge than the US.
People who are able to take vaccines but refuse to do so are the moral equivalent of drunk drivers
Guests are transforming the sleepy town into a major destination for tourists seeking the "real Japan."
A development expert says small cities and towns can be catalysts for lagging rural counties
I was in Taipei the past few weeks working on a documentary with friends. Because of a busy schedule, it wasn't like my usual travels abroad for fun, it felt more like a work trip. Still, even if I'd been there purely for vacation, I would've wanted to try a different mode of travel, one less focuse
The community of Culdesac, Arizona, was designed for pedestrians and cyclists. And residents love it.
If your growth strategy only works as long as wealthy people live in your town, your growth strategy is deeply fragile.
The Biden administration’s push to close an obscure loophole on imports highlights just how disruptive the Temu model really is.
On the plight of environmental-illness refugees
Children across the Western world are getting less happy. If we can’t find a way to reverse the trend, it might have an outsized impact on their future.