Featured Commentary category, Page 4
Matthew Yglesias: Doom-scrolling is a vice. Tax it like cigarettes
Americans are reading less, sleeping less and partying less. We have fewer marriages, fewer children and fewer friends than we used to. Our children are doing worse in school. These are complicated phenomena on some level, but on another level it’s pretty simple: Smartphones, social media and the internet are...
John T. Shaw: Johns Hopkins scholar shows that knowing history is invaluable to statesmanship
Winston Churchill, the towering British statesman who served as prime minister during World War II, was once asked by an American student how to become a successful leader. Churchill’s advice: “Study history, study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.” Frank Gavin, a professor at the Johns Hopkins...
Point: U.S. needs a Strategic Minerals Reserve
Five decades after the creation of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the wake of the Arab oil embargo, the United States is facing a new threat to its economic, energy and national security that calls for similarly decisive action: the weaponization of mineral supply chains by China. The time has...
Counterpoint: With mineral stockpile, oversight and innovation are critical, not stock ownership
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently announced plans to expand the national stockpile of minerals such as lithium and rare earths needed in the production of renewable energy technologies and military weapons. This is nothing new; the U.S. government has stockpiled minerals for decades. What is new is that the government...
Kenneth Zagacki and Richard Cherwitz: The challenges of presidential Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speeches
Having brokered what appears to be a groundbreaking ceasefire leading to a longer-term Middle East peace settlement, supporters of President Donald Trump, and the president himself, are lobbying the Nobel committee to bestow a 2026 Nobel Peace Prize on Trump. Whether next year’s committee honors him may depend less on...
Meredith Sumpter: Election reform turns down the temperature of our politics
Politics isn’t working for most Americans. Our government can’t keep the lights on. The cost of living continues to rise. Our nation is reeling from recent acts of political violence. Seventy percent of voters say the U.S. is in a political crisis, and 64% say our political system is too...
Wanda Wilson and Reps. Arvind Venkat and Mandy Steele: Why solar power makes sense for Pittsburgh area schools
The school year is well underway here in Pittsburgh, and students are learning new things every day. But one thing remains the same: the rising cost of electricity here and all across Pennsylvania. This could leave some school districts facing tough decisions on how to prioritize expenses and looking for...
Robin Abcarian: Virginia Giuffre spent half her life fighting for justice against Epstein
If there’s one takeaway from Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir, it’s that the unrepentant child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s partner in crime, should never, ever be considered for the pardon or commutation that President Trump has hinted at. This is not to downplay the importance of the moving story Giuffre...
Robert T. Smith: Pennsylvania deer management?
Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is spreading in the state’s deer herd. There are now potentially too few hunters to control a deer herd that is always looking to expand naturally, and with this expansion goes the disease. Who will help keep the spread in check? CWD is a contagious, always-fatal...
Bruce Cooper: McCormick must support the Fix Our Forests Act
In recent years, summer in the U.S. has been blighted by wildfires. And as megafires grow, so does air pollution. Just this summer, we experienced air quality alerts in Western Pennsylvania because of the wildfires in Canada. Seeing our beautiful forests ravaged by wildfires is devastating and then there’s the...
David M. Drucker: We’ve reached peak whataboutism. It was a long time coming.
President Donald Trump commuted the seven-year federal prison sentence of acknowledged criminal George Santos because, as he explained in a Truth Social post, the disgraced former New York congressman “had the Courage, Conviction and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!” Democrats are sticking by Jay Jones despite revelations that their nominee...
Joshua Pederson: Sam Altman’s terrible reason for letting ChatGPT talk to teens about suicide
Last month, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing on what many consider to be an unfolding mental health crisis among teens. Two of the witnesses were parents of children who’d committed suicide in the last year, and both believed that AI chatbots played a significant...
Lionel Laurent: Louvre robbery gang used a brazen new criminal blueprintVideo
A ladder truck, an angle-grinder, a maxi-scooter and seven minutes. That appears to be all it took for thieves to nab priceless jewelry from the Louvre, the world’s most-visited museum. The vulnerability of this cornerstone of French soft power adds to the country’s sense of malaise, and fingers are being...
Counterpoint: Trump’s compact would cripple universities
Among the many dangerous actions President Donald Trump has taken, his push to force some of the country’s best universities into signing a sweeping federal “compact” ranks just behind his pardons for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. The 10-part compact is a bizarre mix of bombast, authoritarianism and a few unremarkable...
Point: Trump to universities — olive branch compact or prosecution and defunding
American universities are at a crossroads. Their business model, which is overwhelmingly dependent on the twin pillars of federal grants and taxpayer-backed student loans, is failing in the face of declining public trust, financial malfeasance, a looming demographic cliff, and their publicly acknowledged discrimination, contrary to civil rights law. The...
Danitra Sherman: Your rights are on the ballot Nov. 4
Everything is political — and pretending that our political choices don’t have consequences for our family, our friends and our community is an act that we can no longer afford to keep up. With our Constitution, our democracy and the rule of law undermined and under daily attack by the...
Matthew Yglesias: What makes this shutdown so different
During the 2013 government shutdown, I happened to be in Philadelphia, and I was surprised to find the Liberty Bell — which sits in its own little room with big windows — was “closed.” You could stand there and look at it but only through tourist-smudged glass. This time around,...
Eric Snoey: Cuts to Medicaid and to insurance subsidies will push ERs past the brink
Back in 2007, President George W. Bush was being challenged on his opposition to the Children’s Health Insurance Program — which provides health coverage for children in families too poor to afford private insurance, yet too “wealthy” to qualify for Medicaid. His response was honest, if characteristically clumsy: “People have...
Jim Nowlan: Politicians seem incapable of balancing the federal budget
I was struck, no, dumbfounded by this: Debt funded all federal government spending in 2025. The federal government plans to spend a total of $7 trillion in fiscal 2025 but only bring in $5.16 trillion in revenue. That leaves a deficit of approximately $1.8 trillion. The big four expenditures —...
David Wassel: Reimagining the Gainey campaign offers deeper look into Democratic Party
Since November, Democratic special and primary elections have been observed to measure how are playing out the internal tensions between progressive and institutional factions. This includes the Pittsburgh mayoral contest between Mayor Ed Gainey and County Controller Corey O’Connor. In Allegheny County the most prominent progressive candidates have been a...
Michael Ohler: Pa. needs more state prison boot camps
The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (DOC) has one of the highest recidivism rates in the nation. That’s why its decision last month to close the Quehanna Boot Camp, the state prison with the lowest rate of recidivism and the highest rate of GED graduations, continues to deserve scrutiny. On the...
Allison Schrager: A zombie economy could be America’s future
Over the next decade, the U.S. economy will face two big challenges: higher interest rates and AI-generated disruption. Each invites the same solution: policies to keep rates below their market level. The strategy, also known as yield-curve control, is tempting, and it may even provide an immediate boost to the...
Ken Silverstein: Bridging the red-blue divide on climate
Heather Reams, the president of Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES), stepped onto the stage at Breckenridge’s Mountain Towns 2030 summit — a room full of progressives accustomed to negotiating with Republicans on climate policy. She faced an audience from Idaho, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado — areas that often depend...
Patricia Murphy: Trump forged Middle East peace. How about fixing Congress next?
Defying the odds and expectations of many, President Donald Trump went to the Middle East last week and announced what many thought impossible — a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and, hopefully, a path to peace in the Middle East. As a part of getting both sides to agree to...
Ryan Kennedy: Far fewer Americans support political violence than recent polls suggest
A series of recent events has sparked alarm about rising levels of political violence in the U.S.: the assassination of political activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10 ; the murder of a Democratic Minnesota state legislator and her husband in June ; and two attempts to kill Donald Trump during...
