“Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” so declared Senator Daniel Webster in ending his famous 1830 reply in the U.S. Senate to South Carolina Sen. Robert Hayne’s angry defense of slavery and of a state’s right to nullify federal law. Leading up to the Civil War in 1861, Southerners loved an America […]

Weather forecasts have gotten quite good over the years, but their temperatures aren’t always spot on — and the result when they underplay extremes can be lethal. Even a 1-degree difference in a forecast’s accuracy can be the difference between life and death, our research shows. As economists, we have studied how people use forecasts […]

The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action ruling should not be treated as a racial companion of last year’s reversal of long-standing reproductive rights. The court’s ruling related to programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina preserves a foundational principle, whereas the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, destroyed a foundational […]

Picture a Republican administration “engaging” with social media companies to “recommend” that they delete or slow the spread of posts discussing voter suppression. Why? Because the White House’s experts have “debunked” most of the claims, and the rest, even if not “provably false,” nevertheless are “dubious.” Imagine that some of the “requests” are as specific […]