July 24, 2025
Airline Security’s Best-Kept Secret
Salutations to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for announcing earlier this month that people would no longer need to remove their shoes at security checkpoints in our nation’s airports. We should welcome exceptions to the generally rigid risk aversion in government-run airline security. And the really good news is that, formally or informally,…
July 23, 2025
Trump’s New AI Plan Is Necessary but Insufficient
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, At minimum, the Trump White House’s new AI Action Plan deserves credit for being honest about what it is: not a blueprint for technocratic governance or navigating a world of superintelligence, but rather a stab at geostrategic competitiveness policy designed to ensure American dominance in what could be the defining technology of our time….
July 22, 2025
Five Figures – July 2025
Today I am starting up a new feature here at THB — Five Figures. Every month, I will share five (or so) of the most provocative, interesting, or challenging figures to have recently crossed my desk. Five Figures adds to the features and content available to THB’s paid subscribers — which you can find here. Before making…
July 22, 2025
Europe’s Data Strategy Is Built on Wishful Thinking
The European Union is trying to engineer a digital revolution. Through its European Strategy for Data, EU officials hope to create a “single market for data,” knitting together governments, businesses, and individuals into a shared system of industrial and personal data. The goal is an innovative, sovereign digital ecosystem that can rival the United States…
July 16, 2025
Breaking the Global Warming Gridlock
Twenty-five years ago this month, Dan Sarewitz and I published a widely read and discussed article in The Atlantic Monthly titled, Breaking the Global Warming Gridlock (unpaywalled version here). Today I quote extensively from it and share both my and Dan’s perspectives on it from 2025. We invite your views as well. We began the essay with — what else…
July 14, 2025
Precipitation Paradox?
There is a cynical trick being played by some climate activists to promote misinformation and undercut the assessments of the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as they lobby for changes in energy policy. The trick goes like this: At the core of this line of reasoning is the exploitation of an apparent paradox: How…
July 11, 2025
Surprise! USF Decision Signals Admin Law Revolution, But Not the One We Expected
Late last month, the Supreme Court decided FCC v. Consumers Research. Although an undercard among the Court’s last-day decisions, the case was closely watched in administrative law circles as a potential vehicle for revitalizing the moribund Nondelegation Doctrine. But as predicted after oral argument, the Court found this was not the right case to do…
July 11, 2025
Common Law Evolution Is Not a Policy Proposal!
The outer edge of absurdity in the 1970s Monty Python sketch comedy show may have been “The Larch.” For no evident reason, the sketch retrains viewers on larch trees and the subject of larches. An interview with Pythons dressed as schoolboys goes into the larch question at some length, ending in a hard-to-hear introduction to…
July 10, 2025
What Americans Really Think About Energy and Climate
Right before the 2024 election, my AEI colleague Ruy Teixeira and I engaged YouGov to conduct a survey of how Americans view various topics of energy and climate. Today at AEI, the full survey and our summary report is published, including the survey’s toplines and crosstabs (all are directly linked from the bottom of this post). Here are…
July 9, 2025
Congress Should Avoid an App Store Crack-Up
Prominent members of Congress are reviving the Open App Markets Act (OAMA), a bill they say will create “a freer and fairer marketplace” in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. But rather than opening “the door to more choices and innovation,” the legislation would do the opposite: It would weaken security, reduce customer choice,…