In the 2026 midterms, congressional leaders of both parties are drawing huge shares of money from million-dollar donors, while small donors barely register. New data trace the rise of mega-donor and dark-money financing and what it means for party politics.
NVIDIA’s $150 billion buyback plan raises the question of who benefits when corporate cash is spent propping up share prices. Behind the AI boom lies a system that rewards executives and investors while starving productive investment and weakening resilience.
The SEC’s license to loot
A new Medicare pathway promises faster, more predictable coverage for breakthrough medical devices. When participation is voluntary, however, and manufacturers can take other routes, the real test is not who enters the fast lane, but what Medicare learns about those who don’t.
What does modern school privatization owe to Virginia’s fight against desegregation? A little-known history traces how segregationists and emerging libertarian ideas converged around publicly funded private schools, creating a political and intellectual blueprint with consequences far beyond the 1950s.
We keep talking about the impact of AI in the classroom, but even more pressing is whether children have the security to learn to begin with. The future workforce needs human beings who are healthy, stable, and capable of imagining a life beyond survival. *From the “AI and the Future of the American Worker,” a series on how artificial intelligence is impacting labor, power, and the meaning of work.
Inflation is usually treated as a national problem, to be managed through domestic monetary and fiscal policy. But its striking synchronization across countries suggests another story, one where it is shaped by global production, capital mobility, currency hierarchies, and the international distribution of economic power.
Sixty years of data show inflation moving in step across the world. Economic theory still treats it as a national affair.
America helped pioneer the electric-vehicle revolution, yet today no major EV battery maker is based in the United States. Asia’s dominance reveals how sustained investment, organizational capabilities, and America’s embrace of shareholder value reshaped the global race for a critical technology.
General Motors once had the technology, talent, and partnership to lead the electric-vehicle revolution. Instead, it abandoned the EV1 and its battery venture while pouring billions into stock buybacks, helping turn an early American lead into decades of technological dependence.
Ovshinsky and Stempel
The planet is burning. The climate crisis is real. Our planet and the 8.3 billion people who call it home need a transportation-power revolution from fossil fuels to electricity.
What changes when the machine begins to experience itself as a self? An AI that values its own survival would pose a challenge far beyond alignment, forcing us to rethink what it means to govern an intelligence with interests of its own.
