Since returning to office in January 2025, Donald Trump has aggressively pursued a radical reshaping of U.S. foreign policy. In early March, the State Department terminated foreign assistance programs supporting political opposition and regime change in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, deeming them no longer...

The late 19th century saw economists, mainly German and Austrian, create a mythology of money’s origins that is still repeated in today’s textbooks. Money is said to have originated as just another commodity being bartered, with metal preferred because it is nonperishable (and hence amenable...

I saw macaques for the first time along the river’s edge on the island of Borneo in 1983. I was in a boat with scientist and conservationist Dr. Biruté Galdikas on our way to the orangutan rehabilitation and research site she established on the island....

On February 4, 2025, Chicago’s business community pushed back against Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposal to raise real estate transfer taxes, adding to the city’s ongoing economic struggles. ...

Over more than a thousand years, Venice transformed from a modest refuge into a dominant Mediterranean power. Despite various crises and encircling empires, the Venetian Republic avoided foreign rule, revolution, and collapse. ...

A knot formed in Sam Phillips’s stomach a few months ago when he learned that corroded titanium—sold with faked documents—somehow made it into doors and other components on civilian airliners. ...

Both Trump and Biden imposed high tariffs on imported products made in China and other countries. Those impositions broke with and departed from the previous half century’s policies favoring “free trade” (less or minimal government intervention in international markets). Free trade policies facilitated “globalization,” the...

Shortly after the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War and the beginning of the widescale destruction of Gaza in October 2023, McDonald’s executives in Chicago found themselves inadvertently entangled in the conflict. Local owners of McDonald’s restaurants are given significant autonomy over profits and operations, and...

There is an obscure mechanism by which fossil fuel companies maintain their global domination even as their products are destroying our futures. Most rank-and-file climate activists haven’t heard of it and most news media rarely discuss it in great detail. It is a tool that...

Considering whether modern states are empires tells us almost nothing useful about either modern states or empires. A better question is what policies and structures pioneered by empires are still employed by states today, and how. ...