The death last week of former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan is a reminder of both how low the city’s political culture has sunk and how strong leaders can help turn around a seemingly hopeless situation.  read more »

Most of us have stopped believing in the myth of the meritocracy. The myth promises that the ablest or most intelligent or hardest working get ahead of the rest.  read more »

‘Man is the measure of all things’, Greek philosopher Protagoras wrote over 2,500 years ago. Unfortunately, our elites today tend not to see it that way.

In recent years, the overused word ‘sustainability’ has fostered a narrative in which human needs and aspirations have taken a back seat to the green austerity of Net Zero and ‘degrowth’.  read more »

For all the tumult of today, we as a nation are merely dithering around the edges of the most critical question of our times – do we stop or go?  read more »

We are entering a new urban epoch, with the potential to disrupt city life in ways not unlike that created in the shift from an industrial to what Jean Gottman described in 1983 as the “transactional city.”  read more »

The proper size of government permeates public policy discussions about homelessness, poverty, and health care. The left and right debate varying degrees of government involvement, typically failing to act and often deteriorating into a state of policy paralysis.  read more »

It is difficult, given what Silicon Valley has become, to convey exactly what it was like in the 1970s and ‘80s. It was a remarkable center of technology, but also the embodiment of the spirit of capitalism at its very best, as epitomized by garage start-ups like Apple. Greed, of course, is always a human motivation, but the early Valley culture was created by entrepreneurial outsiders who genuinely wanted to make the world better.  read more »

For nearly all the 20th century, California was the national growth leader. In every census from 1930 to 2000, California added more residents than any other state.  read more »

President Biden may have received a rapturous welcome in Ireland, but Democratic strategists in Washington will have taken little notice.  read more »

Deep Throat never said, “follow the money.”

That phrase, which has become one of the most famous axioms in politics and journalism, was featured in the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men,” which starred Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford.  read more »