Japan 2025 is a version of Japan 2000—albeit with fewer young people, many more old people, and a society that has no idea where it is going. Japan simply runs in place, waiting to see what might evolve next. Change comes slowly here, but eventually enough will accumulate to bite you in the oshiri. You want it to happen so badly, to be the future, but Japan stubbornly refuses to accept the assignment. None of that is visible at first or even second glance in a place like Tokyo. The...

When I was a child growing up in Northern Virginia, a favorite summer evening activity in my family was to pick up a pizza at the Italian Store and go down to Gravelly Point. There we watched the planes land just across the field at Reagan National Airport until sunset. As the jets flew over the park in their final descent, they always seemed so much closer to the ground than they actually were. And they came so often! My brothers and I chased them with our arms outstretched, up...

It’s now clear that President Trump will hold off for a time on his campaign promises to impose stiff, strictly trade-related tariffs of varying levels on all of America’s economic competitors, though import duties relating to border security or other non-economic issues were announced Saturday for implementation Tuesday. But if Mr. Trump is hesitating on the economic side because some of his advisors disagree on how completely to fulfill these pledges, and how quickly, he should side with the trade hawks—and his own long-time instincts. Because going big on such...

NVIDIA was blood red. President Trump warned it was a “wake up call.” More than $1 trillion had been wiped from Wall Street. Overnight. The AI arms race was finally front and center. On the eve of Lunar New Year, Chinese hedge fund billionaire Liang Wenfeng had a surprise for the West that no one saw coming. Liang’s Hangzhou-based DeepSeek AI lab had bested America's finest in front of the whole world, and they'd done it on a bootstrap budget. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas called it “DOGE for AI.” “What...

The destruction wrought by the Southern California wildfires elicited mixed reactions from Iran, where Western cliches about a monolithic theocratic elite rarely survive scrutiny. The administration of President Masoud Pezeshkian, a relative moderate, offered assistance to the United States, while the U.S.-bashing hardliners, including senior clerics and conspiracy theorists, savored God’s wrath against a “godless” superpower in decline.

President Donald Trump hasn’t just shifted the Overton Window, the zone of what’s understood to be possible in politics; he’s blown it wide open. It’s now the Overton Vista. As the close Trump ally Marc Andreessen declared on January 25, “The last week has totally reset my conception of what’s possible.” Coming from a tech bro steeped in Schumpeterian disruption, that’s saying something. Bank on it: If the conventional wisdom thinks one thing, Trump thinks something else. Case in point: Gaza. In the wake of 15 months of carnage, the...

Mark Twain once described members of Congress as having “the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes." And true to form, yesterday morning the cowardly lions of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence roared away during former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation hearing to become the next director of national intelligence.

After two days of confirmation hearings, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is likely to be the next U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services—but there’s no reason to clutch your canola oil just yet. Senators threw buzzwords like “conspiracy theories” and “anti-vaccine” at Kennedy in Wednesday’s Senate hearing. Rhode Island’s Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse told Kennedy, “You frighten people.” Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon called Kennedy’s books on vaccines “junk science.” Kennedy made it very clear: He is not coming for our food or vaccines. “I don’t want to take...

A reevaluation of foreign assistance programs and an America First policy directive to Secretary of State Marco Rubio were among the 46 executive orders President Trump put his Sharpie to on Inauguration Day. Section 2 of the ”America First Policy Directive to Secretary Rubio” states, Trump’s order on foreign assistance mandates a now widely reported on “90-day pause” on foreign development assistance, during which time a determination will be made by the director of the Office of Management and Budget (which by that time will likely be the eminently sensible...

As if we did not already have enough to feel aggrieved about, there’s this: Nearly half of Americans (44 percent) feel neglected by advertisers. Who actually feels abandoned in this way should not be terribly difficult to figure out, but it might surprise some otherwise bright individuals nonetheless. Those feeling ignored and overlooked are not poor people with little money to spend but, according to data from iHeartMedia and Pushkin, these forsaken consumers are, in fact, white suburbanites making more than $100,000 a year. Advertisers overlook them for a number...