-
2 days ago | 
wsj.com | Barton Swaim
The Supreme Court made legalized sports gambling possible in many states. Lawmakers neglected to think through the consequences. “There have always been Americans driven to ruin by gambling. But never have so many been driven to ruin so easily, and never has government done so much to enable them to gamble.” So writes Jonathan D. Cohen in “Losing Big,” an incisive and efficiently written account of the slow rise and sudden ubiquity of legal sports gambling in America.
-
1 week ago | 
wsj.com | Barton Swaim
Russia’s dictator, steeped in myth, couldn’t care less that ‘too many people are dying’ in Ukraine. The ugly truth is at last dawning on the White House—or let’s hope it is—that Vladimir Putin has no interest in settling for a tie in Ukraine. The administration has spent weeks lamenting the pointlessness of the war. “Stop the killing” and “stop the bloodshed,” President Trump has said repeatedly to the combatants in press gaggles and on social media. The phrases, coming from him, sound disingenuous.
-
2 weeks ago | 
cbs42.com | Drew Taylor |Barton Swaim
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — One half of a Birmingham-born filmmaking duo who has made their mark telling stories from a religious perspective recently received a glowing writeup in one of the country’s biggest newspapers.
-
4 weeks ago | 
wsj.com | Barton Swaim
About once a year for the last decade, some prominent liberal intellectual—Mark Lilla, Yascha Mounk, Susan Neiman—has published a book expressing revulsion at the excesses and follies of the contemporary American left. Few of these critiques engage in self-criticism or admit past error. None seriously considers the possibility that postwar liberalism’s critics on the right had a point.
-
1 month ago | 
wsj.com | Barton Swaim
Some Republicans on Capitol Hill may argue that Mr. Trump promised such a tariff regime during the 2024 campaign. But that is wildly to misread his victory. Many, maybe most, voters neither know nor care what a tariff is. Mr. Trump’s narrow victory over an abysmal opponent—49.8% to 48.3% in the national popular vote—may reasonably be interpreted as permission to repair the left’s many fiascoes at home and abroad.
-
1 month ago | 
wsj.com | Barton Swaim
Based in New York and Los Angeles, America’s entertainment industry has long ignored the interests and worldviews of ordinary religious people in the country’s vast middle. That has begun to change. Technological improvements—roughly from the development of the digital camera to the rise of streaming platforms—have enabled independent filmmakers across the country to produce high-quality movies and series that explore themes mainstream studios don’t understand and prefer to ignore.
-
1 month ago | 
wsj.com | Barton Swaim
Based in New York and Los Angeles, America’s entertainment industry has long ignored the interests and worldviews of ordinary religious people in the country’s vast middle. That has begun to change. Technological improvements—roughly from the development of the digital camera to the rise of streaming platforms—have enabled independent filmmakers across the country to produce high-quality movies and series that explore themes mainstream studios don’t understand and prefer to ignore.
-
1 month ago | 
wsj.com | Barton Swaim
Throughout George W. Bush’s first term as president, critics had much to say about the influence of Vice President Dick Cheney. Normally the veep is rarely heard from. Joe Biden, untiring attender of funerals and cutter of ribbons, was the more conventional deputy. The hyperactive ubiquity of current Vice President JD Vance should have attracted more attention than it has.
-
1 month ago | 
wsj.com | Barton Swaim
President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport hundreds of Venezuelan aliens, including members of the Tren de Aragua gang, has occasioned skepticism among our sharpest commentators. The consensus seems to hold that the president’s move is legally suspect but politically advantageous. The tangled dispute with Judge James Boasberg, who on March 15 ordered the administration to suspend the operation and to recall any flights that had already departed, is hard to follow.
-
2 months ago | 
wsj.com | Barton Swaim
The legal scholar Ilya Shapiro has long opposed the practice of conferring advancements—college admissions, governmental nominations—on the basis of sexual or racial identity. That view is morally defensible, entirely in keeping with the U.S. Constitution and broadly popular with the American public. It is not, however, a doctrine to be clumsily expressed on social media by a new employee of an elite university.
