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2 days ago | 
manhattan.institute | Charles Lehman
How campus protests turned into assassinations and firebombing. Last Sunday, Mohamed Soliman, a 45-year-old illegal alien from Egypt, lobbed Molotov cocktails into a group of people in Boulder, Colorado. He did so, he later told police, because of his hatred for these “Zionists,” who were peacefully marching to demand the release of Hamas’ hostages in Gaza.
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3 days ago | 
manhattan.institute | Charles Lehman
America’s big cities are returning to law and order—but have they learned their lesson? Some good news you may have missed: The murder rate is plummeting. After a bloody three-year surge, there were fewer than five murders for every 100,000 Americans last year, crime analyst Jeff Asher has estimated, a 14 percent decrease from 2023. And though the year is still young, Asher has collected data from hundreds of major cities suggesting that 2025 could see the lowest murder rate on record.
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1 week ago | 
manhattan.institute | Steven Malanga
Marijuana-use disorder is soaring among the very populations advocates of legalization aim to help. State and local governments have a long history of using taxpayer dollars to subsidize bad economic development projects—everything from movie productions to sports arenas to industrial facilities. Now those governments are pumping tens of millions of public dollars into an even worse idea—legal pot businesses—as scientific studies increasingly demonstrate the health risks of regular marijuana use.
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1 week ago | 
manhattan.institute | Tal Fortgang
The academy should now recover its institutional autonomy, we are told. The academic “resistance” has found its rallying cry. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” wrote Harvard President Alan Garber.
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1 week ago | 
manhattan.institute | Robert VerBruggen
Public Safety, Cities, Governance 17 Minute Read Share Nationwide, homicide surged in 2020 and 2021, before slowly decreasing over 2022 and 2023. It is crucial to understand the dynamics driving this change, so that policymakers can prevent conditions conducive to such surges and can gain a stronger understanding of what drives crime in general.
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1 week ago | 
manhattan.institute | Jason Riley
His actions against foreign students and research grants have little to do with students’ civil rights. Donald Trump has made the Harvard man his whipping boy, and academia certainly had it coming. Still, what is the president’s objective? The administration announced Tuesday that it is seeking to cancel all remaining federal contracts with the school, which are worth an estimated $100 million. That’s on top of the billions of dollars in grants to Harvard that Mr. Trump has already frozen.
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1 week ago | 
manhattan.institute | Reihan Salam |Jesse Arm
We cannot afford to excuse, indulge, or minimize political violence. On Wednesday night, a young couple left an American Jewish Committee event in Washington, D.C. Moments later, they were gunned down. As police arrested the suspect, he shouted, “Free Palestine.”The victims—Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim—were 20-something Israeli Embassy aides. Lischinsky, a devout Christian born to an Argentinian Israeli father and a German mother, had just bought an engagement ring.
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1 week ago | 
manhattan.institute | Isaac Rose-Berman
“They fatten upon wretchedness, and have the effrontery to demand that the laws of the State shall be adapted to their purposes.” So said Charles Evans Hughes, Republican governor of New York, about Empire State gambling operators in 1908. More than a century later, Hughes’ words ring true as the United States faces an explosion of legal online gambling. Sports betting, decriminalized by the Supreme Court in 2018, has spread to 39 states.
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2 weeks ago | 
manhattan.institute | Brian Anderson
On The Technological Republic, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska. n April 2018, a group of Google employees launched an internal revolt. They were outraged that their company, long associated with the lofty mission of “organizing the world’s information,” was involved in a far grittier enterprise: helping the U.S. military analyze drone surveillance footage. The program, known as Project Maven, was designed to improve targeting accuracy in combat zones.
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2 weeks ago | 
manhattan.institute | Allison Schrager
There is no longer any pretense that America cares about the national debt. That means one thing: more bonds. It is no wonder that so many long-term bond auctions are turning into nail-biters — not just in the US, but in Japan and Europe, too. After all, who’d buy long-term bonds? Long-term interest rates have become much less predictable, and that means volatile prices for long bonds. Even worse, the normal negative correlation between the bond and stock markets has become less of a sure thing.