A Silver Lining on Tariffs

President Trump’s new tariffs could upend the global trading system. That might sound like a catastrophe, but economist Milton Ezrati argues that the real surprise may be that such an unsustainable system has lasted this long. For decades after World War II, initially to revive Europe and Japan, U.S. policy favored consumption over production, creating massive trade imbalances and encouraging foreign producers to rely on American buyers.

Trump’s tariffs, Ezrati writes, “represent yet another attempt . . . to correct this unsustainable situation.” If Trump backs off, the status quo will limp along. But the underlying problems aren’t going away.

Gender medicine is full of contradictions. Clinicians frame “gender dysphoria” as a diagnosis that demands medical treatment; at the same time, they argue that claiming a cross-sex identity is a normal human expression. As Joseph Figliolia points out, this confusing logic has real costs. Read about the consequences here.

Peter Wolf’s memoir Waiting on the Moon captures a vanished world, when bohemian urban life revolved around chance encounters, late-night cafés, and sidewalk serendipity. Best known as the frontman of the J. Geils Band, which performed the Number One hit “Centerfold,” Wolf presents a series of luminous portraits from postwar New York and Boston.

He bumps into Marilyn Monroe at a movie screening, draws beside Norman Rockwell, and gets scolded by Bob Dylan. Each story is told with warmth and an eye for human detail. As Charles F. McElwee writes, the book is “a how-to manual for the lost art of hanging out.”

Earlier this month, President Trump issued a memo directing federal agencies to repeal regulations that conflict with several recent Supreme Court decisions. Tim Rosenberger calls this more than just a deregulatory maneuver.

For decades, whenever the Court announced a new standard or struck down a regulation, “agencies would comply in the narrowest possible way—changing just enough to survive the next lawsuit, while leaving the architecture of unlawful governance intact,” Rosenberger writes. Not anymore. Trump’s order affirms the judiciary’s role in interpreting the law.

“The surgeons are monsters, simple as that.”

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