Even the Trump Energy Department Cannot Resist Meddling
The Office of Energy Dominance Financing (!) of the Department of Energy (DoE) announced on October 5 “a conditional loan commitment of up to $4.2 billion to finance nuclear uprates and modernization...
View ArticleWhy Don’t We Talk More About Family Structure in Schooling?
I’ve long thought family structure deserves far more attention in making sense of educational outcomes. While race and poverty always feature prominently in such analyses, conservatives argue that...
View ArticleCan Broadband Policy Keep Up with Competition? (with Sam Love)
Cable companies are now offering mobile service, wireless carriers are competing for home broadband customers, and satellite providers are even expanding their offerings. As these historically...
View Article“We Are HUNTING Pielke”
How Academic ‘Blacklists’ Impede Serious Work On Climate Science A climate advocacy group called Skeptical Science hosts a list of academics that it has labeled “climate misinformers.” The list...
View ArticleAssessing the E-Rate Program
The Federal Communications Commission launched the Universal Service Fund in 1998, paid for by a modest 3 percent surcharge on consumers’ monthly telephone bills. But as the program grew and the...
View ArticleThree Years After Oct. 7, Jews Are Still a People Who Sing
Three years ago this week, on Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people and kidnapping some 250 more in the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Three years later, I am...
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Good News! Students with Disabilities Are Overrepresented in Private School...
Key Points Critics predicted that, once private school choice was implemented on a large scale, students with disabilities would become highly concentrated in the public school system. That hasn’t...
View ArticlePrivate Tutoring Centers—A Bigger Deal than You Think (with Joshua Goodman)
Kumon, Sylvan Learning, Mathnasium, and Huntington Learning Center—these private tutoring chains are familiar names, but they have received little attention from education researchers. According to...
View Article“Behind the Scenes” at the National Academies
Here at THB, I often assemble complex and disparate pieces of information to tell a story that I believe is grounded in evidence and facts. It is rare that such complexity is verified in the...
View ArticleBargaining with the Data Center
A large data center campus can bring billions of dollars of investment and a windfall of tax revenue. It can also use large quantities of electricity and perhaps water, run banks of backup generators,...
View ArticleWho Wins When a State Execution Fails?
“Botched” is a perfectly fine word for golf, cooking or home repair. It seems inadequate for the taking of a life, even the life of Christa Pike, a heinous murderer. In 1996, a jury found Pike guilty...
View ArticleThe Student Loan Default System Moves Beyond the Fax Machine
As of June 2026, 9.3 million federal student loan borrowers were in default, according to the latest federal data. Over five million of those borrowers have been in default since at least 2019—and...
View ArticleThe Date Is Part of the Message
Today is October 7, and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at Sarah Lawrence College is planning a “Sunset Vigil for 3 years of Genocide in Gaza” in Remy Amphitheater, the campus’s central...
View ArticleWhat We Can Learn About Traditions from Colorful Fruity Candies
I had not thought seriously about Sunkist Fruit Gems in years, but I noticed that they were missing when I was at a bar mitzvah earlier this year. Their absence made me realize that I had been to...
View ArticleWhy Young Americans Think the Market Has Failed Them
Last week, Gallup released a number that makes perfect sense to me but should worry the nation. For the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 2010, more than 4 in 10 Americans, 43%,...
View ArticleReconsidering Preferred Lender Lists in the Wake of the One Big Beautiful...
Key Points Roughly one in four graduate borrowers are expected to turn to the private student loan market to cover financing gaps created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s elimination of Grad PLUS...
View ArticleTrump Drug Pricing and the Iron Lung Fallacy
President Donald Trump is trying to best Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) in demonizing pharmaceutical companies and using government power to lower drug prices. He announced...
View ArticleThe Missing Measure: Family Structure and Child Outcomes
Family structure is an important factor in understanding child outcomes, yet it is rarely reflected in how government agencies report data. Recent research from the American Enterprise Institute and...
View ArticleDoes a Reduction in the Supply of Oil Make the Economy Stronger?
In a Wall Street Journal Economics Newsletter column citing a new draft paper by Diego R. Känzig and Luca Zanotti of Northwestern University and James H. Stock (KSZ) of Harvard, Grep Ip posits that...
View ArticleDoctor, Patient, and AI
The phrase “humans in the loop” has that made-in-a-(frontier)-lab sound to it, language manufactured to soothe anxiety about artificial intelligence without specifying what the loop is and where we...
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