WIS&YIM

what it is & why it matters

Featured Series

The Department of Justice as Political Weapon

How the institution designed to be the nation's independent law enforcement arm — insulated from White House political direction — has been repeatedly turned against political opponents, and why the structural conditions that make it possible have never been fixed.

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01

The Department of Justice

The United States went its first 81 years without a Justice Department — and the one Congress finally created in 1870 was deliberately designed to be the government's lawyer, not the president's enforcer.

02

DOJ Independence

The wall between the White House and the Justice Department's prosecutorial decisions is not a law — it is a norm, enforced by nothing except the political cost of violating it, which has proven to be an unreliable constraint.

03

The Saturday Night Massacre

On October 20, 1973, Richard Nixon ordered his attorney general to fire the special prosecutor investigating him — and both the attorney general and his deputy resigned rather than comply, in the most explicit test of DOJ independence in American history.

04

Special Counsels and Independent Prosecutors

The United States has tried three different legal mechanisms for appointing a prosecutor the president cannot immediately fire — and each version has been weaker than the one before it.

05

COINTELPRO

From 1956 to 1971, the FBI ran a secret program to surveil, infiltrate, discredit, and destroy American political organizations — including civil rights groups, anti-war movements, and socialist parties — using methods the Senate later called 'a sophisticated vigilante operation.'

06

Prosecutorial Discretion

Federal prosecutors cannot charge every crime they could prove — and the power to decide who gets investigated, who gets charged, and how hard the government fights determines who goes to prison and who goes free, long before a jury is seated.

07

Contempt of Congress

Congress can vote to hold executive officials in contempt — but the only way to enforce that contempt citation is to ask the Justice Department to prosecute them, and the Justice Department answers to the president the officials are defying.

08

The Unitary Executive Theory

A theory developed in Reagan-era law offices holds that the president has total, exclusive control over every officer in the executive branch — a reading of the Constitution that, if fully adopted, would make DOJ independence not just politically fragile but constitutionally impermissible.

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All Series
Technology
Technology

AI Data Centers

The physical infrastructure of the AI revolution — vast server farms consuming the electricity of mid-sized cities and the water of small towns — is being built faster than the grid can support, largely without public deliberation.

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Technology

The AI Job Creation Myth

Every wave of automation has been accompanied by confident predictions that new jobs will more than replace the ones destroyed — and those predictions have sometimes been right, often been wrong, and almost always obscured who pays the cost of the transition.

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Technology

AI & Job Losses

AI is already eliminating jobs across writing, customer service, coding, legal research, and data analysis — and the workers bearing the displacement costs are rarely the ones who benefit from the productivity gains.

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Technology

AI Water Usage

Training and running AI models requires billions of gallons of water for cooling — a hidden environmental cost that falls disproportionately on drought-stressed communities with little say in where data centers are built.

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Technology

Artificial Intelligence

AI is the most consequential technology since the internet — possibly since electricity — yet public understanding of what it is, how it works, and who controls it has not kept pace with its deployment.

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Science
Science

Antibiotic Resistance

The drugs that transformed 20th-century medicine are failing faster than we're replacing them — and routine surgery is among the things at risk.

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Science

GMOs

What the scientific consensus actually says about genetically modified food — and why the public debate has so little to do with it.

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Science

Methane

The overlooked greenhouse gas that is warming the planet roughly 80 times faster than CO2 in the near term — and whose sources are lying about how much they emit.

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Science

Microplastics

Plastic particles are now in human blood, breast milk, placentas, and Arctic ice — and we don't yet know what that means for health.

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Science

Nuclear Energy

The one large-scale low-carbon power source that terrifies people — and whether the fear has been proportionate to the evidence.

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Science

The Ozone Layer

The clearest environmental success story in history — a global crisis identified by science, met with international cooperation, and actually solved.

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Science

PFAS / Forever Chemicals

Synthetic compounds engineered to be chemically indestructible are now in the blood of virtually every person on Earth — and the companies that made them knew.

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Science

Kessler Syndrome

The debris problem that could lock us out of space forever.

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Science

Climate Change

The most thoroughly documented phenomenon in the history of science is also the most politically contested — and the gap between what we know and what we've done about it may define the century.

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Politics
Politics

Strait of Hormuz

One-fifth of the world's oil passes through a channel narrower than the length of Manhattan — and the country that borders it has repeatedly threatened to shut it down.

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Politics

CIA Covert Operations

The United States has overthrown governments, assassinated foreign leaders, and run torture programs through the CIA — activities authorized by secret presidential findings, briefed to a handful of lawmakers, and designed to be publicly deniable.

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Politics

COINTELPRO

From 1956 to 1971, the FBI ran a secret program to surveil, infiltrate, discredit, and destroy American political organizations — including civil rights groups, anti-war movements, and socialist parties — using methods the Senate later called 'a sophisticated vigilante operation.'

Read more →
Politics

Congressional Approval for War

The Constitution gives Congress alone the power to declare war — a power last formally invoked in 1942, while presidents have since fought wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and dozens of other countries without it.

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Politics

Contempt of Congress

Congress can vote to hold executive officials in contempt — but the only way to enforce that contempt citation is to ask the Justice Department to prosecute them, and the Justice Department answers to the president the officials are defying.

Read more →
Politics

DOJ Independence

The wall between the White House and the Justice Department's prosecutorial decisions is not a law — it is a norm, enforced by nothing except the political cost of violating it, which has proven to be an unreliable constraint.

Read more →
Politics

The Department of Justice

The United States went its first 81 years without a Justice Department — and the one Congress finally created in 1870 was deliberately designed to be the government's lawyer, not the president's enforcer.

Read more →
Politics

Drone Warfare and Targeted Killing

The United States has killed thousands of people in countries it is not at war with, using remotely piloted aircraft, based on secret legal standards, administered by a classified process, with casualty counts the government disputed for years — a program that has become a permanent feature of American foreign policy.

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Politics

Guantanamo Bay

More than 780 people have been detained at Guantanamo Bay without trial since 2002 — held in a legal limbo the government designed specifically to avoid judicial review, with a facility every president since Bush has promised to close and none has.

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Politics

The Imperial Presidency

The framers designed a weak executive constrained by Congress — what emerged over two centuries is a presidency with powers to wage war, surveil citizens, impound funds, and govern by decree that no founder would recognize.

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Politics

The Military-Industrial Complex

Eisenhower's 1961 farewell warning about the fusion of military and corporate interests has proven more accurate than he could have anticipated — a $900 billion defense budget now flows through a handful of contractors whose lobbying, hiring, and political donations shape the threats America identifies and the weapons it buys.

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Politics

National Emergency Powers

A presidential declaration of national emergency unlocks more than 130 dormant statutory powers — to seize property, freeze assets, restrict travel, and redirect military funds — with no time limit and a congressional termination mechanism that has never successfully worked.

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Politics

Nuclear Launch Authority

The president of the United States can order the launch of nuclear weapons unilaterally, without the approval of Congress, the Cabinet, or the courts — a decision that could kill hundreds of millions of people and that must, by design, be made in minutes.

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Politics

Prosecutorial Discretion

Federal prosecutors cannot charge every crime they could prove — and the power to decide who gets investigated, who gets charged, and how hard the government fights determines who goes to prison and who goes free, long before a jury is seated.

Read more →
Politics

The Saturday Night Massacre

On October 20, 1973, Richard Nixon ordered his attorney general to fire the special prosecutor investigating him — and both the attorney general and his deputy resigned rather than comply, in the most explicit test of DOJ independence in American history.

Read more →
Politics

Special Counsels and Independent Prosecutors

The United States has tried three different legal mechanisms for appointing a prosecutor the president cannot immediately fire — and each version has been weaker than the one before it.

Read more →
Politics

The Unitary Executive Theory

A theory developed in Reagan-era law offices holds that the president has total, exclusive control over every officer in the executive branch — a reading of the Constitution that, if fully adopted, would make DOJ independence not just politically fragile but constitutionally impermissible.

Read more →
Politics

Citizens United

The Supreme Court case that decided money is speech and corporations are people — and transformed American elections overnight.

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Politics

Communism

The theory that has never been fully implemented, the experiments conducted in its name that killed millions, and why the gap between those two facts matters.

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Politics

Dark Money

Political spending that cannot be traced to its source — and the legal infrastructure that makes untraceable spending possible.

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Politics

The Filibuster

A Senate procedure that began as a delay tactic and became an effective veto on any legislation that can't find 60 votes — a threshold the Constitution never requires.

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Politics

Oligarchy

Rule by the few — not as a slur, but as a measurable description of how concentrated wealth distorts political power.

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Politics

Qualified Immunity

A legal doctrine invented by the Supreme Court — not Congress — that makes it nearly impossible to sue police officers who violate constitutional rights.

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Politics

Social Democracy

The political tradition that built the Nordic welfare states — and why its track record is rarely mentioned in American debates about 'socialism.'

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Politics

Socialism

A term that means different things in a policy debate, an academic context, and a Fox News segment — and which countries actually practice it.

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Politics

The War on Drugs

A fifty-year policy built on enforcement rather than treatment — and what fifty years of evidence shows about whether it worked.

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Politics

Gerrymandering

When politicians choose their voters — instead of the other way around.

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Politics

Voter ID Laws

A policy shaped less by the fraud it claims to prevent and more by who it disenfranchises.

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Politics

Fascism

The 20th century's deadliest political invention — and a label still worth applying precisely.

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Politics

Authoritarianism

The governing logic that treats political power as too important to leave to voters.

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Politics

The Electoral College

The system that decides who becomes president — and it isn't your vote.

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Social
Social

Healthcare in America

The United States spends twice what comparable countries pay for healthcare — and gets measurably worse outcomes. The gap is not accidental.

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Social

Immigration

What the economic and social data actually shows about immigration — which is considerably different from what both sides of the political debate usually claim.

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Social

Mass Incarceration

The United States incarcerates more people than any country on Earth — and built the system deliberately, in a generation.

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Social

The School-to-Prison Pipeline

The disciplinary policies that route children from classrooms into courts — and who those policies target.

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Social

Social Security

The most successful anti-poverty program in American history is routinely described as being in crisis — and the actual math is considerably less alarming than the political rhetoric.

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Social

The Wealth Gap

The distance between who owns America and who works in it — and how that distance has been engineered over generations.

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Social

Redlining

The government-backed policy that built America's racial wealth gap, block by block.

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Economics
Economics

The Consumer Price Index (CPI)

The CPI is the government's official measure of inflation — and understanding what it actually measures, and what it doesn't, changes how you read nearly every economic headline.

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Economics

Crude Oil

Crude oil is not a single commodity — it is a spectrum of hydrocarbons with wildly different properties, prices, and geopolitical implications, and the journey from underground reservoir to gasoline pump is stranger and more complex than most people realize.

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Economics

Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

GDP is the most cited number in economics — and one of the most misread, because it measures activity, not wellbeing, and growth, not distribution.

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Economics

Inflation

Inflation isn't just rising prices — it's what happens when money loses purchasing power, and the causes, cures, and costs are far more contested than most economic commentary suggests.

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Economics

Interest Rates

Interest rates are the price of borrowing money — and when central banks adjust them, they are pulling the most powerful lever in macroeconomic policy, with effects that ripple across every corner of the economy.

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Economics

Oil Prices

Oil prices are set by a global market shaped by supply decisions made in Riyadh and Moscow, demand trends in Beijing and Houston, wars and sanctions, and financial speculators — understanding them means understanding why economic shocks so often begin at the pump.

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Economics

Oil Production

Who pumps the world's oil, how much they pump, and why they pump it — the politics and economics of oil production explain more about geopolitics, recessions, and military conflicts than almost any other single variable.

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Economics

The Trade Deficit

The U.S. trade deficit is one of the most misunderstood numbers in economic policy — routinely treated as evidence of national failure when it is better understood as a consequence of America's role as the world's preferred destination for investment.

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Economics

The Unemployment Rate

The official unemployment rate is one of the most watched numbers in economics — and one of the most carefully defined, in ways that guarantee it understates the true extent of labor market distress.

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Economics

Labor Unions

Union membership in the U.S. fell from 35% of workers in the 1950s to 10% today — and the timing of that decline tracks almost perfectly with the stagnation of middle-class wages.

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Economics

The Minimum Wage

The economic consensus that raising the minimum wage destroys jobs collapsed under the weight of the evidence — and what replaced it is more interesting than either side admits.

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Economics

The National Debt

The U.S. owes $36 trillion — but the political conversation about what that means gets almost everything wrong.

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Economics

The Pentagon Budget

The United States spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined — and has failed every financial audit it has ever attempted, meaning no one can fully account for where the money goes.

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Economics

Private Equity

The industry that buys companies with borrowed money, extracts fees, and calls it value creation — and why the evidence on whether it actually creates value is surprisingly mixed.

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Economics

Tariffs

Taxes on imports are always paid by someone — the question economists actually argue about is who, and the answer is almost never the foreign country.

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Economics

Capitalism

The dominant economic system of the modern world — its history, its performance, and the debates it generates that are too often conducted without facts.

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Economics

The Federal Reserve

The most powerful economic institution in the world operates largely outside democratic accountability — by design, and for reasons that are more defensible than they appear.

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Economics

The Housing Crisis

America's housing shortage is not a mystery — it is the predictable result of zoning laws designed to preserve exclusion, and the political economy of homeowners who benefit from scarcity.

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Economics

Supply-Side Economics

The theory that cutting taxes on the wealthy grows the economy for everyone — and forty-five years of evidence on whether it does.

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