Scraps of paper matter, from red poppies to international treaties.

The bad news from the latest Nation’s Report Card has us analysts wearing out our thesauruses. Gloomy, dismal, a bloodbath…no negative seems overwrought for what we saw the other week, especially for our lowest-performing students. For example, since 2013, the start of our “Achievement Recession,” eighth grade reading scores for students at the 10th percentile have dropped by ten points. Ten points! That’s the equivalent of an entire grade level. The bottom seems to be falling out.

Hoover Institution fellow Jack Goldsmith talked with New York Times's Charlie Savage and Justin Florence of Protect Democracy, about the history of the executive power survey, the value of the questionnaire, and the takeaways from responses to this year’s questions. 

Hoover Institution fellow Jack Goldsmith discusses his recent book In Hoffa's Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth.

Under the supervision of two foremen, workers clad in white coveralls use a sandblaster and other power tools to remove corrosion from airplane parts.

Good news doesn’t get attention the way bad news does. That sad truth explains most reporters’ knack for spotting the lone cloud on an otherwise bright horizon.

On June 12, 1987, then-President Ronald Reagan was in a limousine on the way to give a speech at the base of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin. While this gate had originally been commissioned by King Frederick William II of Prussia and had been built some two centuries earlier as an entranceway to an avenue leading to the palace, for decades prior to Reagan’s visit the sealed gate had become a symbol of the Berlin Wall that epitomized the division of Germany into two separate countries.

America will always have a love-hate relationship with its wealthy financiers, but lately there has been a resurgence of interest in the private equity industry. In HBO’s Silicon Valley, for example, venture capital partner Laurie Bream is a ruthless automaton who runs on egg whites and green beans; in Succession, another HBO hit, private equity prodigy Stewy Hosseini is too untouchable to bother concealing his cocaine habit. Whether through mechanical indifference or supreme arrogance, private equity investors can strike fear in the hearts of even the grizzliest CEOs.