Latest Articles

In Hurricane Relief, 2 out of 3 Ain't Good

October 2, 2017  •  The Wall Street Journal

The federal government deserved the rave reviews it earned for its responses to back-to-back hurricanes in Texas and Florida. The Federal Emergency Management Agency worked well with state and local officials and predeployed key resources and personnel. It seemed as though Washington had learned from its failed response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Yet as President Trump visits a Puerto Rico devastated by Hurricane Maria, cheers for FEMA have turned to boos. What went wrong?

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How Republicans Might Bring About Single-Payer Health Care

October 2017  •  Commentary

The effort to repeal Obamacare came tantalizingly close to fruition. Republicans succeeded in passing a bill in the House, only to fall just a few votes shy on a different bill in the Senate. But had that hurdle in the upper chamber been overcome, a president in the White House was ready with pen in hand to sign almost any negotiated settlement sent to him by the GOP House and Senate. Instead, Obamacare survived. More than survived. It became politically stronger in the course of the debate and its aftermath, and in the wake of the Republican failure, a more radical measure even more pleasing to the left has suddenly been infused with new life.

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How the National Anthem Got Tangled Up With American Sports

September 26, 2017  •  Politico

Listen to President Donald Trump, or any one weighing in after more than 200 NFL players took a knee during the Star Spangled Banner on Sunday, and you might think that there's a very simple right and wrong way to listen to the national anthem, or register our objections to it. The truth is, though, that the history of playing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at American sporting events is complicated.

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Trump's Reassuring Hurricane Response

August 30, 2017  •  The Wall Street Journal

President Trump visited Texas Tuesday to assess the damage from Hurricane Harvey and show concern for its victims. So far, his administration is largely getting praise for effective handling of the crisis. Washington's disaster authorities appear to be in sync with the state on roles and responsibilities; the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its leader, Brock Long, deployed resources as Harvey approached; and the government response as a whole appears well coordinated.

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Judaism Can Help Those Whose Electronic Yearnings Get the Better of Them

August 22, 2017  •  Mosaic

Jeffrey Bloom begins his fine essay with a discussion of a form of addiction that has lately been the subject of widespread worry: the addiction of many Americans, and especially many younger Americans, to their "screens." As a behavioral addiction, in contrast to the much more serious plague of chemical addiction to drugs, it is also easier to ridicule or dismiss. But Bloom devotes some enlightening paragraphs to a recent book detailing its gravely debilitating effects on the lives of those caught in its snare and, alarmingly, to the ways in which (in his words) "the feedback mechanisms of social media" and video games "are engineered [my emphasis] to erode self-control"—in other words, the ways in which whole industries implicitly collude in the creation of more addicts.

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Books by Tevi Troy