A federal watchdog report examining how the companies that run America’s 401(k) plans handle participant data found that most of the privacy policies it reviewed placed no limit on selling or sharing that information for marketing and that four separate federal agencies each explained why enforcement was not their responsibility. The Government Accountability Office published the findings in February 2026...
October 23, 2026
The Lenders Say the Consumer Is Fine. The Consumer Says Otherwise.
Five of the largest credit card lenders in the United States told investors this summer that American consumers are paying their bills better than expected. Three of them lowered their forecasts for how much money they expect to lose to defaults this year. In the same weeks, consumer sentiment fell to a level below the 1st percentile of the University...
Caspian: Iran’s Limited Gateway to Unencumbered Trade
The U.S. naval blockade of Iran is frequently described as a total maritime cutoff. By the U.S. military’s own definition, it is not. It covers Iran’s southern coastline the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman and nothing else. Iran has a second coastline. It runs roughly 650 kilometers along the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, and it holds...
Political Polling: How Do They Keep Getting It Wrong?
With 73 days until the November 3 midterm elections, the country is heading toward the polls with less reliable information about the electorate than at any point in modern memory and the failures of the past 20 months have come from opposite directions. In August alone, a fabricated poll in the Los Angeles mayoral race moved money on two prediction...
Iran’s Inventory Play: How Tehran Managed Its Oil Output Around a Storage Ceiling
In April, senior U.S. officials predicted that a naval blockade would fill Iran’s oil storage tanks within days and force the country to shut in its wells. Four months later, Iran is still producing roughly 2.5 million barrels per day. What happened between the prediction and the outcome is a case study in how a producer manages a physical constraint...
Blakeman Closes to 10 Points on Hochul But the Poll That Moved Changed Its Own Rules
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman has cut Gov. Kathy Hochul’s lead in the New York governor’s race to 10 points, according to the Siena College Research Institute survey released Aug. 12- down from a 20-point gap in the same pollster’s June measurement. The 10-point figure has driven a week of coverage framing the contest as unexpectedly competitive. It has also...
786,000 to One: How America’s Citizen-to-Representative Ratio Quietly Became One of the Worst in the Developed World
The Democratic Socialists of America released a national program in July 2026 called “Workers Deserve More,” and buried inside the coverage of its more incendiary planks is a structural argument that deserves a hearing on its own terms: the platform calls for expanding the House of Representatives, implementing proportional representation and ranked-choice voting, and abolishing the Senate. Two-thirds of that...
Egg Recalls and the Vaccine America Approved but Won’t Use
Introduction On July 22, 2026, Midwest Poultry Services, L.P. pulled 1,589,577 dozen shell eggs roughly 19 million eggs off the market because they might be carrying Salmonella Enteritidis. Three weeks later, the Food and Drug Administration upgraded that recall to Class I, its most severe designation, meaning the agency believes eating the product could reasonably cause serious illness or death....
Clean Air Worked. The Climate Bill Is Coming Due.
A study published this summer in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters found that Europe’s summers have warmed faster than comparable regions of the Northern Hemisphere in large part because the continent cleaned up its air. Within days, the finding had been rewritten in the British press as evidence that heatwaves are “caused by fall in pollution,” and from there...
Grades Rise as Reading and Math Proficiency Falls: Nashville’s Grade-Change Allegations and the Accountability Gap
On Tuesday, Aug. 12, Metro Nashville Public Schools leaders presented state test data to the district’s board and described some of the highest academic achievement levels the district has recorded since Tennessee adopted more rigorous standards. Social studies proficiency in grades 3 through 8 rose 4.1 percentage points to 42.1 percent. Superintendent Adrienne Battle called the results a product of...