Essays & Observations

Question: How do Democrats get from 47 seats to a Senate majority in 2026, and who would be the Majority Leader if they do? Answer: They need a net gain of four seats, because a 50-50 tie belongs to the vice president, and the vice president is a Republican. The map gives them a real shot: one likely pickup in North Carolina, two coin flips in Ohio and Texas, and a bench of competitive races from Maine to Alaska. If the defense holds and the flips land, the Majority Leader is almost certainly Chuck Schumer, and the real fight is over who succeeds him. ...

There is a version of MacKenzie Scott’s life that reads like a fable about the wrong kind of ambition. She studied creative writing at Princeton under Toni Morrison, who called her “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative writing classes.”1 She spent ten years writing her first novel while helping her husband build a company that would become the most valuable retailer on earth. The novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, won an American Book Award. Morrison reviewed it as “a rarity: a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart.”2 And almost nobody read it. By NPD BookScan’s count, her books sold modestly.3 ...

The National Emergencies Act of 1976 was written to be a leash. Congress, tired of four decades of unexamined emergency powers, demanded that every declaration name its statutory basis, be reported to the legislature, and lapse unless renewed each year. The whole design assumed that emergencies would be rare, and that rarity would be the check. Eighteen months into the second Trump administration, the leash has become a rubber stamp. Twelve new national emergencies have been declared since January 2025: for the border, for cartels, for energy, for tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China, Brazil, and the world, for the ICC, for Venezuela, for Cuba, for the bulk-power grid. Twelve emergencies, and not one of them was an emergency in any ordinary sense of the word. They were vehicles. ...

The National Emergencies Act of 1976 was supposed to be a leash. Congress, alarmed by four decades of unexamined emergency powers, required that every future declaration name its statutory basis, be reported to Congress, and lapse automatically unless renewed each year.1 Fifty years later, the leash has stretched into something closer to a routine: as of late October 2025, 48 national emergencies were active in the United States, and President Trump was responsible for 11 of them.2 By the end of August 2026, the number of new declarations from his second term alone had reached twelve, with two more carried over from his first term still on the books.3 ...

The fountain pen is a small object with a large argument inside it. Every serious pen is a thesis about what writing is for, and no two pens argue the point more cleanly than the Lamy 2000 and the Waterman Carène. Both are modern classics, both have been in production for decades, and both cost roughly the same money. They could not be less alike. One is a German machine that hides its nib; the other is a French yacht that displays it. Choosing between them is not choosing between two pens. It is choosing between two theories of the examined life. ...

The 2026 midterms come Tuesday, November 3, with both chambers of Congress in play and an outcome that has become genuinely uncertain as the campaign enters its final stretch.1 Republicans control the Senate 53 to 47 and the House 219 to 212, with four seats vacant.2 Democrats enter the fall with the national wind at their back, roughly six points ahead on the generic ballot, and a plausible arithmetic for taking both chambers.3 The question is whether they survive contact with the map. ...