The Permitting Revolution

Maybe we can do some more of this again.

I occasionally get a complaint from a reader asking why I can’t write about anything other than the latest bad thing Donald Trump has done or said.

Look, I would love to be writing about other things all the time. But every day I wake up and Trump is talking against about revoking someone’s citizenship because they criticized him, or something equally insane.

And yet—yes, there are other things to write about, and there is even some good news out there. So I’m going to take a newsletter just to highlight some of these stories.

“Science Asylum”

Trump’s precipitous cuts to science funding, combined with a hostile climate toward academic freedom and immigration, may be driving scientists out of this country to seek “science asylum” in the south of France. (I am waiting for the Italians to offer “pundit asylum” in Tuscany.)

But many important new innovations are coming out of the pipeline started years earlier.