‘The radical development of an entirely new painkiller’
Rivka Galchen at The New Yorker
Specific “pain can correlate with the underlying causes of it — and different causes point to different approaches to relief,” says Rivka Galchen. But “we have tended to get in trouble when we mismatch pains and painkillers.” The “risks of addiction and overdose make prescribing opioids not unlike sending someone home with a gun.” Opioids are “miserable in other ways: they leave users sleepy, confused, and constipated. But what else is there to give?”
‘Trump’s “Golden Dome” system is an expensive way to make America less safe’
Kelsey D. Atherton at MSNBC
President Donald Trump’s “Golden Dome” is “impossible to deliver, expensive to pursue, and one whose very development guides other nations into deadlier countermeasures that make America and the world less safe,” says Kelsey D. Atherton. A “system built to stop ICBMs is likely to struggle with nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which fly at different speeds and trajectories than either submarine or land-based ballistic missiles.” Defense “on the scale of Golden Dome is especially confounded by the danger of a thermonuclear warhead.”
‘America has a billionaire problem — we need a wealth tax to fix it’
Alan S. Davis at The Hill
An excessive “concentration of wealth is the biggest threat facing our nation,” says Alan S. Davis. It “bestows a dangerous degree of economic and political power on a select few and arms them with the ability to distort our democracy and our economy for personal gain.” Lawmakers “must consider sweeping tax reforms to counter this threat.” One “mechanism for achieving this goal is a wealth tax on the ultra-wealthy,” which “could transform American society for the better.”
‘We need a farm system for American jobs — before it’s too late’
John Hope Bryant at Time
America needs a “farm club system for American jobs of the future,” says John Hope Bryant, a “national pipeline — backed by private enterprise and public policy — that starts in K-12 and follows a young person all the way into a career with dignity, purpose, and a paycheck.” The “threat to American economic dominance is internal. It’s our failure to prepare the next generation for the economy that’s coming.” We’ve “disconnected our education system from our economic engine.”
Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
