Opinion

  If Donald Trump loses the election and doesn’t concede, it won’t violate the U.S. Constitution. But it would break a tradition of concession that dates back more than a century and has achieved quasi-constitutional status. And like most enduring political customs, its value goes beyond graciousness: It helps ensure the continuity of government and offers a legitimating assist to ...

  If you were at work last Friday, you might have noticed that you couldn’t get on Twitter, Spotify, or whatever it is you do to avoid work. The sites themselves were fine, but users across the US lost access due to a large-scale attack on Dyn, a company whose servers provide infrastructure and routing services for the internet’s top ...

  Democracy requires dignity to sustain itself. This shouldn’t surprise. The ruling system that democracy replaced had been divinely chosen; the royals had God-given dignity, with all the trappings. For democrats to compete, they had to prove first that the electoral rabble could govern its passions and temper its prejudices, and next that their leaders would be chosen from the ...

  While the economic arguments for freer trade are strong, many people remain skittish about proposed trade deals involving the U.S., Asia and Europe. In particular, critics are focusing on provisions of these deals that set up tribunals to rule on disputes between governments and companies. The critics charge that these Investor-State Dispute Settlement panels would have too much power ...

  The U.S. Federal Reserve faces a tough task in figuring out how best to respond to a highly unusual economic recovery. As chair Janet Yellen noted in a recent speech, it could use some help from academia. So what key questions should researchers be trying to answer? Let’s start with what the Fed got right. Internal documents from 2009 ...

  Voters in Washington state will be asked next month whether they want to adopt the nation’s first carbon tax — a powerful way to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. You’d think environmental groups would be doing everything they can to back that idea. You’d be wrong. THE COST OF CARBON Initiative 732 will be on the ballot on Election Day. It ...

After four months of Brexit, a new chapter unfolds on Monday as British Prime Minister Theresa May meets with the first ministers from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The meeting would be crucial as the leaders seek to lay out a roadmap for departure from the EU. The meeting of Joint Ministerial Committee (JME) would be the first since December ...

  There was a time when ticket splitting was common. Voters would support one party’s candidate for president and the other’s for Congress. At its peak in 1972, ticket splitters represented 30 percent of voters, reports political scientist Alan Abramowitz of Emory University. Since then, the practice has gone into eclipse. In 2012, only 11 percent of the electorate were ...

  I was in the middle of an e-mail to an old friend this week, and had written a sentence about a mutual acquaintance that was more than 50 percent positive but contained a snarky word or two. I paused. “Is that necessary?” I thought to myself. No, it wasn’t. So I deleted the sentence. Maybe it was the Neera ...

  Does anyone remember President Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia? The plan was to focus diplomatic and military assets in East Asia to contain a rising China. It was one of the reasons Obama said he was shrinking the American footprint in the Middle East. Well, the pivot is failing. On Thursday, the president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, announced ...