An Urban's Rural View

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's success in knocking an asteroid off course is, as NASA's director says, "a watershed moment for planetary defense and a watershed moment for humanity."

China's president professes a fondness for Iowa but U.S.-China relations have spiraled downward on his watch nonetheless. With relations getting chillier, the U.S. and China need a crisis-management mechanism.

Farmers are always free not to use conservation easements, but there's no reason to demonize them.

U.S. companies sell a lot of semiconductors but increasingly make them overseas. The government is spending big bucks to encourage more domestic production.

The techno-optimists have been right (and the Malthusians wrong) about agriculture's ability to keep up with population growth, but a new book challenges techno-optimism on the decarbonization front.

To avoid having to raise interest rates into the stratosphere in the long run, as the Federal Reserve did in the early 1980s, today's Fed looks likely to continue to impose unusually large increases in the short run.

The U.S. has a Labor Day, not a May Day, even though the May Day in many other countries commemorates an 1886 incident in Chicago, the Haymarket Riot.