Author: Mitchell A. Sobieski

The most recent count of Wisconsin’s homelessness population presents a complicated story beyond what the data can show. According to the report Mixed Trends for Wisconsin’s Homeless Population, published by the Wisconsin Policy Forum in August, the number of people experiencing homelessness in the state rose 4.8% in January 2026, reaching 5,495 people and continuing a period of slow growth that began after 2021. That increase matters because it signals movement in the wrong direction after years in which Wisconsin reduced homelessness more effectively than much of the country. Yet the number also sits inside a longer arc. Wisconsin’s...

For most of the twentieth century, the American dream was a public promise. It was built on the idea that broad prosperity came from shared investment in schools, infrastructure, and fair labor, and that government had a duty to guard citizens from the excesses of wealth. That consensus began to collapse in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration recast greed as patriotism and deregulation as freedom. The consequences of that ideological turn now define the nation’s political and economic landscape: a country where the billionaire class owns the narrative, the means of production, and the very idea of what...

The argument that “Dune” should be read as a warning against artificial intelligence has become increasingly attractive in an era defined by anxiety over automation, surveillance, labor disruption, copyright disputes, and the environmental costs of computation. That anxiety is not imaginary, and the criticism of AI does not need to be softened or dismissed to challenge a bad reading of Frank Herbert’s 1965 work. The issue is not whether AI deserves scrutiny. It does. The issue is whether “Dune” is being used honestly when it is weaponized as anti-AI scripture. That distinction matters because “Dune” has become a useful...

Wisconsin’s latest brain drain numbers point to a problem that is less dramatic than a population collapse but more durable than a temporary labor-market fluctuation. The Wisconsin Policy Forum’s report Brain Drain Erodes State’s Talent Potential found that Wisconsin-born adults who have moved to other states are more likely to hold bachelor’s degrees than adults born elsewhere who have moved into Wisconsin. That gap places Wisconsin among the worst states nationally on one key measure of net brain drain. Yet the same analysis also complicates the warning. Wisconsin-born adults are more likely than Americans overall to hold bachelor’s or...

The June 17 memorandum between the United States and Iran was supposed to create a 60-day path from ceasefire to a broader settlement. That window expired August 17, but it had already failed in practical terms weeks before. Donald Trump’s false orchestration of the end to the war came without producing a permanent peace agreement, no lasting nuclear arrangement, no normalized commercial traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, and no stable negotiating process. The document remained relevant as a possible diplomatic reference point, but its mechanisms did not resolve the central disputes over sanctions or nuclear restrictions, U.S. military...

The Kyiv Independent’s Martin Fornusek interviewed Phillips O’Brien, a U.S. historian and professor of strategic studies, about Ukraine’s decision to stop trying to win over President Donald Trump and the broader shift in Kyiv’s wartime strategy. The exchange pointed to a turning point in the politics of the war, as Kyiv concluded that appeals to personal favor, transactional concessions, and symbolic gestures could not overcome a deeper realignment in Trump’s approach to Russia’s brutal war. The earlier strategy had followed the logic of dependency. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine had relied heavily on the United States for...