Free Republic

Serena Williams made a surprise cameo during Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX halftime show, as she was spotted dancing during the performance of "Not Like Us." Making an appearance for that song sparked some debate on social media, especially considering Lamar’s song is a diss track toward the rapper Drake, whom Williams dated in 2011. Many believed it was no coincidence Williams’ time to shine was during this track, and ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith thinks the same. It’s why, during his Monday edition of "First Take," he told his colleagues he would divorce her if he was her husband....

... The Great Depression was caused by misguided government policies adopted to avoid the "unsatisfactory conditions" signaled by the crash. The run-of-the-mill recession that ought to have followed the crash was magnified by the policies of the federal government during the administration of Herbert Hoover. In a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research published last August, Lee E. Ohanian examines a continuing mistake during the Hoover administration that helped transform difficulty into calamity. An economics professor at UCLA, Ohanian has written numerous papers on the Depression. In one earlier paper, he pinned the persistence of high unemployment on...

What caused the Great Depression? There are plenty of theories and arguments out there, and I don’t plan to review them. But a new one (at least new to me) is contained in a paper by Lee Ohanian, a U.C.L.A. economist, that was released today by the National Bureau of Economic Research. He blames Herbert Hoover. That is not exactly original; the Democrats ran against Hoover for a generation after he left office, much as some would now like to run against George W. Bush. But his criticism is that Hoover was too kind to workers, which is not exactly...