Free Republic

The hollowing out of U.S. cities’ office and commercial cores is a national trend with serious consequences for millions of Americans. As more people have stayed home following the COVID-19 pandemic, foot traffic has fallen. Major retail chains are closing stores, and even prestigious properties are having a hard time retaining tenants. The shuttering of a Whole Foods market after only a year in downtown San Francisco in May 2023 received widespread coverage. Even more telling was the high-end department store Nordstrom’s decision to close its flagship store there in August after a 35-year run. In New York City, office...

TikTok refugees fled by the millions to RedNote, a Chinese app, in response to the TikTok ban, which went into effect Jan. 19, 2025. The company shut down the app shortly before midnight on Jan. 18 but restored service the following day. The app was unavailable to download from the Apple and Google app stores on Jan. 19. Through cat memes, shared jokes about the ban and honest conversations about usually avoided topics, former TikTokers and RedNote natives are bridging years of U.S.-China digital separation. This spontaneous convergence recalls the internet’s original dream of a global village. It’s a glimmer...

Throughout the 2024 election cycle, reproductive rights were an electoral vulnerability for Donald Trump. Though popular with the Republican base, his appointment of antiabortion judges gave serious pause to many key voting blocs, including undecided young men. In pursuit of these voters, Trump’s strategy wasn’t demagoguery but comedy. Trump’s October appearance on comedian Andrew Schulz’s podcast, “Flagrant,” demonstrated his approach to the touchy issue. Schulz playfully invoked Trump’s youngest son, who’s a student at New York University – “Barron is 18. He’s unleashed in New York City. Are you sure you want to reverse Roe vs. Wade now?” After a...

For many people, especially those leaning left, Donald Trump’s disqualifications to be president seem obvious. Why did so many people vote for Trump again, they wonder, and how did he win not just the Electoral College vote this time but the popular vote as well? Trump’s critics cite his two impeachments, multiple criminal indictments at the state and federal levels and a felony conviction as evidence that he is unfit to be president again. Opponents also say that Trump is a threat to democracy, a misogynist, racist, a serial liar and a rapist. About 78% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independent...

After eight years of scouring databases of tens of thousands of Roman inscriptions on places ranging from walls to tombstones, I found evidence of over 200 survivors in 12 cities... It seems as though... They preferred to settle with other survivors, and they relied on social and economic networks from their original cities as they resettled. Some of the families that escaped apparently went on to thrive in their new communities.Fabia Secundina from Pompeii – apparently named for her grandfather, a wealthy wine merchant – also ended up in Puteoli. There, she married a gladiator, Aquarius the retiarius, who died...

Unravel the cosmic enigma with our latest video on the elusive "Planet Nine"! Join the quest as astronomers explore gravitational hints, peculiar orbits, and groundbreaking techniques in the relentless search.Are We about to Discover a New Planet in Our Solar System? | 21:46Astrographics | 44.6K subscribers | 329,973 views | February 7, 2024

Our Solar System is a pretty busy place. There are millions of objects moving around – everything from planets, to moons, to comets, and asteroids. And each year we're discovering more and more objects (usually small asteroids or speedy comets) that call the Solar System home. Astronomers had found all eight of the main planets by 1846. But that doesn't stop us from looking for more. In the past 100 years, we've found smaller distant bodies we call dwarf planets, which is what we now classify Pluto as. The discovery of some of these dwarf planets has given us reason...

Most of the clothing and gadgets you buy in stores today were once in shipping containers, sailing across the ocean. Ships carry over 80% of the world’s traded goods. But they have a problem – the majority of them burn heavy sulfur fuel oil, which is a driver of climate change. While cargo ships’ engines have become more efficient over time, the industry is under growing pressure to eliminate its carbon footprint. European Union legislators reached an agreement to require an 80% drop in shipping fuels’ greenhouse gas intensity by 2050 and to require shipping lines to pay for the...

The big idea When Black diners get poorer service from wait staff and bartenders than white customers, it’s more likely because of racial bias than the well-documented fact that they tip less, according to a new survey I recently published. To reach that conclusion, my colleague Gerald Nowak and I recruited over 700 mostly white full-service restaurant servers and bartenders to review a hypothetical dining scenario that randomly involved either white or Black customers. We then asked them to predict the tip that the table would leave, the likelihood that the table would exhibit undesirable dining behaviors and the quality...

MONTREAL, QUEBEC — Scientists have modeled what Earth would look like in 500 years if our planet keeps warming up at the present rate. What they found would surprise you. Video Here. A group of environmental scientists have combined to model the impact of climate change all the way up to the year 2500. After publishing their findings in Global Change Biology, the researchers wrote in The Conversation that Earth will gradually become uninhabitable if governments across the globe do not act more strongly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.The study’s results show that the Amazon will change into a place...

Sea ice cover in Antarctica shrank rapidly to a record low in late 2016 and has remained well below average. But what's behind this dramatic melting and low ice cover since? Our two articles published earlier this month suggest that a combination of natural variability in the atmosphere and ocean were to blame, though human-induced climate change may also play a role. What happened to Antarctic sea ice in 2016?Antarctic sea ice is frozen seawater, usually less than a few metres thick. It differs from ice shelves, which are formed by glaciers, float in the sea, and are up to...

Gol-e-Zard Cave lies in the shadow of Mount Damavand, which at more than 5,000 metres dominates the landscape of northern Iran. In this cave, stalagmites and stalactites are growing slowly over millennia and preserve in them clues about past climate events. Changes in stalagmite chemistry from this cave have now linked the collapse of the Akkadian Empire to climate changes more than 4,000 years ago... It appears that the empire became increasingly dependent on the productivity of the northern lands and used the grains sourced from this region to feed the army and redistribute the food supplies to key supporters....

I often decry the laziness, incompetence and bias of the American press. Tuesday night in Sago, West Virginia, the press sank to an all-time low, in covering the mine disaster. Working on the Internet, with a 24-hour news channel running, I heard the announcement that the original reports were false. Instead of one miner dead and 12 rescued, the reverse was true. Only one was found alive where they had barricaded themselves in, to await rescue. An orgy of press coverage followed, in which reporters stuck microphones in the faces of grief-stricken survivors, seeking agonizing sound bites for the titillation...