Peggy Noonan

I believe artificial intelligence has become a dominating subject in America because Americans by nature have imaginations. The average American has a lot of untapped, unfocused creativity, and can imagine exactly what it would look like if things went sideways—the grid down, the water system hacked—fast. This tendency will be encouraged by almost daily reports […]

There is no subject now but artificial intelligence. Nothing else is as crucial, nothing carries dangers so imminent or implications so great for the human future. I have spent the past few years reading the vast and growing literature, from “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,” by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares to Dario Amodei’s […]

I’ll never get over it, none of us will who were in town that day. If we were trees cut down after a century and cut open to reveal the rings, an arborist would observe one that was darker than the others, denser and resin-scarred, and he’d say, “What happened there?” And you’d say, “That […]

At Buckingham Palace the Coldstream Guards Band played “9 to 5” when they heard of her death. The White House ordered flags flown at half staff. In New York they turned the top of the Empire State Building pink and sparkly. She was born in the hills of Tennessee, the fourth of 12 children of […]

I’m thinking about the deeper effects of governmental corruption in the Trump era, and why it leaves many not only indignant but uneasy. I suspect it’s doing something to us as a people. The thoughts were prompted by a poll this week from Reuters/Ipsos, which Reuters headlined “Most Americans Believe Trump Has Inappropriately Profited Since […]

It has seemed to me this summer that people avoid the subject of Donald Trump as much as possible. What is there to say? People stand where they stand, no one expects to win anybody over. The subject is both boring and harrowing, so why disturb the moment? A classically conservative insight is that no […]

Socialism is not a passing thing but an arriving thing. It must be taken seriously as a factor in our politics and the Democratic Party. A CNN/SSRS poll issued this week reported 34% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults identify as “democratic socialists.” That number won’t be depressed by the success of Abdul El-Sayed, who won […]

It wasn’t good for Anthony Fauci or anybody else that he took the Fifth at his Senate hearing this week. That plus his diary may well have been a reputation-destroying event. It was obviously his right as a citizen to invoke the protections of the Constitution, and he surely had his reasons, but everyone who […]

This last in a series on July Fourth themes is about a small sweetness that was gratefully received. As we near our 250th birthday, let us never forget the gift of the Scottish national soccer team and its followers, the famous Tartan Army—the pleasure and delight they gave as they marched through America, drank our […]

As we near America’s 250th birthday, my thoughts keep turning to what we’ll need to get to our 300th. I see three main things. One, a personal and national commitment to endure. We’ve been given this brilliant thing, America, and must shepherd her safely through another 50 years. We can’t know what they’ll hold, but […]