January 19, 2026

Now, on to the news…

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is fast approaching, but Americans are more divided than ever. Can we realistically hope to find enough common ground to celebrate this milestone as a unified nation?

Ryan Cole looks to Montgomery County, Indiana, for inspiration. Especially noteworthy, he writes, is what residents there didn’t do when they gathered to discuss how their celebrations would proceed: “Attendees didn’t pretend that disagreements didn’t exist,” he writes. Instead, “they found agreement in the Declaration’s ideals and in honoring not only Revolutionary veterans who settled in their county but also other Americans who worked to carry on the Founders’ work, from abolitionists to suffragists to civil rights leaders.”

Does this approach point the way to greater national unity? Read Cole’s thoughts here.

Prior authorization—that is, health insurance companies’ practice of requiring doctors and hospitals to seek approval before delivering the costliest treatments—has become a flashpoint on Capitol Hill.

The practice could curb rapidly rising health care costs, but it’s also “likely to become increasingly controversial, especially as technological progress generates an ever-growing set of expensive new treatment options that only modestly improve medical outcomes,” writes Chris Pope.

Read here to see why Pope thinks technology has the potential to speed up the prior-authorization process but is unlikely to dispel the controversy.

Cea Weaver, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pick to run the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, has come under fire in recent days for some of her past posts on social media. Among them: claiming that it was “racist” to own a home—even “a weapon of white supremacy”—and expressing her desire to “impoverish the white middle class.”

Language like this might seem jarring today, but it wasn’t long ago that attitudes like these dominated the culture. Oliver Traldi offers some examples from the late 2010s and examines how this bigoted ideology affected everyone.

The Manhattan Institute is proud to serve as the Principal Institutional Partner for the Sun Valley Policy Forum’s 2026 Winter Summit in the iconic resort town of Sun Valley, Idaho on February 11, 2026.

We are thrilled to join Joe Lonsdale and MI senior fellow Christopher F. Rufo for an evening on principled leadership and the future of American institutions in an AI-driven era. Please click here to learn more about the Sun Valley Policy Forum and our partnership and to purchase tickets at a discounted rate for friends of the Manhattan Institute.

The homeless in America often fit one or more archetypes. Some are mentally ill. Others are drug addicts. Still others are jobless or former inmates, living in the aftermath of personal catastrophe.

Walk the streets of a major American city, and you’re bound to encounter people in one or more of those categories. But as author Brian Goldstone highlights in a new book, another, less visible type exists: the “working homeless,” who have a job but can’t afford a home.

John McMillian, associate professor at Georgia State University, reviews Goldstone’s portrait of five working-homeless families. Goldstone presents the protagonists as victims of circumstance. But McMillian argues that this reductive picture misses the role that bad choices, along with bad luck, played in their undoing.

Read McMillian’s review of a book that unintentionally underscores the importance of bourgeois values.

“Interesting how those who cry poverty when found to be abusing their kids always seem to have money for drugs.”

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Lex Orandi II, commenting on the child-welfare system 

Photo credit: DOMINIC GWINN / Contributor / AFP via Getty Images