July 28, 2026

Photo credit: TOBIAS EVERKE/OSTKREUZ ARCHIV/REDUX

Memphis, Tennessee, is consistently ranked as one of America’s most dangerous areas. Between 2020 and 2024, the city averaged 288 murders annually, a homicide rate of 47.2 per 100,000. The Memphis Police Department is short of full capacity by about 600 officers.

But late last year, President Trump established the Memphis Safe Task Force “to end street and violent crime in Memphis to the greatest possible extent through the promotion and facilitation of hypervigilant policing, aggressive prosecution, complex investigations, financial enforcement, and large-scale saturation of besieged neighborhoods with law-enforcement personnel.”

It appears to be working. The city ended 2025 with 184 murders, a decline of 36 percent. Crime continued to decline sharply in the first quarter of 2026, with murders down 29 percent.

“To an unusual degree for U.S. presidents, Trump has prioritized crime throughout his second term with everything from executive orders on policing and bail reform to immigration-enforcement surges and changes to how the Department of Justice approaches police oversight,” Rafael A. Mangual writes.

Mangual visited Memphis back in March for an inside look at the task force and what enforcement units are doing to turn the city around. Read about what he saw here.

The Senate’s version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act prohibits the Pentagon from contracting with a company unless that company agrees not to repurchase its publicly traded shares or other capital distributions, including dividends.

The idea is that the money that’s returned to shareholders could instead be used to expand weapons production. Indeed, weapons systems consistently arrive late—the average delivery time is over 12 years—and over budget. But banning buybacks isn’t the right solution, Todd Henderson argues.

“In standard theory, companies ordinarily decide which projects are worth undertaking first, then how much liquidity they need, and only afterward what to do with any remaining cash,” he writes. “When a firm lacks additional projects expected to earn more than their cost of capital, it may distribute the excess to investors, who can redeploy it elsewhere. A dollar retained by a corporation is therefore not necessarily a dollar invested productively.”

Read more.

A new report claims that driverless cars like Waymos are more dangerous than vehicles operated by Uber, Lyft, and cab drivers in New York City.

“But a closer look at what the report actually found shows that the safety record of robotaxis is so strong that they clear even the bar of safety compared with professional drivers in the Big Apple,” Arpit Gupta writes. “Unfortunately, the report skewed the numbers to push the authors’ preferred narrative.”

Read more about the data here.

A new report finds that in states with more flexible childcare regulations, the fertility gap—the range between a woman’s desired number of children and achieved fertility—is smaller.

Vermont, for instance, is the most heavily regulated state. If its regulations more closely matched those of a state like North Carolina, its fertility gap would shrink from 0.78 to 0.68 children per woman—a 12.5 percent change.

In other words, “overzealous childcare regulations are one obstacle keeping Americans from having as many kids as they want,” Anna Claire Flowers, Vincent Geloso, Clara Piano, and Lyman Stone write. “Childcare regulations make the service more expensive by tightening staff-to-child ratios, ramping up credentials, or limiting classroom capacity. Worse, they eventually run providers out of the market and limit the range of childcare options available to parents.”

Read more about their findings.