Matthew Bernard wanted to build a home. He bought a small lot in Oakland, California, and began clearing several diseased and fallen trees that the local fire department had identified as hazards. The result was a $915,000 “mitigation fee” from the city of Oakland—nearly five times the value of the lot itself. Under Oakland’s tree ordinance,...
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacres of September 11th, 2001, brings with it a flood of memory, and regrets. The simple reality, visible at the time and brought into ever-sharper focus across each successive year, is that the enemy in Al Qaeda achieved its major strategic objects in its attack upon the United States of...
September 11, 2001 was not an inexplicable act of violence. The men who carried out the attacks belonged to an ideological tradition that had identified the United States and the broader West as enemies long before commercial airplanes were hijacked that morning. Twenty-five years later, the danger is that Americans remember the horror of 9/11...