ifty years ago, the smartest people alive were terrified the planet would starve. Today, China just posted its lowest birth rate since 1949 — and it's not alone. This week Roger traces the wild swing from 1970s overpopulation panic to 2026's demographic collapse: Paul Ehrlich's Tonight Show tour, the wheat scientist who quietly saved a billion lives, China's one-child policy and its 30-million-man marriage gap, and the sobering fact that no government in history has ever reversed a birth rate once it falls this far. From ancient Rome's plagues to Hungary's tax breaks for mothers, it's a history of nations solving yesterday's problem — right as the next one shows up. History doesn't repeat, but it sure rhymes.

In June 2026, New York's Democratic primaries handed a clean sweep to a slate of democratic-socialist challengers — the latest chapter in a pattern that's far older and far stranger than this week's headlines suggest. From Ho Chi Minh washing dishes in Paris to the Chicago Boys remaking Chile's economy from the ground up, Roger traces a two-hundred-year habit of empires and institutions accidentally training the very people who go on to dismantle them. Along the way: Hayek's "secondhand dealers in ideas," Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs, a Soviet university built explicitly to export revolution, and a hard look at why Latin America proves this pattern cuts both left and right. Personal reflections from twenty-plus years in emerging markets and travels through more than fifty countries. This is The Roger Retrospective.

or 250 years, New York has been where America tests its future first. This week, Roger traces the throughline from Tammany Hall's patronage machines and the corruption of Boss Tweed, through the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the reforms it forced, to Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs's battle over what a city should even be — and asks why the same island keeps producing the ideas that eventually reshape the rest of the country. From Ellis Island to the Harlem Renaissance to Wall Street, and now a new mayor promising the latest experiment: what makes New York impossible to ignore, generation after generation.