Commentary My good friend professor Yuri Maltsev died this week and I’ve spent these mourning days recalling our conversations. He was a leading economist in the old Soviet Union, as the top advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev’s chief economist. He defected in 1989 before the Soviet Union fell apart. We became fast friends just after he…

Commentary I am writing this column upon returning home to California after five days in Florida. For the first time since my first trip to Los Angeles in 1974 and moving there two years later, I dreaded going to California. That first trip, as a 25-year-old New Yorker, I experienced the palpable excitement looking at…