With President Trump reportedly set to pardon I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, it may be worth revisiting my column from September 2017, which mentioned Libby and also Sholom Rubashkin, whose sentence was later commuted by Trump. It's nice to see the president working his way through that list.

In a column earlier this year about the "daddy track," I wrote:

It used to be that when someone publicly announced that he or she wanted to spend more time with family, most people figured that was a way of putting a polite public face on some other, less flattering story.

But in at least two recent high-profile cases, it appears to be a real part of what was actually happening. Both of the cases involve men — Republican men, even. So count it as something of a triumph for feminism, at least that part of it that demands dads do their share with the children.

On January 19, J.D. Vance, the Marine veteran and Yale Law School graduate who wrote the bestselling Hillbilly Elegy, explained that he'd decided not to run for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio.

"I thought seriously about running in August 2017, but decided that the timing was awful for my young family," Vance wrote. "I've still got a family that needs more of my time than a political campaign would permit."

Closet libertarian and New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells writes about how rising minimum wages have ruined dessert in New York City restaurants:

According to Shuna Lydon, who has worked in or led some large and famous pastry kitchens as well as some small and obscure ones, you can learn everything you need to know about the sundae invasion by reading the help-wanted ads on Craigslist.

"The restaurants that used to be looking for pastry chefs are looking for pastry sous-chefs," she said. "It's all the same duties, all the same hours, all the same physical labor, but they can now pay you $30,000 or $40,000 less a year because you're not a chef, you're not in charge."

David Brooks gets it about right here in his latest column about the failures of anti-Trumpism:

Part of the problem is that anti-Trumpism has a tendency to be insufferably condescending. For example, my colleague Thomas B. Edsall beautifully summarized the recent academic analyses of what personality traits supposedly determine Trump support.

Trump opponents, the academics say, are open-minded and value independence and novelty. Trump supporters, they continue, are closed-minded, change-averse and desperate for security.

This analysis strikes me as psychologically wrong (every human being requires both a secure base and an open field — we can't be divided into opposing camps), journalistically wrong (Trump supporters voted for the man precisely because they wanted transformational change) and an epic attempt to offend 40 percent of our fellow citizens by reducing them to psychological inferiors.

In investing, the concept of compounding means that a small difference in savings or expenses can, over time, translate into a large one. A similar concept applies in navigation. Set off a few degrees off course on a short trip and you may wind up approximately where you were going. But if the trip is across an ocean, or a continent, by the time you arrive at your destination, a few degrees may mean a difference of hundreds of miles.

The same idea applies to political and policy mistakes. What may seem like minor or forgettable failures can turn out to have large and lasting effects.

What we appear to be seeing now with the government raid of the offices of President Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, is a compounding of a series of political and policy errors that Republicans have made over the years.

David Leonhardt at the New York Times (here) and Jim Geraghty at National Review (here) both have well-timed and cutting negative takes on prosecutor, FBI director, and former hedge fund general counsel James Comey, who has a book — A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership — and related publicity tour coming soon.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress — and, precisely, how or if the Trump campaign's use of Facebook data differed from the Obama campaign's use of Facebook data — is the topic of my column this week. Please check the full column out at Reason (here), Newsmax (here), and the New York Sun (here).

The New York Times reports on salaries at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency created during the Obama administration with funding from the Federal Reserve:

The consumer bureau, as well as fellow financial regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, is allowed under federal law to pay employees significantly more than other government agencies can pay. The rationale is that the higher salaries are necessary to recruit skilled employees who otherwise might land jobs on Wall Street.

As a result, the C.F.P.B. is stocked with employees who earn more than the average Washington bureaucrat. Of the agency's 1,600 employees, 219 make more than $200,000, according to the records reviewed by The Times.

The Global Editors Network has a brief ("six minute read," according to Medium) interview with Mark Little about his NevaLabs project. I thought the photo of the "From...To" whiteboard and the "Apps That Make Us Happy" graphics were pretty cool.

The CEO of JP Morgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, is out with his 2018 annual letter covering the company's performance in 2017. I find this letter to be an interesting read pretty much every year. Some passages follow that I thought were particularly worth highlighting.

Mr. Dimon is fairly positive about some developments from the Trump administration and the Republican Congress, and the effects they will have on the American economy:

The United States in particular may be strengthening as we speak. The competitive tax system, a more constructive regulatory environment, and very high consumer and business confidence are increasing indications that the economy will likely expand.

He says that the American economy has fallen short of its growth potential.

our economic growth has been anemic. Our economy has grown approximately 20% in the last eight years, but this stands in contrast with prior average recoveries where growth would have been more than 40% over an eight-year period.

Preet Bharara, the aide to Senator Schumer-turned federal prosecutor whose insider trading and public corruption cases were frequently rejected or reversed by higher courts, is calling on Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to silence President Trump.

In a tweet that went viral (garnering more than 20,000 retweets and more than 85,000 likes, at this writing), Mr. Bharara wrote, "What if Jeff Bezos bought Twitter with the change in his pocket and shut Trump's account?"

The reference was to the escalating feud between Mr. Bezos, who owns the sharply anti-Trump Washington Post, and Mr. Trump, whose recent tweets critical of Amazon have sent the company's stock price plunging. Careful readers of FutureOfCapitalism may have seen that fight coming; we wrote on March 15:

Apple CEO Tim Cook's call for increased regulation of Facebook is the topic of my column this week. Please check out the full column at Reason (here), the New York Sun (here), and Newsmax (here).

How Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg will handle the flap over Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook customer data in the presidential campaign is the topic of my column this week. Please check out the full column at the New York Sun (here) and Newsmax (here).

Hillary Clinton will appear at Harvard during Commencement week to receive the Radcliffe medal, while Congressman John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, will give the university's Commencement Address and receive an honorary degree, the university has announced.

Harvard is a big and decentralized enough institution that it's certainly possible that the Clinton and Lewis decisions were made independently. And there are excellent nonpartisan reasons to honor each one of them. Clinton achieved something historic as the first woman to win a major party U.S. presidential nomination, and in her career she has demonstrated exemplary resilience. Lewis displayed heroic personal courage for a just and righteous cause in the Civil Rights movement.

A new economic research paper about the financial consequences of illness is the topic of a news article in the New York Times.

The research is interesting, but so is the news article, for the way it makes assumptions about what is or isn't possible. Here's one passage that caught my eye:

To the authors, the lesson of the paper is that standard health insurance isn't enough — policymakers need to think about ways to better protect people against the income risks that accompany illness. In Denmark, for example, similar reductions in income have been found after hospitalizations, but government programs help replace some of the losses, lessening people's financial burden. Such programs, to expand wage insurance, sick leave or disability insurance, would require new resources from the government or employers. [Emphasis added.]