Thinking Outside the Boxe has published since 2004. Robert M. Clinger III and the late Sebastian G. Peréy built it to do one thing: ask the question the room had agreed not to ask, and follow the answer wherever the evidence went.

That habit has produced positions that were unpopular when we took them. We have argued for liquidating failing commercial airlines to save the industry, for a national rail system built for this century, and for blunt solutions to the standoffs with Iran and North Korea. Some of those arguments aged well. Some did not. We keep all of them on the record, because a think tank that edits its past to look prescient has stopped thinking.

How we work

We do not subcontract our conclusions to a network, a party, a university, or a donor’s preferred vocabulary, and we do not assign them to our correspondents. Correspondents come from both major parties and are chosen for what they know and where they stand, not for which way they lean. They advocate for what they believe. We publish it; we do not lobby for it. When they disagree, we publish both. When they are wrong, the readers tell them, and the letters are often the best part.