Let’s start with the easy part. The policy of separating children from their parents at the southern border, delivering them into a bureaucratic labyrinth while their fathers and mothers await trial or petition for asylum, is the wickedest thing the Trump administration has done so far—and you can tell exactly how wicked by observing how […]
Read MoreLike a lot of conservatives who write about public policy, my views on climate change place me in the ranks of what the British writer Matt Ridley once dubbed the “lukewarmers.” Lukewarmers accept that the earth is warming and that our civilization’s ample CO2 emissions are a major cause. They doubt, however, that climate change […]
Read MoreLast month, the state of Arkansas, which had executed nobody since 2005, put to death Ledell Lee for the crime of murdering Debra Reese in 1993. Why now—11 years after the last execution, 24 years after the crime? Because the chemicals used for lethal injection were about to expire. Reasonable people can disagree on the […]
If Donald Trump could script his presidency, every week would probably feature another Carrier. You get on the phone with some corporate big shot who’s considering closing a plant in the Rust Belt. You offer some carrots, you threaten implicitly, you make a deal: Jobs stay, factories don’t close, and maybe next time they even […]
Since the 1990s, we’ve seen two broad social changes that few observers would have expected to happen together. First, youth culture has become less violent, less promiscuous and more responsible. Childhood in the United States is safer than ever before. Teenagers drink and smoke less than previous generations did. The millennial generation has fewer sexual […]
It seems likely that Obamacare is neither fixed nor fully paid for nor furiously opposed but simply limps along with the rest of our health care system for as long as both can limp.
Between 1936 and 1939, the Spanish Civil War condensed the awful drama of the 1930s into one conflict.
It’s likely that HealthCare.gov will be fixed by Thanksgiving and millions of Americans will (finally) be able to get a real look at what Obamacare is selling them.
It’s easy for us to look back and pass judgment on yesterday’s eugenicists.
She seems to have no meaningful relationships apart from her bond with the Obama White House.
If there’s any reason for real optimism in this picture, it’s for Americans.
The last 10 years, we’ve watched this same elite lead us off a cliff—mostly by being too smart for its own good.
Republican primary voters deserve a better class of right-wing populist, and the country does, as well.
Our approach to the world was fundamentally altered by 9/11, and nothing that’s happened since has undone that transformation.
The administration’s maneuvering keeps working out as planned, but Obama’s position keeps eroding.
For the first time in a decade, it seems, the Republican Party doesn’t know where it stands on foreign policy.
We do not generally praise doctors who help dispatch their terminally ill patients, as Kevorkian repeatedly and unashamedly did.
Under the president’s plan, we soak the rich in the short term, and then just keep going deeper into the red.
Alas, somebody else may have to ensure the survival of the republic, since Daniels has spent the month backpedaling from the idea of a presidential run.
The ultimate hope of liberal warfare is to fight as virtuously as possible, and with the minimum of risk.
The ultimate goal is a sexual culture that makes it easier for young people to achieve romantic happiness—by encouraging them to wait a little longer, choose more carefully and judge their sex lives against a strong moral standard.
This is the paradox of America’s unborn. No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured. And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.
