ArcaMax

Scene: the Midwest in midcentury.

The Madison, Wisconsin, neighborhood lived through the 1930s and 1940s, depression, wartime and polio. President Franklin Roosevelt's radio fireside chats built morale.

My father's mother, Marie, a widowed nurse with four children, never missed Eleanor Roosevelt's column, "My Day." Her husband, Reuben, a ...Read more

As we head into a momentous election year, with state and national legislative seats up for grabs, even let-them-eat-cake Republicans are scrambling to sound sympathetic to today's hard-hit working-class families.

Of course, tongue-clucking concern doesn't mean actually doing anything to help this majority of Americans -- and most ...Read more

A midterm election year is upon us, and that can mean only one thing: we have entered the realm of quickened speculation about the 2028 presidential election. On the Republican side, if President Donald Trump decides to abide by the Constitution in at least one respect, the nomination looks to be Vice President J.D. Vance's to lose. Which leaves...Read more

For anyone aiming to cut back drinking, January's arrival times perfectly. Some may have simply overdone it through the long holiday stretch, when alcohol seemed piped into any vaguely celebratory event. Some may worry that they're beginning to forget the last drink they accepted.

Recovering alcoholics or others who don't drink at all have it...Read more

Through the '60s, when I was a single-digit child, people knew that revolution was hard. Those who committed to revolutionary change understood that the elites who control the levers of power, institutional inertia and the broken spirits of those they sought to emancipate comprised barriers that were nearly impossible to overcome. They knew that...Read more

I've always loved a real Christmas tree but struggled with the idea of cutting down trees just to decorate them inside my home for a few weeks a year. Trees are living things and to grow them just to cut them for my enjoyment is something I had trouble reconciling within myself. According to the National Christmas Tree Association, there are ...Read more

One of my most distinct memories of childhood is sitting in the back seat of my mother's car with my sister on Christmas Eve as my mother explained that there would be no Christmas at our house because we were Jewish. It's not your holiday, she told us. And it's not. It belongs to those who worship Jesus, which we do not.

It took me many ...Read more

"Cry me a river." I gave a party with this theme on Jan. 20, 2025, the day Donald Trump was sworn in as president.

Little did we know that 2025 would be an ocean of tears, the worst since 1968. The tragic assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. broke hearts everywhere.

And now, what a long fall from grace.

Let's do a ...Read more

In keeping with the season, I offer a little political anecdote about Christmas.

More specifically, it's about the moral teachings of the biblical Jesus, which formed the ethical foundation of Christmas and gave Christianity itself its true gravity.

The story is about a political clash some 60 years ago in Houston, when a boorish right-...Read more

This week, we learned another lesson about how corporate media consolidation corrupts democracy. A story on President Donald Trump's mass deportation of shackled Venezuelan men to El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison was to air on CBS' flagship news magazine "60 Minutes." The segment was spiked by CBS News' newly-installed Editor-in-Chief Bari ...Read more

I'm 7 years old. We live in a white two-story house we rent on General Cobb Street in a small manufacturing city called Taunton, Massachusetts. I live with my parents, Peg and Gene, my big boxer dog, Joey, and my grandmother, Munroe, who has a bad heart.

The old house has a weak heating system, and sometimes on very cold mornings, there's a ...Read more

"The presidency," former President Franklin Roosevelt observed, "is not merely an administrative office. That is the least part of it. It is preeminently a place of moral leadership." We learn as children to respect the office of the president and to pay attention to the conduct and the words of its inhabitant. Most of us were taught that moral ...Read more

Fifth Avenue swarms with tourists grinning at the fabulous scene as retailers cash in on the cheer. Christmas in New York is a Rockettes kick line of store windows awash in fantasy and light spectaculars. But something is missing from the big show this year.

That would be Donald Trump. In truth, the president hasn't made much of a Gotham ...Read more

If a president can murder civilians at sea and keep the legal justifications secret, we should all be concerned. The harm is even worse when basic factual evidence, such as full videos and orders, are also hidden from the American people.

Since September, the Trump administration has ordered 26 lethal strikes on civilian boats in ...Read more

According to data from the CDC analyzed by the Williams Institute at UCLA, some 3.3% of American high school students ages 13-17 self-identify as transgender. Earlier studies, sometimes asking the question differently, have reported a range from 1.2% to 2.7%.

Who should decide how to best raise these children -- what medical care will help ...Read more

From an economic standpoint, governments look at citizens as workers, consumers or both. Most people, of course, are both: We work and earn, and we spend.

Our dual economic roles inform the core of the affordability discussion at the center of current politics. For as long as everyone but the oldest of us can remember, both major ...Read more