America celebrated its 250th year of independence under a historic heat dome that shattered more than 148 records for daily high temperature across the Eastern United States.

The nation’s capital recorded the hottest Fourth of July on record at 103 degrees. Philadelphia, where our Declaration of Independence was written, recorded three days ...Read more

Maine oysterman Graham Platner suspended his Senate campaign amid a hurricane of revelations, culminating in a sexual assault allegation credible enough that his own national political party abandoned him within hours.

Before the scandals, his appeal, blue-collar affect, and progressive policy positions had catapulted him to stardom. Platner's...Read more

There’s a simple statistic that often stops people in their tracks.

It is this: Reading for pleasure as a child is the factor that studies show is more closely correlated with future success than anything else — even more than family background, wealth, schooling or peer group.

But in America right now fewer children than ever are reading ...Read more

This week the loved ones of Nolan Xavier Wells, the 18-year-old college football player who went missing while partying with friends on the Fourth of July, learned the body authorities found days later was his. Wells was last seen alive on Horn Island, a sliver of undeveloped land that's roughly 20 miles from the coast of Alabama, 10 miles from ...Read more

These are uncertain times for America’s large and significant nonprofit sector. Since retaking office in 2025, President Donald Trump has canceled or frozen more than $425 billion in federal funds across the arts, education, health care and other sectors.

This affects us all. There are nearly 2 million nonprofit organizations in the United ...Read more

Democrats are scrambling in the wake of Graham Platner’s exit from the U.S. Senate race in Maine, but one of the questions the party should be asking itself is this: What have you learned from the fiasco?

Platner, a military veteran and oyster farmer, was the darling of progressive leaders after Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of the race in ...Read more

As a student years ago, I dove deep into the history of the Red-hunting McCarthy era and became familiar with the actor who emerged second only to Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy as the villain of that insidious time: his shameless, conniving young lawyer, Roy Cohn. Never would I have imagined that a future president would count Cohn as a mentor and...Read more

Since the nation’s earliest days, the federal government has struggled to contain leaks. The newest proposal to plug them — a nondisclosure agreement that federal agencies may roll out to more than 2 million civil servants — is unlikely to improve matters.

The plan comes from the Office of Personnel Management, whose director, Scott Kupor...Read more

One of us got a call last spring from a longtime friend. The story was familiar: two doctors, an MRI, an online AI tool, a stack of articles — and one anxious question. “Everything tells me something different. The AI says I might need surgery. What should I do?”

We believe there’s one key response to anyone in this all-too-common ...Read more

The need to reform Social Security — to keep by far the most important government assistance program solvent — has long been obvious.

The Baby Boom from 1946 to 1964 kept the ratio of workers paying Social Security taxes to the number of retirees receiving Social Security benefits at a healthy level for decades. But after birth rates ...Read more

Elizabeth Warren’s belated withdrawal of her support for Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner – long after a string of troubling allegations first surfaced – is the latest politically expedient move by the opportunistic Massachusetts Democrat.

The progressive darling senator has made an entire career of shifting with the political winds,...Read more

Let’s begin with the obvious: President Donald Trump is out to rig the midterm elections.

We know this because the president commits many of his illegal acts in broad daylight.

For the past year, Trump has revved up his election-tampering efforts by throwing everything at the proverbial wall.

He called for nationalizing elections, pushed to...Read more

There is a distinct, heavy silence that accompanies a late-night phone call. For adult children of aging parents, it is the one we all quietly dread. A sudden fall on the stairs, an acute medical event, or a rapid, unexpected decline in health that changes everything in the blink of an eye.

In my work in senior living, I see the aftermath of ...Read more

Amid record-breaking temperatures and headlines about “heat domes,” I worry profoundly about dogs like Cash, who spent his life deprived of relief from extreme weather—and everything else—while chained to a tree in North Carolina. Legislators there are considering Duke’s Rescue Act, a bill that would restrict tethering—a move we ...Read more

The Fourth of July has come and gone, and for many families, summer has reached its sweet spot. The pools are open. The bikes are out. Library reading logs are filling up. School feels far away.

At least, that’s the nostalgic version.

And yet, for many children in the city and suburbs, summer doesn’t look like that at all. Children of ...Read more

Last year, we wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was done chasing criminals after we’d already handed them money. We said we were building something different — a prevention-first operation that would detect and stop fraud before the check cleared, not attempt to claw back lost funds years ...Read more

A new study finds that Australia’s ban on social media accounts for kids under 16 has not curbed use among teens. The findings come as other nations are exploring age-based bans of their own. Has the social media train left the station, leaving parents and policymakers without a way to protect their kids from Big Tech’s addictive embrace?

...Read more

It often feels like the only predictable thing about President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is that he’s unpredictable.

At a NATO summit on Wednesday, Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It went quite differently than their public disagreement at the Oval Office last year.

“We’ve actually developed a good ...Read more

The Democratic establishment, shaken by the rise of progressive socialists, is right to wonder where this wave might lead. The similarly populist movement of Tea Party Republicans, however muddled, foreshadowed President Donald Trump.

Republican candidates for Congress backed by the GOP establishment were pushed to the limit beginning in the ...Read more