In today’s America, one of the rites of passage that marks the transition to full adulthood is paying your own phone bill. By this standard, many people — even those well into middle age — are stuck in an extended adolescence.

A survey released this month by the insurance firm Northwestern Mutual says that many Americans, including some ...Read more

The air is thick with schadenfreude in the wake of Graham Platner’s impressive victory in the Democratic primary for U.S. senator from Maine.

Columnist Bret Stephens, writing in The New York Times just before the election, said that Maine Democrats who choose Platner while continuing to object to President Donald Trump’s putative moral ...Read more

SpaceX’s initial public offering made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. You might think there’s not much you can buy with a hundred (or a thousand) billion dollars that you can’t buy with one billion dollars. But there is: Absolute power.

The world’s top 10 wealthiest individuals all have fortunes of around $150 billion or ...Read more

Recently, I attended a meeting of an advisory task force in Austin, Texas, where I live, to urge more funding for housing and shelter. As I sat in the parking lot before going inside, I realized it was the same parking lot where, not all that long ago, I slept in a tent.

I am no longer homeless, in large part due to the American Rescue Plan Act...Read more

On my first attempt to find Bernardo de Gálvez in 2015 in Pensacola, Florida, he was difficult to spot. I eventually found him at Fort George, in the form of a small stone bust with the words “Yo Solo” (“I Alone”) carved underneath.

The memorial — dedicated in 1981, on the 200th anniversary of the Siege of Pensacola — was an ...Read more

In January, the United States sent military forces into Venezuela, killing more than 50 people, to capture Nicolás Maduro to face federal charges. By even the most generous reading, that raid was legally questionable. A more honest reading sees it as an illegal use of military force to accomplish what the government itself treated as a criminal...Read more

Chicago recorded its fewest violent crimes in 60 years last year. That’s the good news. The bad news is what’s happening so far this year. While other cities continue reducing crime, in Chicago, homicides are actually up 7%. And summer is here, a time when violence spikes.

Chicago just can’t spend its way out of the problem. Federal ...Read more

Earlier this year at San Francisco International Airport, a nine-year-old girl watched in terror as federal agents in plainclothes forcibly handcuffed her mother, pried her fingers from an airport bench, and wheeled her away. The child stood alone in the terminal, crying – as so many other children watched. Within 48 hours, both mother and ...Read more

The Trump Department of Justice going after people who make the president mad or even sad is nothing new, in this dangerous age when the presidency is increasingly about placating the desires of the old man in the Oval Office.

Leticia James, James Comey, Adam Schiff. Most recently, E. Jean Carroll, who sued President Trump personally and won a ...Read more

The on-again, off-again peace deal with Iran is on again. President Donald Trump is taking a leap of faith that the pact will normalize relations between the United States and Tehran.

The details remain murky, but reports indicated that American and Iranian leaders on Monday signed an agreement intended to end hostilities between the countries....Read more

When it comes to preparing young children for successful lives, few factors weigh more heavily than early reading.

A Harvard Graduate School of Education study found that reading to children starting very early — even as babies — gives them measurable advantages later over those who don’t have that exposure. The American Academy of ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — If Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature truly believe that slow vote counting is a horrible problem — which it’s not — right now is the time to fix it.

They’re crafting a new state budget. And they could choose to spend the money needed to help counties hire more temporary election workers, buy more ...Read more

My favorite tech trend so far this year has nothing to do with artificial intelligence.

It’s the cool girls making their own “cyberdecks,” — strange, DIY and highly customizable personal computers that explicitly reject AI. They look like props from a cyberpunk movie, usually built on a Raspberry Pi base and spare parts. As one tinkerer...Read more

The New York Times last week told the story of Sidharth Hariharan, a mathematics graduate student at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University who spent more than two years helping translate one of the past decade’s most celebrated proofs into a form a computer could check, a painstaking task called formalization.

Earlier this year an ...Read more

TONOPAH, Nev. — Some years ago, Harry Chahal and his wife were on a trip to Las Vegas when, like countless motorists before and since, they passed through this high desert speck of a town.

Tonopah, built by the mining industry around 1900 and depleted as the gold, silver, lead and mercury petered out, is a remote way station about halfway ...Read more

Illinois’ new budget includes a new tax — shocking, we know. This time, the target is social media companies.

The plan is to create a graduated tax of sorts on those powerful businesses, based on the number of users they have here in Illinois.

The architects behind this grand idea say that it will generate about $200 million per year.

If ...Read more

President Donald Trump is proud of America, and he wants you to be proud too. He chides the head of the Smithsonian Institution for his 250th anniversary exhibits because they don’t say we’re special enough, and he issues a directive to “Celebrate American Exceptionalism.”

Fifty years ago, when my father, Daniel Boorstin, was librarian ...Read more

As the United States prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of its founding later this summer, there will be extensive celebration and reflection about our democracy and the values it embodies. But the 250th is not the only anniversary that should capture our attention. Indeed, our nation’s story is an evolution of moments built over time.

...Read more

We have two new problems in the asylum system, a dangerous combination that started last month: The asylum application now costs $102 to file, but asylum seekers are no longer allowed to apply for the right to work until a full year passes after submitting their application. My clients are officially stuck.

One of them is nine months pregnant. ...Read more

Some of the nation’s largest corporations are joining forces with the White House to turn the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence this July 4 into a celebration of militarism and the mixing of church and state.

The group behind this effort is America250. Its nearly 60 corporate sponsors include Amazon, American...Read more