ArcaMax

As a new generation of college students gets ready to return to campus, I'm reminded of the late Allan Bloom, the University of Chicago professor, philosopher and -- on the subject of university education -- famously eloquent grump.

No one had any reason to expect his 1987 book with the stuffy ...Read more

As the toll from mass shootings this year already approaches the total for all of last year, more people are openly asking a question that has lurked mostly in the shadows: Why are the shooters so often white men?

"Mental illness and hatred pull the trigger, not the gun," declared President Donald Trump when he condemned shootings in El Paso, ...Read more

OK, we saw this coming, didn't we?

Former Vice President Joe Biden, who has a well-known history of gaffes, spouted another one Thursday night by telling a group of mostly minority voters in Iowa that "poor kids" are just as bright as "white kids."

That's awkward. But let us not even try to pretend a moral equivalence between Biden's racial ...Read more

When newscasters speak of Dayton and El Paso, I hear my name.

I was born in Dayton, Ohio, and later covered local news there as an intern in the days of typewriters and telephone booths.

Years later, my son would attend the University of Texas at El Paso (Go, Miners!). I met a number of "nice ...Read more

President Donald Trump isn't a racist. Just ask him. He'll tell you.

"I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world," he told reporters at the White House.

That's a statement that doesn't sound like it is to be taken seriously by anyone except perhaps his mostly white and very conservative support base as a signal that he's not ...Read more

I'll say this -- and it's not much -- about President Donald Trump's incendiary tweet attacks at Rep. Elijah Cummings and the city of Baltimore: At least, for a change, he's laid off my beloved Chicago.

The Republican president has treated Chicago, hometown of his predecessor President Barack Obama, as his favorite symbol of "American carnage,"...Read more

Ah, memories. Remember how presidential candidate Donald Trump grandly promised to eliminate the federal debt in eight years? That's a memory he apparently hopes we forget.

You could hear that in the absence of "debt" or "deficit" in the high praise he enthusiastically tweeted Thursday ("I am totally with you!") for the two-year budget deal ...Read more

It's not healthy to repress bad memories, yet we always try.

Perhaps that explains why Chicagoans have not memorialized the city's 1919 race riots, which erupted 100 years ago this week, very much.

Even the Fort Dearborn Massacre, a 15-minute battle in 1812 that U.S. soldiers lost to the Potawatomi Native Americans, has its own park and a ...Read more

If you were relieved, as I wanted to be, by President Donald Trump's next-day repudiation of the "Send her back!" chant directed at a Somali-born congresswoman during his North Carolina rally, perk down.

The vitriol that welled up so visibly and disturbingly in that crowd Wednesday night symbolized the unusual place that Trump's own rhetoric ...Read more

Why does President Donald Trump, who holds the world most powerful political office, waste his time, energy and insults belittling a quartet of first-year congresswomen?

On Sunday, the president unleashed his now-notorious tweetstorm on the four Democratic congresswomen -- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna ...Read more

It may be more than coincidental that R&B music star R. Kelly and well-connected Wall Street financier Jeffrey Epstein were arrested in the same week on federal charges related to sexually abusing underage girls.

For one thing, as Labor Secretary Alex Acosta said two days before he resigned Friday, "We live in a very different world."

Indeed, ...Read more

I used to wonder how a society as old, grand and sophisticated as Italy could choose an elderly businessman as flamboyant, scandal-prone and inexperienced in government as Silvio Berlusconi to the position of prime minister. Then the U.S. elected Donald Trump and I found out.

Three years after Trump's election, it should bring more caution than...Read more

What? Mad magazine will disappear from newsstands after August? Well, as Dorothy Parker is said to have said after hearing of President Calvin Coolidge's death, "How can they tell?"

After 67 years of publishing elegantly illustrated goofiness, Mad's "Usual Gang of Idiots" is calling it quits -- although not quite totally.

DC Entertainment, the...Read more

Here we go again. Birtherism is back.

Just as the original birthers rose up in 2008 to raise what turned out to be bogus questions about Barack Obama's birth certificate, new birthers appeared online after presidential candidate Kamala Harris' impressive Democratic debate performance Thursday to question whether she's really black.

Joining ...Read more

After the first of two nights of 2020 Democratic presidential debates, I found it hard to argue with President Donald Trump's brief tweeted critique: "BORING!"

Most disappointing in the two-hour event, there were no zingers. Just as there are auto racing fans who secretly hope that if a pileup happens they'll get to see it, there are debate ...Read more

When you're a small city mayor running for the Democratic presidential nomination, television news images of you getting yelled at by angry black constituents is not a good look.

That's because, among other reasons, black votes matter. A record high black turnout in 2012, for example, crucially helped to put President Barack Obama over the top ...Read more

Critics of Joe Biden are falling over themselves in a rush to castigate the former vice president -- and current front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination -- for his latest so-called "gaffe." Some of them are even Democrats.

His sin: He waxed nostalgic, as many of us old men do, at a New York fundraiser last week about a time when...Read more

Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden is taking heat and light for his recent switcheroo on abortion rights. But Biden is hardly alone in his inconsistency on this volatile issue. Some of us remember how now-president Donald Trump made a famous abortion switcheroo too.

Biden's big switch came in early June, two days after he reaffirmed...Read more

While Mr. Page is away Mary Sanchez is filling in.

Surfing conservative websites, it didn't take long to find this nugget of backward thinking, courtesy of American Thinker:

"The sexual revolution that was kick-started by the advent of birth control in the early 1960s has done irreparable damage to Western civilization."

If you had any...Read more

Once celebrated by many, Linda Fairstein, the former prosecutor turned mystery book author, now fights for her professional life and reputation for her leading role in the 1990 prosecution of the so-called Central Park Five.

She's not the only player in this real-life drama whose role deserves a new look.

A week after the May 31...Read more