ArcaMax

WASHINGTON -- "Summer's lease hath all too short a date," wrote Shakespeare, but the Bard didn't know what the summer of '24 had in store.

The cicadas are still singing, but they won't be for long. The days are getting shorter, the nights fall faster. And the garden knows it; the last batch of zinnias displayed its colors, and the gold black-...Read more

History repeats itself: first as tragedy, second as farce. That's what the German philosopher said.

Lawless former President Donald Trump is breaking this rule in two, as he does for every other. For him, it's history as farce first, tragedy second. His illegal campaign stunt at Arlington National Cemetery is high tragedy playing out on the ...Read more

CHICAGO -- The poet Carl Sandburg's "City of the Broad Shoulders" lifted Kamala Harris up, making the vice president the frontrunner in the race for president.

Harris hit all her notes, personal and political, in a near-perfect speech to introduce herself to the American public. She met the moment at the Democratic convention.

Who says joy ...Read more

Picture Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, as young, beautiful Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," being blown away in a storm and, in the end, coming face to face with the scary wizard.

And there he is, a blowhard behind a green curtain, shouting into the wind. In the movie, the wizard looks like former President ...Read more

With one word, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz changed the public conversation: "joy." That word stumped and trumped former President Donald Trump's brand of rage. He looks fit to be tied in that very long red tie.

When Walz joined Vice President Kamala Harris as her running mate, he thanked her for bringing back the joy in politics. He added, the ...Read more

Free things are now being colonized across social spaces and public squares. Since 2020, for example, togetherness at work retreated to the private virtual sphere.

There's no better time to beware the social price we pay for privatizing time, water, air, news, and human attention and conversation.

America is enmeshed in a loneliness epidemic...Read more

On the tip of tongues in the Capitol: Vice President Kamala Harris' pick as her running mate in the 2024 presidential stakes. Everyone has a theory. All agree this is a happy problem to solve, a true test of judgment.

Democrats were tearing out their hair before frail President Joe Biden retired from his reelection race. Now the party has ...Read more

After a fierce rainstorm, the light shone on the Capitol dome like a city on a hill.

The House of Representatives was returning at that moment Monday to an utterly changed reality. The day before, an ailing President Joe Biden withdrew from his race for reelection. The old chieftain, 81, was last to know it was time to go after his alarming ...Read more

Washington is burning. This is America.

The mercury soars to 100 F, and people are sheltering in place. Death by heat wave or dehydration? No, that couldn't happen here.

And yet, consider the wild things that have happened here lately, turning the presidential race upside down since the end of June.

The shocking attempt on former President ...Read more

Cutting dead flowers while barefoot in the summer garden is a sublime sensation that seldom leads to thoughts of politics. Yet this time my thoughts traveled straight to President Joe Biden, 81 years of aged mind, body and memory.

Roses and cosmos ready to bloom need the sun and space blocked by the old ones. That's just a fact, ma'am.

In ...Read more

MADISON, Wis. -- The presidential torch passed from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who seemed ancient at 70, to vigorous young John F. Kennedy, 43, a Bostonian who spoke these stirring words on a bright new day, snow glistening on marble: "Let the word go forth from this time and place ... that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans...Read more

Chief Justice John Roberts, meet Roger Taney, your history big brother.

Abraham Lincoln despised Taney as the legal upholder of white supremacy but had to suffer being sworn in by the old Maryland scarecrow in 1861. In that fraught March moment, the dark past and bright future of America came face to face.

Lincoln defied Taney's trying to ...Read more

Speaking to my father on Father's Day, he looked back on his boyhood in Madison, Wisconsin, to the time his father died when he was 8 -- just weeks before the Pearl Harbor calamity.

His mother, Marie, a nurse, found herself with four children to raise under their Spooner Street roof.

Yet there was no better place for a fatherless child. ...Read more