ArcaMax

For those who remember the way savagery shattered serenity on Sept. 11, 2001, the last 25 years haven't dimmed the memory of the evil that occurred that day. One remembers the photos of the missing, murdered plastered on Manhattan's buildings and street poles and The New York Times obituaries -- bunches each day -- of those pulverized in the ...Read more

Historians may settle on President Donald Trump's demolition of the United States Agency for International Development as the perfect exemplar of America's precipitous plunge: the nullification of the best and most idealistic of what we have to offer by those whose values are the worst and most cynical we've ever experienced. Founded by John ...Read more

It's another not especially beautiful week in the neighborhood, another week in which a spotlight is shone on President Donald Trump's unsubtle use of executive power to retaliate against critics and opponents, and to intimidate into submission those who might criticize or oppose him. Last week's lawsuit by the American Broadcasting Company ...Read more

Except for those in districts that are deeply, deeply blue, Democratic Congressional nominees won't be making the impeachment of President Donald Trump a campaign issue this fall. There's no percentage for them in doing so. For Democrats in contested districts, the "I-word", like Voldemort, is the thing that shall not be spoken. All it does is...Read more

"Don't it always seem to go," Joni Mitchell wrote decades ago, "that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?" Last week's Senate passage of legislation authorizing new sanctions against Vladimir Putin's Russia was much-ballyhooed, but much ado about little: The most meaningful sanctions, tariffs against countries purchasing Russian ...Read more

Anyone looking for an actual liar about COVID-19 shouldn't be eyeing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert who spent 50 years protecting the public health and earning every accolade he got. If Republicans wanted to highlight bona fide lying about COVID, the guy they'd haul in for questioning would be the president, because unlike ...Read more

At my age, I shouldn't care so much whether the Boston Red Sox win or lose, let alone permit my daily mood to rise or fall accordingly.

It's only a game. It's supposed to be a pastime (according to AI, something that "helps make the hours pass pleasantly when you are not working"), not an obsession. There are 162 games a year and letting your...Read more

Time-honored wisdom holds that if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. The explosion of venom, vitriol, vandalism and violence against Jews since Israel was attacked by genocidal killers on Oct. 7, 2023, begs the question: Is what certainly looks like anti-Semitism something other than anti-Semitism? ...Read more

"I cannot tell a lie," young George Washington supposedly told his father when asked if he'd cut down a cherry tree. That there was no tree and George never said those words hasn't impeded the myth that holds otherwise, popularized by one of Washington's early biographers. Ever since, Americans have opted to think that their first president was ...Read more

Everything about President Donald Trump's Independence Day-eve speech at Mt. Rushmore was a much-unneeded reminder that the personification of crude, self-glorifying narcissism occupies the White House as we celebrate our 250th birthday. He chose the venue to suggest, not subtly, that he deserves to be etched on a mountainside along with -- God ...Read more

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," reads the iconic welcome to the world's oppressed inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. Emma Lazarus, the poet who penned those words, had herself helped Jewish refugees from the anti-Semitic pogroms of Eastern Europe who had fled to our shores in the late 19th ...Read more

There was a time when lying all the time was frowned upon, and when easily demonstrable lying all the time could get a fellow into trouble. If President Donald Trump has succeeded at anything, it is in proving that those days are over. Pathological, even felonious, lying did not impede his 2024 election and doesn't appear to have shaken his ...Read more

For Americans traveling in Western Europe this summer, it's a time of real humility, and some humiliation. You have to be quite the American exceptionalist to defend America these days, when what seems truly exceptional about our country is a presidency that is openly, even flagrantly, corrupt. It's a strident word to use, but it is, as the ...Read more