ArcaMax

Scene: the Midwest in midcentury.

The Madison, Wisconsin, neighborhood lived through the 1930s and 1940s, depression, wartime and polio. President Franklin Roosevelt's radio fireside chats built morale.

My father's mother, Marie, a widowed nurse with four children, never missed Eleanor Roosevelt's column, "My Day." Her husband, Reuben, a ...Read more

As we head into a momentous election year, with state and national legislative seats up for grabs, even let-them-eat-cake Republicans are scrambling to sound sympathetic to today's hard-hit working-class families.

Of course, tongue-clucking concern doesn't mean actually doing anything to help this majority of Americans -- and most ...Read more

A midterm election year is upon us, and that can mean only one thing: we have entered the realm of quickened speculation about the 2028 presidential election. On the Republican side, if President Donald Trump decides to abide by the Constitution in at least one respect, the nomination looks to be Vice President J.D. Vance's to lose. Which leaves...Read more

For anyone aiming to cut back drinking, January's arrival times perfectly. Some may have simply overdone it through the long holiday stretch, when alcohol seemed piped into any vaguely celebratory event. Some may worry that they're beginning to forget the last drink they accepted.

Recovering alcoholics or others who don't drink at all have it...Read more

Through the '60s, when I was a single-digit child, people knew that revolution was hard. Those who committed to revolutionary change understood that the elites who control the levers of power, institutional inertia and the broken spirits of those they sought to emancipate comprised barriers that were nearly impossible to overcome. They knew that...Read more

I've always loved a real Christmas tree but struggled with the idea of cutting down trees just to decorate them inside my home for a few weeks a year. Trees are living things and to grow them just to cut them for my enjoyment is something I had trouble reconciling within myself. According to the National Christmas Tree Association, there are ...Read more

One of my most distinct memories of childhood is sitting in the back seat of my mother's car with my sister on Christmas Eve as my mother explained that there would be no Christmas at our house because we were Jewish. It's not your holiday, she told us. And it's not. It belongs to those who worship Jesus, which we do not.

It took me many ...Read more

"Cry me a river." I gave a party with this theme on Jan. 20, 2025, the day Donald Trump was sworn in as president.

Little did we know that 2025 would be an ocean of tears, the worst since 1968. The tragic assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. broke hearts everywhere.

And now, what a long fall from grace.

Let's do a ...Read more

In keeping with the season, I offer a little political anecdote about Christmas.

More specifically, it's about the moral teachings of the biblical Jesus, which formed the ethical foundation of Christmas and gave Christianity itself its true gravity.

The story is about a political clash some 60 years ago in Houston, when a boorish right-...Read more

I'm 7 years old. We live in a white two-story house we rent on General Cobb Street in a small manufacturing city called Taunton, Massachusetts. I live with my parents, Peg and Gene, my big boxer dog, Joey, and my grandmother, Munroe, who has a bad heart.

The old house has a weak heating system, and sometimes on very cold mornings, there's a ...Read more

If a president can murder civilians at sea and keep the legal justifications secret, we should all be concerned. The harm is even worse when basic factual evidence, such as full videos and orders, are also hidden from the American people.

Since September, the Trump administration has ordered 26 lethal strikes on civilian boats in ...Read more

The Supreme Court announced that it will hear oral argument in our birthright citizenship case. The case blocks President Donald Trump's executive order seeking to take away the right to birthright citizenship for many native-born American children, even though the 14th Amendment guarantees that right.

Just hours after the president signed ...Read more

Searching for an apartment online, applying for a loan, going through airport security or looking up a question on a search engine -- you might not think anything of these exchanges other than that they are mundane things you do, but, in many of these instances, you're actually interacting with artificial intelligence.

Avoiding AI in our ...Read more

In a major overhaul of immigration enforcement leadership, the Trump administration is replacing nearly half of top leaders at ICE offices across the country with current or retired Border Patrol officers.

For months, masked immigration agents have brought terror to communities across the U.S., arresting parents in carpool lines, dragging ...Read more