ArcaMax

It is useful when you feel stumped to step back and ask yourself: What if I were coming to this person/situation/decision fresh, without precedents or historical baggage?

Inertia is a powerful and insidious force. How many times, working in an office, when you ask why something is done a certain way, do you get the circular answer that it's ...Read more

Supporters of Israel, who are mostly on the Right, believe the Israeli government's official story, which is that the Jewish state's bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza has one objective: deposing Hamas so its fighters and government no longer pose a threat. According to this narrative, Palestinian civilian deaths are unavoidable ...Read more

Dear Mr. President,

Won't you please kill the homeless woman who lives on a bench on the median strip of the street near my apartment building?

She doesn't bother me. As far as I know, she doesn't bother anyone else either. The woman who lives in the middle of the street is nice. I like her. Last week, as I was waiting for the traffic signal ...Read more

Polls keep saying the same thing: Voters think President Joe Biden is too old.

The latest comes from some outfit called "The New York Times." According to these "Times" people: "An overwhelming 71% said [Biden] was 'too old' to be an effective president -- an opinion shared across every demographic and geographic group in the poll, including a ...Read more

"Israel has a right to defend itself and its people," President Joe Biden said on Oct. 7, hours after Hamas fighters killed more than 1,400 Israelis.

"Thou shalt not kill" is probably the oldest and most widespread moral and legal edict in human civilization, common to nearly every culture. However, there is one universal exception: Even in ...Read more

Hi. Joe Biden here, asking for more money for Ukraine and Israel.

Many Americans are asking: Why, while millions of Americans are unemployed and getting evicted and starving and homeless, should we ignore our own people and send billions of dollars to foreign countries instead? The answer is: democracy. We have to defend democracy.

...Read more

In the days and weeks and months and years after 9/11, when you questioned how the Bush administration responded to the terrorist attacks by al-Qaida, right-wing Republicans and liberal Democrats alike answered with a passive shrug. "Well," they said, "we had to do something."

Then you pressed about Bush's specific responses -- those <...Read more

Six weeks after 9/11, I thought I perceived a "new American thoughtfulness" in response to the attacks against New York and Washington, D.C.

"For the first time in memory, Americans are reconsidering the wisdom of supporting an Israel whose reactions to Palestinian terrorism is itself increasingly indistinguishable from terrorism," my ...Read more

We already know partisanship can be toxic. It also has some overlooked side effects. Team politics -- the type of partisanship in which adherents of a party excuse every act of hypocrisy and wrongdoing by their own side while exaggerating and lying about the purported evils of the other -- fuels censorship.

Consider climate change, by some ...Read more

Bipartisanship is dead. But job-killing trade agreements like NAFTA were promoted by politicians of both major parties alike -- until Donald Trump. "Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization, moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas. Globalization has made the financial elite, who donate to ...Read more