Considering the awful alternative — default on the nation’s debts and the possibility of a recession — the White House and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy deserve credit for cobbling together a compromise to suspend the nation’s debt ceiling. But the agreement, approved by the House on Wednesday and by the Senate late Thursday, shouldn’t ...Read more

Joe Biden had much experience in foreign policy before being elected president, but he is certainly no Richard Nixon. Although Nixon had to resign because of domestic corruption linked to the U.S. war in Southeast Asia, he was masterful in driving a wedge between the two communist great powers—Maoist China and the Soviet Union—to achieve ...Read more

“MTG, Voice of Reason” is not a headline I ever thought I’d write. In fact, it’s disorienting to even type it.

But U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene won the title this week, for this moment, after dozens of Republicans and Democrats peeled off the bipartisan bill to lift the debt ceiling, but she and a handful of other far-right House ...Read more

The Supreme Court’s recent decision on the limits of federal authority under the Clean Water Act has been celebrated or condemned, depending on the ideological predilections of the observer. Everyone agrees, however, that the opinions themselves make for rather rough reading. They boil down to a squabble over the words “adjacent” and “...Read more

When I was a kid, a dour woman named Nellie walked by our house every day, almost always in a gray overcoat. She never spoke to anyone, never looked at anyone. Someone said she was a witch, and kids in the neighborhood either mocked her or avoided her. Years later, when we “put away childish things,” we came to understand that Nellie was not...Read more

From California-based tech giants Twitter and Meta to retailers such as Amazon and Walmart, few industries have been spared from layoffs in recent weeks. These layoffs are a devastating blow to workers’ livelihoods. But the ripple effects run deeper than paychecks. When you lose your job, you also lose an identity.

I’ve spent the past three...Read more

On Tuesday, California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal reversed Gov. Gavin Newsom’s veto of Leslie Van Houten’s parole, reinstating the state board’s 2020 parole grant decision. Its ruling exposes deep flaws in California’s system of allowing gubernatorial vetoes in the first place.

Van Houten, a member of the infamous Manson “family...Read more

LOS ANGLES — Los Angeles schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho is no stranger to protest and dissent. He came to Los Angeles last year after leading Miami-Dade County school district, in the "don't say gay" state of Florida, where education has become ground zero in contentious culture wars.

But even Carvalho was surprised by the vitriol ...Read more

We continue to receive intriguing but incomplete reports about what special counsel Jack Smith was doing a few weeks ago. And while they concern the details of an already obviously powerful case of obstruction and other charges against Donald Trump in the federal classified documents case, they underscore the impression that the case Smith is ...Read more

Would we really risk the catastrophe of a debt default because we think that some citizens who are receiving food stamps may not be working hard enough?

It appears that we would: One of the puzzling priorities for Republicans during negotiations over the debt ceiling increase was stricter work requirements for welfare recipients, a point that...Read more

Having failed to blackball Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from the high council of international affairs, President Joe Biden is now desperate to get Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler into the world’s most exclusive club. White House officials have told journalists they are hopeful MBS, as the prince is known, will sign the Abraham Accords by ...Read more

The Supreme Court dealt a serious blow on Thursday to a core protection of workers, the right to strike. The court held that unions can be sued for the “foreseeable” damages their strikes cause employers — a sweeping threat to the federally protected right, because virtually all strikes (and employer lockouts) pose a “foreseeable” ...Read more

Elon Musk’s Neuralink received approval last month from the Food and Drug Administration to conduct human clinical trials, which one former FDA official called “really a big deal.” I do not disagree, but I am skeptical that this technology will “change everything.” Not every profound technological advance has broad social and economic ...Read more

The NYCLU has taken Rockland and Orange counties to federal court for their emergency orders blocking NYC from temporarily putting up migrants in local hotels. Let’s hope for a swift victory.

If you’re wondering why the policies are so self-evidently wrong, here’s a helpful exercise: imagine if the counties had issued practically ...Read more

More than 40% of American adults are obese, costing the health-care system $173 billion a year. Related conditions including heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and some cancers are among the leading causes of preventable death in the U.S. But while drugmakers have developed astonishingly effective medications for weight loss, they’re not ...Read more

Today we will be exploring why Donald Trump’s little-understood MAGA Republican base has seemed so stunningly shatterproof – despite being pounded by nonstop news revelations of potential prosecutions, more unsavory conduct and eruptions that sound unpatriotic to outsiders’ ears.

Now this: The 2024 presidential campaign attacks are just ...Read more

Donald Trump was the most anti-immigrant U.S. president in nearly 100 years. He oversaw a family separation policy at the border that traumatized countless children and lost track of hundreds of parents; slashed refugee admissions to record lows; gutted access to asylum; and much more.

But for some of the most influential U.S. nativists and ...Read more

When Alexander Hamilton, as the first Treasury secretary, starting in 1789, began issuing debt to borrow on the good name of the new government of the United States until now, there has never been a default on its loans. Ever. That’s 234 years of paying its obligations despite a Civil War, a Great Depression and a couple of world wars. The ...Read more

Betty Friedan was just a fiery radical with a bad temper. It’s convenient to believe this. But at a moment when many of the rights for women she gained are being overturned, it’s time to reconsider common wisdom about her character.

Friedan, a towering figure in the women’s movement who died in 2006, wrote the 1963 groundbreaking book “...Read more

I chose a career in medicine because I wanted to work somewhere with a strong ethical foundation. It was the same reason I spent years involved in the antiwar movement and taking action on climate change — which is now a concern across the profession.

Hospitals have pledged to lower operational carbon emissions. Several leading public ...Read more