California has mandated that by 2035 all new vehicle sales must be plug-ins. A handful of blue states have fallen in line and copied the Golden State’s edict. Nevada regulators have floated the same proposal, and more than a few Democrats in the Legislature would eagerly leap on the bandwagon.

But the idea that this can be accomplished ...Read more

I’ve got a bone to pick with “estimated reading times.” You know the ones I mean, those temporal cues that are increasingly popping up on magazine and newspaper websites indicating how long it will take to read a given piece. “3 min. read” or “7 min. read,” these markers inform us, accompanied by a small clock face icon.

They’re...Read more

In Minneapolis, the video of Tyre Nichols’s fatal beating at the hands of Memphis police officers triggered unwelcome flashbacks. Just two and a half years ago, the city erupted with riots after video emerged of George Floyd’s murder. In the aftermath, hopes that Minneapolis’s troubled police department might be reformed fell apart as ...Read more

For many people, the most notable date in February is Valentine’s Day. But for those familiar with the history of rock music, two others stand out: Feb. 3, 1959 — “the day the music died,” as Don McLean described it in his 1971 hit “American Pie” — and Feb. 9, 1964, when the Beatles made their first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan...Read more

If you think public policy doesn’t really affect you or your family, take a quick glance at your retirement account – but you may want to sit down first. Those accounts have taken a beating lately because of the misguided policies emanating from Washington, D.C., and the result is a dramatic reduction in wealth for the average American ...Read more

According to a new Harris Poll, public safety is the top concern of Chicago’s voters. As the Harris CEO Will Johnson wrote in the Tribune this week, 95% of voters cited that issue. Johnson also reported that his poll showed most Chicagoans feel that our city is worse off than others when it comes to crime.

Whether that actually is the case is...Read more

Even before the city of Memphis released video of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols’ brutal beating during a traffic stop, the five city police officers involved were given a familiar moniker: bad apples.

So it was in Baltimore following the in-custody death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in 2015, and in Cleveland after an officer there shot and killed ...Read more

Although February is the shortest calendar month of the year, it has served as one of the most significant months for momentous musical events — both happy and sad.

On Feb. 3, 1959, a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, took the lives of promising young rock musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson (known as the “Big Bopper�...Read more

Bail reform, or ending cash bail for people arrested on some or all charges, is not, from a statistical standpoint, a controversial topic. That’s why it has drawn strong bipartisan support in so many states and cities. It immediately reduces the cost burden on county jails. Combined with thoughtful pretrial supervision, including ankle ...Read more

Now for some good news about our planet: The ozone layer is healing.

A recent United Nations-backed assessment found continued progress in the global effort to repair the shield-like layer high up in the stratosphere that protects Earth and its inhabitants from harmful ultraviolet radiation that causes skin cancer and hurts plants and animals. ...Read more

At first glance the Republican presidential campaign is shaping up to be bizarrely normal. In a deeper sense, however, it is profoundly bizarre. Of course the reason is former President Donald Trump.

Start with how normal it is. There’s the frontrunner who has already declared, and held his first public events of the year last weekend. Then ...Read more

This one hurts.

Of course, they all do, all the deaths of Black people at the hands of police, deaths that continue to be among the most painful and potent reminders that racism is not some abstract problem but a precept of American life that’s particularly evident in street-level law enforcement. The death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols joins ...Read more

Today we answer questions about ageism, sexism and the rompin', stompin' contest to succeed Dianne Feinstein in the U.S. Senate.

So now that Feinstein is retiring, the race is underway!

Whoa. Hold up, pony. Feinstein has yet to publicly state her intentions. She said she'll announce sometime this spring whether she plans to retire at the end ...Read more

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is spending part of this week in the Middle East, where he’s scheduled to meet with Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian officials to reduce the roiling violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But you can bet that Blinken will also take this opportunity to refocus attention on another issue that is ...Read more

A handful of top medical schools, including Stanford and Columbia, pulled out of U.S. News & World Report’s annual rankings in January, following a similar exodus of more than a dozen law schools, including UC Berkeley, Yale and Harvard, late last year. It’s a welcome development that is overdue. Undergraduate institutions and other graduate...Read more

Growing up I remember hearing the phrase “Have you no shame?” That question must have held some power back in the day. But if you asked that now, some shapers of our current political culture would respond with a resounding “No.” Hyper-partisanship has moved us into a post-shame world.

Shame is the internal, uncomfortable sense arising ...Read more

I guess they expected us to be grateful for the warning.

Before Memphis police released the body cam footage of the Jan. 7 fatal beating of Tyre Nichols at the hands of its officers, nearly everyone who'd already seen the video warned it would be "heinous" and "inhumane."

And it was. Nichols was tortured. You can describe the hour of footage ...Read more

The Oscar-nominated short film “An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It” could be the name for Silicon Valley’s latest gift to Western civilization — and to many practitioners of misinformation.

The artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT has been heralded as if it’s a techno-counterpart to the steam engine or ...Read more

The world watched and allowed a brutal genocide three decades ago in the Bosnian city of Srebrenica. A tragically similar crisis is looming again. Global leaders know how this could end, and they have no excuse to stand by. Indeed, they are bound by law and human decency to intervene and protect the 120,000 civilians in the Armenian-majority ...Read more

The fact that the five Memphis former police officers accused in the beating death of Black motorist Tyre Nichols are themselves Black could actually clarify the issue of police violence, which is more complicated than just a few bigoted white cops. It highlights that policing in America is in desperate need of reform that addresses more than ...Read more