California is a state of contradictions. We lead the nation in environmental regulation, tout our clean energy goals with pride and champion a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. Yet despite this green image, our economy — and daily life — still very much run on oil and gas.

Fossil fuels account for roughly 8% of California’s $3 ...Read more

One of the biggest spending items in the Republican budget bill has hardly gotten any attention: $170 billion for an unprecedented crackdown on immigration. By some calculations, it would make the annual budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement larger than Israel’s entire defense budget.

The supplemental funds — to be spent over the ...Read more

The wisest among us realize that what we normally think of as opposites are also associates. There’s life and death, joy and pain, fulfillment and absence. And, as Charlie Chaplin understood, and helped millions to understand, comedy and tragedy.

Cinema was about a quarter of a century old when Chaplin’s “The Gold Rush” premiered June ...Read more

Whether U.S. bombers recently “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability (President Donald Trump’s preferred wording) or “severely damaged” it (per the CIA) matters so much to Trump that he’s threatened to sue news outlets reporting the CIA’s terminology.

The common presidential desire to shape the narrative has been especially ...Read more

The Trump administration has accomplished something that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and other dictators desired. It destroyed the Voice of America.

Until mid-March, VOA had been on the air continuously for 83 years. Starting in 1942 with shortwave broadcasts in German to counter Nazi propaganda, America’s external voice had expanded to nearly 50 ...Read more

Within the hearts and faces of the Class of 2025 is a mixture of anticipation and apprehension—on the edge of a world that is, by turns, irreverent and weary, defiant and desperate for something more. These are not gentle times. Our society, economy, and politics all feel stretched and fraying, sometimes broken. But that, my friends, is ...Read more

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was appointed secretary of health and human services, everyone knew he was capable of doing great damage. He had a long history of indulging conspiracy theories, particularly when it came to vaccines.

Already, his attempt to reassess immunization schedules in the U.S. has outraged pediatricians. But his latest ...Read more

Illinois is down young people — by a lot.

To put it bluntly, our pipeline is drying up. We’ve lost than 185,000 people ages 18 and younger compared with 2020, a 6% decrease. Cook County lost the bulk of these youngsters, with its 18-and-under population decline accounting for over half of the state’s total.

Meanwhile, the retiree ...Read more

Many legal commentators apparently believe that, in the term that just ended, the Supreme Court further enabled President Donald Trump. The court did, in fact, issue a series of conservative decisions that Trump likes. However, under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, the court also simultaneously pursued a careful strategy aimed at ...Read more

In one of the most memorable scenes in “Pulp Fiction,” a film replete with memorable scenes, a Los Angeles gangster, Marsellus Wallace, turns the tables on a man who has kidnapped and abused him. He’s going to get a couple of friends to go to work on his assailant “with a pair of pliers and a blow torch,” he says, and ensure that he ...Read more

American and Israeli forces have done the world a favor by setting back Iran’s nuclear program, whether by a little or a lot. But, unless the U.S. now binds the regime to a deal with strict, long-term constraints on its nuclear activities, the risks they’ve taken may well be for naught.

The Beltway debate over whether Iranian nuclear ...Read more

Just as you may have thought that it was finally safe to think about American politics without thinking about Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, he has slinked his way into the national news again.

The occasion was a tour he hosted Tuesday for Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of what has become known as "...Read more

Zohran Mamdani isn’t the most famous Democrat in America. But the frontrunner to serve as New York’s next mayor is well on his way — and he’ll get there, if Republicans have anything to say about it.

Immediately after the previously little-known state assemblyman from Queens won the Democratic nomination for mayor, stunning his party’...Read more

The thing about bullies is they don't have real friends.

They have lieutenants, followers and victims — sometimes all three rolled into one.

Most of us learn this by about third grade, when parents and hard knocks teach us how to figure out whom you can trust, and who will eat you for lunch.

Elon Musk, at age 54 with $400 billion in the ...Read more

The political realignment has come for economics. At least since the days of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes in the last century, the divide in economic thinking roughly corresponded to the political split. In the mainstream, everyone was a capitalist and saw some role for government. The right/left divide was mostly over exactly how big...Read more

For the last several months, I have organized a weekly “Stand-Up for Democracy” rally/protest on the busiest street corner in my hometown. On Fridays at 5:30 pm., students, teachers, townspeople, and senior citizens come together, hold signs, and wave at passing drivers, some of whom honk their horns in solidarity.

I live in a very ...Read more

The Pew Research Center is one of the most trusted polling firms in the country, especially when it comes to Latinos. Last week, it published findings that should have been a victory lap for Donald Trump and his tortuous relationship with America's largest minority.

According to Pew, Trump won 48% of Latino voters in the 2024 presidential ...Read more

I love pickles. Dill pickles, kosher dill pickles, cornichons, full-sour pickles, half-sour pickles, quarter-sour pickles, quick pickles, gherkins, German senfgurken. Not bread and butter pickles. Those are not pickles. The flaccid, round slices with their fluorescent yellow tint and sickeningly sweet flavor are a disgrace to the pickle name.

I...Read more

For several hold-your-breath weeks, as spring sizzled into summer, the nuclear dealmakers of President Donald Trump’s USA and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Iran seemed astonishingly close to a deal.

So close that it seemed they’d soon reach out and seize the deal. But no one was willing to reach out.

First, on May 13, Iran�...Read more