A decade before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps on the lunar surface, a popular children's book was published with a title that sounded like a promise:

"You Will Go to the Moon."

The illustrations showed a young boy's trip in a rocket to a space station, to a lunar lander and finally a moon base. He went. Pretty soon, you...Read more

I was very sorry to hear about the British woman who died after impaling herself on a reusable metal drinking straw -- and not just because it sounds like a terrible way to die. This single strange and horrible story has the potential to do further harm by whipping up fears over efforts to reduce single-use plastic.

Sixty-year-old Elena ...Read more

President Trump's racist tweets and comments this week show how low he plans to go and how deeply he intends to divide the nation in order to try to win re-election in 2020.

"Go back to where you came from" is a bigoted taunt that we should not tolerate from our children, in our schools, in the workplace -- and certainly not from our president....Read more

Here are two facts Americans should be aware of: There will be men and women deploying to Afghanistan for the first time this September who were born after Sept. 11, 2001; the authorization for that war was signed so long ago that 80% of the men and women in Congress today never voted on it. Put these facts together and one comes to the ...Read more

Nicolas Maduro, the authoritarian shoved aside by an interim leader in Venezuela, nevertheless maintains his grip on power. Humanitarian aid still is stuck at the Colombian border, while Venezuelans starve and are desperate for medication. U.S. sanctions have severely cut into Venezuela's oil revenues, as intended, but they also have left more ...Read more

When 65,853,514 of us cast our ballots for Hillary Clinton on November 8, 2016, we were voting for the relative peace, opportunity and pluralism of Barack Obama's America. The majority of voters that day at the polls hoped for an experienced leader known for effectiveness and compromise.

We got the opposite. Now 2016 is a distant country, and ...Read more

The new faces of sex trafficking are increasingly white, affluent and well-connected. In an indictment unveiled July 8 in the Southern District of New York, Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy hedge fund manager, was charged with sex trafficking for recruiting numerous minors for paid sex acts. In 2018, a federal judge ruled that Harvey Weinstein, the ...Read more

CHICAGO -- It was clear from his trial in 2008 that R. Kelly is a bad guy. It was hard to grasp how a jury could have acquitted him of child pornography after watching the videotape that prosecutors said showed him having sex with a 14-year-old girl.

But what choice did they have when the girl in the video, by then a 23-year-old woman, insisted...Read more

Things have gotten abysmal for Beto O'Rourke.

Not even a year ago, he came closer to winning a statewide office than any Texas Democrat in two decades. He even won Tarrant County, a rare feat. And although he lost to Sen. Ted Cruz, his arrow seemed to point only up. O'Rourke's entry to the presidential race was greeted with a fawning Vanity ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- "Nothing's clean, Howard. But we do our best, right?" the Ava Gardner character tells eccentric Howard Hughes, who is fretting over germs.

It's one of my favorite movie quotes, one that universally speaks to the human condition -- most any condition, particularly politics.

In the 2004 Academy Award-winning film "The ...Read more

Gavin Newsom's new $21.5 billion California wildfire fund is being seen as a big victory for the governor. With good reason. The legislation offers a reasonable approach to solving the complex liability problem of who should pay when utilities cause destructive infernos.

But there's a catch. And it's a big one.

The success of the bill hinges ...Read more

There's research and development going on to offer the world a new kind of Fitbit-type measuring tool that would be able to give you feedback about your mood.

I'm intrigued.

Let me explain one thing before we continue: I don't own a Fitbit because it would end up owning me.

I'm the kind of person who, when performing an eye exam, squints in ...Read more

We could be in the midst of the beginning of the end of democracy as we know it. Or we could just be in another of those eek-yikes crises that democracy has always managed to triumph over in the last reel. So far. David Runciman is a professor at Cambridge University; his book "The Confidence Trap, a History of Democracy in Crisis from World War...Read more

America's population is growing, its workforce is aging and its health care system is straining under the weight of both. At the intersection of these trends is the very practical question of just who's going to care for all these new patients.

Increasingly, the nurse answering that bedside call looks and sounds a lot like me, a first-...Read more