The nation and the world shouldn't have to tolerate being whipsawed by a mercurial American president who has never seemed to grasp the importance of policy discipline and consistency. President Donald Trump brought his shoot-from-the-hip style to negotiations with North Korea, as he does routinely on other matters. Only this time, it backfired ...Read more

The primary purpose of Memorial Day is to honor those who have sacrificed their lives to defend this country.

There have, though, been many millions of others who gave portions of their lives to warfare but survived. This day is theirs too.

Most, like a former Chicagoan named Red Madsen, have come home from wars to lead ordinary lives. Not ...Read more

Philip Roth taught me everything I know about men, or at least most of what I've needed to know. I was probably 19 when I read "Portnoy's Complaint," the novel the New Yorker called "the dirtiest book ever published" and whose countless masturbation scenes include one in which the young narrator, Alexander Portnoy, achieves sexual fulfillment ...Read more

There's a heroic tale to tell about the Korean War service and sacrifice of Army Maj. Charles A. Newman, a tank commander from Glenview who led an assault on Chinese forces in May 1951.

The story, appropriate for Memorial Day, involves bravery under fire and an impatient general who goads Newman while waving a swagger stick. "Get those god-...Read more

Scientists and political leaders have warned for years of the looming health peril posed by so-called superbugs -- bacteria that have gained resistance to current antibiotics. Researchers across the globe are locked in an international arms race to find new, more potent antibiotics. This is a battle to the death -- with tens of millions of lives...Read more

A surreal and disturbing spectacle unfolded in Jefferson City this week. Like actors doing a table-reading of a script, members of the Missouri House committee considering impeachment of Gov. Eric Greitens performed dramatic readings from transcripts of previously secret testimony taken from "K.S.", the woman with whom Greitens had an affair in ...Read more

Who overpacked California's prisons? It was first-term Gov. Jerry Brown, when he signed into law the Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act in 1976. And it was the Legislature's Democratic majority, who'd sent Brown the act in the first place and then tried to outflank tough-on-crime Republicans by adding one sentence-lengthening provision (or "...Read more

A year ago I wrote a column titled "From Iraq, a good-news immigration story."

It concerned the reversal of a cruel injustice the U.S. bureaucracy had perpetrated on the Al-Baidhani family, whose two sons paid a high price for working as interpreters for the U.S. army in Iraq.

I wrote too soon.

In the current anti-immigration era, when ...Read more

The National Football League swaths itself in patriotic gestures. We've seen those pre-game moments when an unfurled American flag all but covers the field itself. We've watched solemn color guard ceremonies. We've witnessed the roaring fighter jet flyovers. To what extent these displays are heartfelt patriotism or shrewd marketing, we can't be ...Read more

President Donald Trump recently referred to MS-13 members as "animals," but animals do not beat people to death with baseball bats. They do not cut off their heads with machetes. They do not torture a 15-year-old girl by slicing off her tattoo before stabbing her to death. So maybe Trump was wrong to refer to these people as animals. Let's just ...Read more

Last week Israel turned 70. In historical terms, that is such a young age for a country. Yet look at what it's accomplished: The only democracy in the Middle East, Israel has transformed itself from a strong agricultural producer into a technological powerhouse.

And for its birthday, it was awarded a number of international gifts. First, it won...Read more

It was some time after the mother of the bride entered the church, after the sermon and after the choir, that the significance of last weekend's royal wedding hit me. More than 400 years after the first English settlers set foot in North America and some 242 years after we declared our independence from the British crown, the American Revolution...Read more

The fate of the Dreamers is an issue that has come back to life in Congress, thanks to aggressive action by a small group of House Republicans. Why now? "We're boiling over," said Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan. "It's got to get done."

The 16-term Republican is right. Congress needs to resolve the status of the young migrants brought to the U.S. ...Read more

We're now a third of the way into President Donald Trump's four-year term. It's time to check in on his approval ratings again.

The good news for Trump: He's sustained his 2018 public opinion rally. Via FiveThirtyEight, through Wednesday he was about 6 percentage points better than his mid-December low point. That leaves him right around 42 ...Read more

President Donald Trump's decision to cancel his summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is, in itself, no cause for regret. Going ahead with a meeting that had little chance of success would have been a mistake, compounding errors the administration has already made on this issue. The cancellation is an opportunity to rethink, one the ...Read more

President Donald Trump's decision to cancel his summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is, in itself, no cause for regret. Going ahead with a meeting that had little chance of success would have been a mistake, compounding errors the administration has already made on this issue. The cancellation is an opportunity to rethink, one the ...Read more

When Yale graduate student Lolade Siyonbola dozed off in a common room of her dormitory during a late-night paper-writing session, she had no idea what her nap would lead to. Another student, perhaps assuming that Siyonbola was an intruder or disturbed at the sight of a black person sleeping in plain view (or both), turned on the lights and told...Read more

There's plenty of reason to question the series of decisions by the justice system that allowed 16-year-old Dawnta Harris to be in Perry Hall Monday when police say he drove a stolen Jeep into Baltimore County Police Officer Amy Caprio, fatally injuring her. We are still learning more details about his history, but it isn't merely the benefit of...Read more

From the beginning of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, he has said he wants to make trade "fair." For too long, he argued, American companies and workers suffered as trading partners used tactics that stole jobs, damaged U.S. industry and widened deficits. The implication was that he'd work to strip away the remaining tariffs and other ...Read more

I heard "yanny."

This is, I know now, objectively wrong. In 2007, actor Jay Aubrey Jones was recorded pronouncing the word "laurel" for vocabulary.com. Earlier this month, a high school student in Georgia named Katie Hetzel played that audio clip, but like me, she heard "yanny." So she posted it to social media to find out how it sounded to ...Read more