Sen. Rand Paul is a medical doctor, an ophthalmologist, but he has an unhealthy obsession with Dr. Anthony Fauci and now has rigged a ridiculous contempt of Congress charge against Fauci, who was the ubiquitous, calming voice of reason during the horrors of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many in the MAGA base came to resent, even hate Fauci for this, ...Read more

Few things are as shocking to living people as corpses decomposing in the summer heat.

But that is what apparently occurred inside a funeral home on the city’s Southeast Side when more than 50 human bodies were discovered inside the South Chicago Chapel funeral home in the 2900 block of East 95th Street, following complaints from neighbors ...Read more

How deeply is President Donald Trump mired in disasters of his own making? Let me count the ways:

His deeply unpopular war against Iran resulted in a stronger Iran regime, dared Iran to restrict the Strait of Hormuz and led to a damaged-but-hardly-obliterated nuclear program. On the home front, gas and grocery prices are high, and consumer ...Read more

School doesn’t begin again for a few weeks. But you wouldn’t know it looking at my phone. These days, returning to the classroom seems to involve more homework for parents than for students.

Weeks before my child has been assigned a teacher or seen a syllabus, we’re fielding an invite for a weekend kindergarten campout. We’re buying ...Read more

Let’s set aside, for a moment, how ridiculous it is that officials serving in President Donald Trump’s administration, including executive and judicial officials, won’t acknowledge in front of Congress that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

These deliberate dodges — a consistent pattern more than 18 months into Trump’s second ...Read more

I landed my first real, albeit minimum wage job at the tender age of 15, and one of my lasting memories was how the paycheck came with a boatload of deductions.

Money was withheld for federal and local income taxes, of course, but there was one category for which teen me was not prepared — some kind of “insurance” payment. I was curious....Read more

A quarter-millennium into the American experiment, some of our skepticism of big government has given way to populism and astounding numbers of regulations. Here’s one explanation.

Following British overreach and the weak Articles of Confederation, we found the happy medium of the Constitution — a system made possible not just by separation...Read more

What keeps secrets secret? Historically, social respectability has relied, remarkably often, on the discretion of others and the last resort of deniability. Now, these safeguards are being demolished by databases: collections of facts that, when revealed, can become bombshells.

Today, with unprecedented ease, people may explore their family ...Read more

The start of the school year brings a familiar list of responsibilities for parents: buying school supplies, keeping track of forms, coordinating transportation and responding to a steady stream of emails from teachers and administrators.

Although many families strive to share these responsibilities, research has consistently found that mothers...Read more

There are a lot of jobs in the U.S. economy that pay miserably low wages. And there are a lot that offer a reasonable hourly rate but still result in miserably low earnings because of unstable, fluctuating schedules.

How many is hard to know, but it’s not a small number: According to the Government Accountability Office, there are about 9 ...Read more

We may never know what caused the COVID-19 pandemic that has taken more than 7 million lives worldwide. Was it a leak at a laboratory, as some have claimed? Did it come from animals, as most scientific bodies have stated?

We do know this: The answers won’t come from a vicious Republican persecution of Dr. Anthony Fauci. And as if there isn’...Read more

U.S. states are supposedly the laboratories of democracy, cooking up and testing local solutions to national problems. But some of those labs are more like Walter White’s RV methmobile: They’re not always doing stuff you want to emulate.

Consider the concoctions Florida has brewed up in response to the national home-insurance crisis that ...Read more

On Wednesday, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker wrote to the U.S. CEOs of seven major oil companies accusing them of “profiteering” from the war in Iran and imploring them to return their bounty to Illinois consumers.

“Under the guise of supply disruptions from war in the Middle East,” Pritzker wrote, “your companies are collecting windfall ...Read more

Arizona and Nevada will feel the brunt of the pain under a federal plan to reduce stress on the Colorado River. It’s an unjust solution, particularly for the Silver State.

Recently, the Interior Department released a 10-year blueprint to address water shortages on the Colorado. The river has been over-allocated for a century, and long-term ...Read more

Sen. Tina Smith warned Minnesotans two years ago that a zombie could rise from the dead. She was right.

The zombie in question isn’t a movie monster. It’s the Comstock Act, a 1873 law criminalizing the mailing of “obscene” materials that has remained on the books, though largely unenforced, for more than a century. In an April 2024 Star...Read more

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s decision to join Japan in supporting the yen was the first joint intervention of its kind for decades and took investors by surprise. There’s a respectable case for such cooperation: The U.S. and Japan can both benefit, at least for a while. But the policy fails to tackle the underlying problem and could ...Read more

Let’s give credit where it’s due to Democrats hoping to unseat Republican Senator Susan Collins in Maine: Troy Jackson is certainly an improvement over Graham Platner.

As a former longtime state legislator, his background has been vetted, and he doesn’t appear burdened by personal scandal (or a Nazi tattoo.)

But Democrats — ...Read more

The day after the state's Senate primary, I was at a gym in Michigan when I overheard a brief exchange about the results of the close race.

The small group of voters were all elderly and white. Most of them expressed disappointment that Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens lost. Most of them questioned victor Abdul El-Sayed's ability to win in ...Read more

The Iran war has provided at least two clear economic lessons. It has exposed the steep costs of being reliant on fossil fuels, highlighting the need for countries to diversify their homegrown energy sources, including solar and wind power. And it has shown what U.S. commerce could look like freed from the Jones Act, one of the most ...Read more

A few years ago, I interviewed a Black teen as part of a study on the health of Gen Z. What this ninth-grader from an inner-city community was most passionate about surprised me.

“In eighth grade, lunch used to be something tasty; I could eat it,” she told me. “Here we go now: 65% reduced fat. Barely any seasoning. I’m like, ‘What is ...Read more