To listen to representatives of the U.S. government lately, you’d think the United States is at imminent risk of a communist takeover. “Communism is the single greatest threat to our country and its history,” President Donald Trump said in a recent speech outside Atlanta.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has likened the midterms to a battle ...Read more

President Donald Trump’s weird hatred of offshore wind energy is costing a lot as Uncle Sam has to pay off the companies which had invested in the canceled projects.

For the fifth time now, the Trump administration has agreed to pay an energy firm a huge sum of money, not for building something, but in fact for not building it. The German ...Read more

Cincinnati is known for its chili, ice cream and devoted sports fans. But these days, the Queen City is banking on other assets to secure its future, and we think Chicago should be paying attention.

Cincinnati sits on the banks of the Ohio River, which (along with an underground aquifer) provides it with ample fresh water. Its location in the ...Read more

President Donald Trump’s proposed sweeping changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, whether ever actually implemented or not, are yet another affront to public health in the U.S.

No new evidence is being offered to justify the proposed overhaul, which arrived via executive order on Monday and calls for cutting back the number of vaccines ...Read more

America is debating budgets, taxes, deficits, and spending priorities. Those discussions are necessary. But amid the political arguments, we cannot lose sight of a simple truth: every budget reflects our values.

Nearly every American hopes to grow old. Yet growing old with dignity has become increasingly difficult for many seniors living on ...Read more

The numbers are alarming. More than half a million mail ballots cast in the 2024 elections were rejected and never counted. Not because they were illegitimate, but because voters often made easily avoidable mistakes.

They forgot to sign and date the envelope or get a witness to sign. Or their signature was out of date. Or they simply used the ...Read more

Every generation believes its technologies are about to destabilize the world.

The printing press initially was accused of eroding authority and unleashing uncontrollable voices. Railways were said to compress space unnaturally, disturbing body and mind. The telephone threatened the centrality of the public square; television, the vitality of ...Read more

Like 155 million other Americans, I get my health insurance coverage through my employer. The millions like me who are not on Medicaid or Medicare may not be closely tracking the massive changes coming to public insurance programs because of H.R.1 (also known as President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”).

But over the next ...Read more

To hear candidate Oliver Larkin define himself as “anti-Zionist” is jarring — and that’s an understatement — as he runs in a Democratic primary to represent a South Florida congressional district that’s roughly 25% Jewish, one of the largest concentrations of Jewish voters in the country.

Larkin is part of a growing faction of the ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Say you want a new pair of running shoes, but you just can’t make up your mind. So you spend a solid week checking them out online, coming back to one pair on a particular site again and again.

When you’re finally ready to check out, you notice something upsetting — the price you saw on day one is now 20% higher. ...Read more

In June 2014, it seemed the entire city was upset when a certain New York real estate developer added five 20-foot-tall serifed letters spelling his name to the 16th floor of his eponymous tower facing the Chicago River.

That moment and the ensuing kerfuffle seem quite quaint now.

That unexpected design move — which defaced what is arguably ...Read more

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