True story: The state that has led the nation in book bans is requiring all high school students to read the most famous literary attack on book banning. It’s stranger than fiction.

I’m talking about Texas, where state laws barring “indecent or profane content” and diversity, equity and inclusion programming have led to the purging of ...Read more

College sports have long been influenced by money.

These days, commercial gain appears to be the point. Some athletes are playing at a different school every season. Others are betting on their own games. Eligibility has become so loosely defined — and potential compensation so generous — that some professionals are trying to play for ...Read more

The annual report of the Social Security board of trustees, issued last month, has prompted Congress to return to one of its favorite pastimes: creating bipartisan Social Security commissions. More precisely, there are currently at least two bills in Congress to empower a commission to come up with a proposal to “save” Social Security, which...Read more

Ever wonder about the financial implications of your life choices? Taking one job over another, spending Christmas with your nephew instead of working through it at your financial firm, that time Bitcoin fell to $400 and instead of filling your boots with the stuff you wrote a column mocking it? We’ve all been there, right?

Such decisions ...Read more

The billionaires behind the idea to build a city roughly the size of Oakland about 40 miles southwest of Sacramento are seeking the help of Gov. Gavin Newsom to advance the Solano County project known as California Forever. The mystery inside the Capitol is what the governor will actually do.

This is not an easy political choice. Far behind in ...Read more

On July 6, Gov. JB Pritzker signed the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act, which passed with overwhelming legislative support in the General Assembly. Anthropic backed it. So did OpenAI. The companies being regulated stood alongside the legislators regulating them, which is rare enough to be worth pausing over.

California and New York ...Read more

I've written quite a few columns about the death of student-athletes over the years.

In 2011, I covered the story of Wes Leonard, the high school basketball player out of Fennville, Michigan, who collapsed and died shortly after hitting the game-winning shot that preserved his team's perfect season.

Later that summer, at least six high school ...Read more

New Jersey made national headlines earlier this week when it was revealed that 6,600 noncitizens had been added to the state’s voter rolls between June 2023 and June 2024 — and roughly 400 of them had cast ballots since then. Not good.

Especially given the moment, when debates over election integrity have become intensely polarized and the ...Read more

Repeated law-breaking. Lying and deceit. Reckless disregard for safety. Lack of remorse.

Those are traits that help define a psychopath, someone who lives among us but doesn't have the empathy and ethics necessary to behave in a civilized, or even safe, fashion.

Unfortunately, it's also increasingly clear that these are the traits that define ...Read more

Legislation to reshape the rules for voting nationwide is the issue that’s prompted the greatest pressure from President Donald Trump on Senate Republicans to end the filibuster. That’s also the issue that triggered the greatest pressure on Senate Democrats to end the filibuster under President Joe Biden. The parallel is no coincidence.

And...Read more

In June, University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos announced that the institution would be rolling out Claude Enterprise, an artificial intelligence tool developed by Anthropic, to all students, faculty and staff.

The letter features carefully composed language: “Spanning the domains of research, education, and operations: these are ...Read more

Zohran Mamdani, a lifelong foe of the existent of the Jewish state of Israel, knows he can’t do anything of the sort by ordering the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu should he come to New York. So why does Mamdani keep talking about the impossible? The mayor even used city resources to make a 2-minute video decrying Netanyahu ...Read more

It's right there in his name: Sen. Mark Warner for months has been on a tear to warn Americans of President Donald Trump's designs to disrupt the midterm elections.

The Democrat from Virginia first got my attention in late March with a four-alarm op-ed in the New York Times. The sober, plugged-in Warner, the vice chair and a former chair of the...Read more

When we imagine a threat to free speech, we picture a ban — a law forbidding certain words, a prosecutor charging a dissenter, an official with a censor’s stamp. That picture is increasingly obsolete. The gravest threats to expression today rarely announce themselves as censorship. They take the form of ordinary administration turned to ...Read more

Will the nation’s biannual ritual of moving the clock backward and forward an hour soon be a thing of the past? Perhaps, but it’s no sure thing.

The House last week passed the Sunshine Protection Act by a 308-117 margin. Support cut across party lines. Under the legislation, states that don’t exempt themselves would observe daylight ...Read more

My late father-in-law smoked unfiltered Camel cigarettes. Regrettably, I now feel like I do too when summer makes its annual debut.

The culprit is the wildfire smoke blanketing Minnesota again and again, turning blue skies to apocalyptic yellow, with ash coating cars and windowsills in some of the hardest-hit areas of our state. The gloomy haze...Read more

The war in Iran is nearing the five-month mark, and during that time at least 17 U.S. service members have been killed and more than 400 injured. Still, for the war President Donald Trump said would take “a few days,” there is not only no end in sight, but the stated objectives have yet to be accomplished.

That’s because Trump bypassed ...Read more

The summer travel period is here, with high passenger volume keeping airplanes filled, even as jet fuel prices remain high and ticket prices have spiked.

To add more angst to air travel, the first half of 2026 gave air travelers a rollercoaster ride of delays and disruptions. Whether it was Transportation Security officers not being paid due ...Read more

The United States — like all democracies — is centered around the basic premise that a representative system of governance reflects public preferences. This is not and has never been true, however.

As the left and right argue, the disproportionate influence of a select few suppresses the will of the majority. Interest groups play an outsize...Read more

Having died earlier this month after two decades in the Senate, Lindsey Graham is likely to be remembered for his roles in foreign policy and his imprimatur on Trumpism. For LGBTQ+ people especially, he may be remembered as the last closet case.

There is no verified public evidence of Graham’s sexual orientation. He consistently denied the ...Read more