Every autumn, families flock to pumpkin patches and fall fairs in search of hayrides, corn mazes and seasonal fun. But tucked among the gourds and festive displays, many attractions also feature petting zoos and other hands-on animal encounters that pose serious risks to both visitors and animals. As pumpkin patch season gets underway, parents ...Read more

During back-to-school season, college students and their parents can easily overlook what should be a priority: vaccinations. For students who have missed recommended vaccines, college can be the moment when that decision suddenly has consequences.

Many colleges and universities require documentation of vaccinations such as MMR (measles, mumps ...Read more

Debate continues across the country on our nation’s energy future. What is our best energy policy going forward?

Several factors contribute to a higher standard of living, but one of the most important is access to reliable and inexpensive energy. Affordable energy is essential for almost every aspect of our modern lives. Without it, we ...Read more

The last thing President Donald Trump needs right now is another war brewing in the Middle East. But this is what Trump is getting at a time when he’s in a monthslong standoff with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz and as midterm elections, traditionally seen as a referendum on the first two years of a president’s term, are weeks away.

Over ...Read more

Every election now feels existential.

That's the word NYU law professor Richard Pildes used in a recent New York Times interview with Sarah Isgur: Many Americans on both sides of the political spectrum are convinced the country will never be the same if the other side wins. He points to a striking pattern. Since 2000, control of the House, the ...Read more

California has always hidden the true price of progress somewhere beyond the horizon.

The water arrives from a distant river. The electricity crosses a mountain range. By the time the benefits reach us, the damage has been assigned elsewhere.

Now the future is arriving in windowless buildings.

Data centers are rising from industrial corridors...Read more

Former Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan murdered 13 people and wounded 32 others at Ft. Hood, Texas, in 2009. His guilt is not in doubt. Nothing about his crime invites sympathy. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants Americans to watch him die.

After Hegseth announced plans to livestream Hasan’s Dec. 3 execution by firing squad, retired ...Read more

If you believe the artificial intelligence industry, they're thirsting for government regulation; at least, some of their leaders are.

OpenAI issued a whole "blueprint for democratic governance" of AI in June. Around the same time, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the AI firm Anthropic, called for "more serious and binding regulation of AI"...Read more

It’s a time-honored tradition for one generation to shake its head at the next, wondering if progress and technology have caused more harm than good. So it is now, with some prominent academics saying kids today need to be off their screens or unsupervised more often, as they were in simpler times.

As tempting as it is to look backwards, and ...Read more

This is what Maya Angelou had in mind when she wrote about “the dream and the hope of the slave.”

Meet Alexis Sims, Nia-Sarai Perry, Cori’Anna White, Aiyana Ringo, Alyssa Richardson, Sophia Davis and Mariama Diallo — a group of young Black women who personify academic excellence.

These are seven Spelman College graduates — better ...Read more

Last month, the White House announced that the United States and China had “operationalized” their new Board of Trade. The working procedures, however, say remarkably little about how the board is actually supposed to operate.

Years of tariff disputes between Washington and Beijing have produced many announcements. The Board of Trade is the...Read more

At the rape crisis center where I was trained in Chicago, we didn’t refer to the criminal justice system. We called it the criminal legal system: because justice, while aspirational, is rarely achieved. As an emergency room advocate, I was taught never to pressure survivors to report to the police, but simply to outline their options and ...Read more

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has a fantastic sense of humor. At a time when Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh has turned central bank “forward guidance” into a banned phrase, the academy awarded the Nobel Prize in economics to Michael Woodford, one of the intellectual fathers of the practice, and Robert Hall, whose research on ...Read more

One night in 2005, I sat in a church in Texas listening to a lecture by Helen Prejean, the prominent opponent of capital punishment. Her book about her work among death row inmates had been made into the film “Dead Man Walking.”

Mostly, Prejean was preaching to the choir. She talked convincingly about the brutality and futility of capital ...Read more

Russia’s war against Ukraine has become a test of American judgment. This weekend, Russian strikes in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region killed at least 20 people, including children, according to Ukrainian officials. At the same time, President Donald Trump called for Ukraine to get a new president, arguing that Volodymyr Zelenskyy has failed to...Read more

Math may not be popular, but it remains undefeated. That’s a problem when it comes to Social Security.

The Congressional Budget Office recently released its new long-term projections for Social Security. It shows that its trust fund will run out of money in 2032. Last year, Social Security collected tax revenues of more than $1.1 trillion. ...Read more

If America sold tap water the way it sells, say, eggs or gasoline, with the price right there in your face every time you consume it, then our national argument about inflation might have looked much different over the past decade.

That’s because tap water isn’t free, though it might seem that way whenever you drink it at a restaurant, ...Read more

Sometimes it’s the humble actions that matter, which is a lesson for our dangerous time. For years, I’ve volunteered to get out the vote for my preferred candidates. In one election, knocking on doors in a Seattle neighborhood, I spoke with three people who supported my candidate for governor but wouldn’t have voted had I not contacted ...Read more

Manufactured housing, colloquially known as the “mobile home,” has a reputation for low quality, but that stereotype is outdated. As states grapple with ways to relieve home prices for beleaguered residents, they need to rethink this option and clear the obstacles to constructing more of it.

Homes built to the modern Department of Housing ...Read more

Public comments quietly closed Oct. 6 in response to the proposed rescission of the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, an undercelebrated piece of federal legislation that has protected about 58.5 million acres of roadless areas across our National Forest System. That’s about one-third of the 193 million acres that make up our national ...Read more