The end of a calendar year is always a good time to reflect on the time that has passed. We’d like to share our reflections on the 12 months of messages we have been privileged to share with you through the pulpit of the opinion pages.

We begin with the obvious: 2025 was a year of major setbacks.

Following the inauguration of a new ...Read more

Susie Wiles was right about one thing.

In a revealing Vanity Fair article, President Donald Trump’s chief of staff said he thinks “there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing. Zero. Nothing.”

Trump confirmed it by having his handpicked board rename one of the nation’s most cherished memorials “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy...Read more

As usual when Donald Trump occupies the White House, 2025 condensed a decade’s worth of political upheaval into a single year. Identifying the most important of those developments is like picking through the wreckage to find a few family heirlooms after a tornado has torn through the neighborhood.

But in the swarm of conflicts, controversies,...Read more

I was one of the researchers in the well-known Stanford prison experiment in 1971, demonstrating the destructive dynamics that are generated when one group of people — randomly assigned as “guards” — is given near total power over a group of “prisoners.” In six short days, inside a simulated prison environment, authoritarian forms of...Read more

We’re once again approaching the annual resetting of the Doomsday Clock. Last January, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a group of very smart people, moved the hands of their metaphorical clock to 89 seconds to midnight, where midnight represents doomsday, apocalypse, Armageddon, extinction, or whatever you ...Read more

It seems we’ve decided the humanities have less to give the human race — or more modestly, this country’s future — than the sciences.

This is a serious mistake. The sciences and the humanities are different faces of the human search for knowledge and not the opposites we have turned them into. If you hamstring one, you hamstring the ...Read more

You may have only recently heard about Demis Hassabis. He’s been named one of Time magazine’s “AI architects,” won a Nobel Prize for using the technology to predict protein folding and runs Google’s AI efforts. When the search giant acquired his company DeepMind in 2014, he embraced his new employer’s vast resources to build machines...Read more

President Donald Trump spent much of 2025 squandering the public’s support on what was once his best issue: immigration. Yes, he quickly delivered on his campaign promise to secure the southern border. But as the year unfolded, his anti-immigrant agenda drove immigration policy far beyond where most Americans are willing to go.

Trump has ...Read more

A week or so before Christmas, Sacramento police descended on a residential block in a Latino neighborhood in California's capital city, closing it off on either end.

Then the party started.

Undocumented families filled the street for a posada, a Latin American Christmas tradition akin to a roving block party, with music, food and an ...Read more

Having watched Chicago’s City Council rebel against his budget — to some extent, anyway — Mayor Brandon Johnson is now focused on the matter of how (and if) the city collects its past-due debts. It’s one of the last weapons against the alternative budget he has in his quiver.

Noting the eye-popping $8 billion currently owed to the city,...Read more

Last week, Australia’s social media ban for children under age 16 officially took effect. It remains to be seen how this law will shape families' behavior; however, it’s at least a stand against the tech takeover of childhood. Here in the U.S., however, we're in a different boat — a consensus on what's best for kids feels much harder to ...Read more

Last week the Supreme Court gave the country one notable gift in blocking the Trump administration’s efforts to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, part of a campaign of intimidation that has seen troops deploy now to various (invariably heavily Democratic) areas.

Six justices said no to Trump, Chief John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena ...Read more

The United States Postal Service has reached a pivotal moment. Challenged by technological disruptions and constrained by outdated regulations, it is in the midst of a major restructuring plan to modernize operations, achieve service excellence and survive financially.

But to enable its transformation, the Postal Service urgently needs ...Read more

As winter settles in and daylight fades early, Americans long have turned to books for comfort, curiosity and company. The good news this holiday season is that the bookstores which make that habit possible are rebounding, too.

In the late 1990s, many book lovers often looked with scorn upon the likes of Barnes & Noble and the now-defunct ...Read more

President Donald Trump's executive order directing states to deploy artificial intelligence in foster care isn't just welcome—it's overdue.

The provision calling for "predictive analytics and tools powered by artificial intelligence, to increase caregiver recruitment and retention rates, improve caregiver and child matching, and deploy ...Read more

At a recent peaceful Hanukkah celebration of Australian Jews at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, two gunmen opened fire on families who were singing, laughing, eating festive food and enjoying fellowship. Fifteen innocent people were killed, and more than 50 were wounded.

The mourning has begun, but the anger and alienation felt by the Jewish community...Read more

“I’m not really fearful anymore,” Mary Wood told me. Wood, 49, doesn’t dodge uncomfortable topics. But I’m unsure how much to credit this claim. Over dinner in late November at a chain restaurant near her home outside Columbia, South Carolina, she recalled the “constant state of fear” that enveloped her in February 2023 when she ...Read more

Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski’s appeal to Gov. Ron DeSantis and President Donald Trump to pause immigration enforcement during the holiday season is the humane thing to do — in a situation that has become increasingly inhumane.

Wenski, who has long been active in immigration issues in Miami, made his pitch Monday on behalf of the Bishops ...Read more

"As far as human nature is concerned, with panic comes irrationality."

This simple statement by Professor Steve Calandrillo and Nolan Anderson has profound implications for public policy. When panic is highest, and demand for reactive policy is greatest, that's exactly when we need our lawmakers to resist the temptation to move fast and ban ...Read more