Governing, the political sages tell us, is all about making choices, particularly when leadership faces finite resources and the choices are between war and peace; this is the "guns or butter" balancing raised by Lyndon Johnson's pursuit of the Vietnam War and, appropriately, by President Donald Trump's Iran war.

Thus far, according to budget ...Read more

Free child care is starting to take root in the U.S. But is it good for kids?

Last year, New Mexico became the first state to offer free universal child care. This year, New York began offering free child care for children ages 0-3 in certain cities, with a goal of reaching all children under 5 by 2028. Massachusetts has set its sights on ...Read more

On Monday, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court appeared poised to threaten voting by mail, as Washington and other states do it, during oral arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee.

This troubling development comes at the same time the RNC, with President Donald Trump’s backing, is pressing Congress to pass the Safeguard ...Read more

I was incredibly close to my grandparents. They were thoughtful, well-read and deeply engaged citizens who believed strongly in civic participation. They followed the news and took voting seriously.

Despite my curiosity and more than a few questions over the years, I still have no idea for whom they voted.

That was not unusual for their ...Read more

President Donald Trump’s disastrous war on Iran is weakening the United States, while presenting America’s principal adversaries, China and Russia, with a strategic opportunity to expand their global influence.

The war in Iran is already diverting U.S. attention and resources from Ukraine and East Asia at an alarming level, giving China and...Read more

The United States and Israel are devastating the parasitic Islamic regime that has squandered the wealth of Iran for decades and exported terror across the Middle East. Understanding the biggest losers in this war is just as important as any battle damage assessment on the rubble of government buildings in Tehran.

The third Gulf War is very bad...Read more

Australia led the charge on banning children under 16 from social media platforms such as Instagram and Tiktok, and now much of the Asia-Pacific region — with its young, tech-savvy markets — is eager to follow. The collective push will be impossible for tech platforms to ignore.

Indonesia plans to implement its restrictions later this ...Read more

A jury in Los Angeles may have just done for social media what early lawsuits did for Big Tobacco. Outside the courtroom, families who said they have lost children to the effects of these platforms gathered in shirts that read “We Are K.G.M.,” expressing solidarity with the 20-year-old plaintiff. Inside the court on Wednesday morning, the ...Read more

If there is a familiar refrain from the critics of President Donald Trump these days, it’s about his foreign policy excursions overwhelming his administration and preventing him from focusing on the economy and other domestic challenges, which register his approval rating at around 40%. Some of his MAGA loyalists are now questioning their 2024...Read more

As the U.S. president continues his quest to spread peace throughout the world, even if we have to “keep bombing our little hearts out” and threatening imminent war crimes in the process, it’s a good time for an update on the Nobel Peace Prize, don’t you think?’

The Nobel, or “the Noble,” as Trump sometimes types it in his ...Read more

Joe Kent is a cautionary tale.

When Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center to protest the Iran war, critics of the conflict — especially opponents of President Donald Trump — quickly cast the decorated military combat veteran as a principled dissenter. Superficially, that tracks. And yet those tracks are laid on ...Read more

As midterm elections approach in November, voters have one thing on their minds: Life is too expensive. Democrats are wise to campaign on “affordability.” Unfortunately, many of their ideas are likely to make matters worse.

Most poll respondents now rank some variant of “high prices” as their top concern, with good reason. Inflation, ...Read more

BP, the British oil major, has locked out roughly 800 union workers at its Whiting, Indiana, refinery after contract talks with the United Steelworkers broke down. This is no local matter. Whiting is the eighth-largest refinery in the nation, the largest in the Midwest, and a critical supplier of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel to the American ...Read more

The framed photo of César Chávez and Dolores Huerta sits in my personal office on a bookshelf crammed with volumes about California and the American West.

The two are at a 1973 United Farm Workers convention, presiding over the union they co-founded. After years of victories in the name of campesinos, the group and its charismatic leaders ...Read more

The attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, belongs to a terrifying new phase in the global surge in antisemitism that has shown its ugly face in recent months in the United States, Canada, Europe and of course at the massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney last December. A much larger tragedy was prevented in Michigan by a mix of quick ...Read more

Every time we stream a movie, upload photos, send emails or ask artificial intelligence to answer a question, the action feels effortless. The internet appears weightless — floating somewhere in an invisible “cloud.”

But the cloud is not weightless at all.

Behind every digital activity lies a vast physical infrastructure of data centers,...Read more

As it turns out, we aren’t quite so divided as a nation.

Again and again, surveys show that Americans agree that billionaires and corporations don’t need more tax breaks. We agree that we want quality, affordable health care, housing, child care and education. We agree that our children should not go hungry. We agree on equal rights for all...Read more

I am a proud Democrat, and I have always proudly supported Israel. And because I support Israel, I support the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, though my journey there has not been a straight line.

I was an AIPAC supporter from the late 1980s through 2017, when I stepped away over the organization’s opposition to President Barack ...Read more

From the moment Donald Trump began the first legacy-shaping lap of his 2.0 presidency, things started looking and feeling nothing like he wanted them to be.

Every day began feeling like a desperate uphill effort. Yet his polls kept tumbling downhill. So he began doing more of his usual things – bragging and making up whatever facts he needed ...Read more

In April 2022, my mother-in-law, Karla, went for a routine physical therapy visit for carpal tunnel pain. The clinic was full and nearly turned her away. Only after she insisted that something felt wrong did a therapist send her to the emergency room.

A CT scan revealed a mass in her brain.

Karla was 50 years old. She was a first-generation ...Read more