It was the “belly tap heard around the world.”

When former President George W. Bush gave his successor Barack Obama the playful tap at Jimmy Carter’s state funeral in January, the interaction went viral.

Why should a simple act of civility among people of different political backgrounds be so noteworthy?

Unfortunately, we have become ...Read more

President Donald Trump has not yet completed 100 days in office, but for Democratic governors, the shadow primary for 2028 is underway as they test messages and search for ways to flip the script from the defeatism of their party in Congress.

Into this fray has stepped Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a progressive billionaire pitching his potent ...Read more

The arrest and recent imprisonment of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu sent shockwaves through Turkey, marking a decisive shift toward full autocracy. On March 19, police officers — acting on instructions from the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP — detained İmamoğlu. By Sunday, the popular opposition figure was imprisoned — ...Read more

“I’m a veteran and you don’t give a f— about me! … You don’t get to take away our rights. You don’t get to do this to us!” These were the words of disabled veteran Jay Carey before sheriffs hauled him out of a Republican town hall in Asheville, North Carolina.

At a town hall in Kootenai County, Idaho, Teresa Borrenpohl spoke up ...Read more

Jeff Pearlman is one of the most successful sportswriters of his generation. His must-read articles appeared in Sports Illustrated and ESPN in the 2000s before he switched over to penning best-selling books on everything from Bo Jackson to the 1986 New York Mets to the Showtime-era Lakers, the latter which was turned into the recent HBO series "...Read more

On March 5, the mayors of Boston, Denver, Chicago and New York were summoned to Congress to justify their cities’ sanctuary status. The mayors’ explanations were interrupted by questions rooted in inaccurate, racist stereotypes about undocumented immigrants, but they stood their ground.

“I am here to make sure that the city of Boston is ...Read more

In a sweeping “Dear Colleague” letter in February, the U.S. Department of Education claimed that in the last four years, our educational institutions “have discriminated against students on the basis of race, including white and Asian students.” To combat this discrimination, the letter asserts that educational institutions must halt ...Read more

In trying to distract from their alarming incompetence of having Jeff Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, in their Signal group chat about bombing Yemen, top Trump administration officials lied that there were no military secrets divulged to Goldberg.

That collapsed this week when Goldberg published the details of the strikes, ...Read more

I feel like I spend all of my time lately beating up on the Trump administration. But as they say in the military, it’s a target-rich environment.

The Trump team’s latest offense is also its most dangerous — a group chat on the encrypted, but unclassified, text messaging app Signal, finalizing the details of an attack on Houthi rebels in ...Read more

The Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, led by an unelected billionaire and supported by the Donald Trump administration, continues its bulldozer approach to our federal government.

As we careen forward, an essential food for thought is an awareness of the global and historical perspectives that underscore how our current leaders' ...Read more

Evenings in our house oscillate between routine and existential. I prefer the ones where we mostly muddle through the mundane, and the ever-present threat to health and to normalcy goes largely unobserved, acknowledged only in the subtle ticking of insulin metered out by my 6-year-old daughter’s pump into her body.

Every few nights we change ...Read more

This month marked the end of my 16-year career with the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance. Like thousands of other federal workers, I was dismissed without warning or explanation. In my time at USAID, I led response teams helping people during wars and after natural disasters around the world, on ...Read more

Count me in the ranks of those who have quit Tesla.

Three years ago my wife and I bought a Model Y, Tesla’s small SUV. I was particularly intrigued by a car that ran on electricity, not gas. Living in Fresno, California, in one of the nation’s most polluted air basins, meant that driving an EV, with its zero emissions, would be my small ...Read more

One of my favorite stories is "The Butterfly and the Tank," a powerful novella written by Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway. First published in Esquire magazine in November 1938, the piece is based on Hemingway’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War.

In it, Hemingway exposes a chilling truth about human nature: the greatest ...Read more

The world found out shortly after noon eastern time on March 24 that the United States’ March 15 bombing of Houthi targets across Yemen had been discussed just before it happened on the private messaging platform Signal among U.S. national security officials. Jeffrey Goldberg, a journalist from The Atlantic magazine, had been inadvertently ...Read more

Freedom of speech. Due process under the law.

They sound good, don’t they?

They’re the twin pillars of a free society and a free university. And they’re both under assault from President Donald Trump’s administration.

The only way for universities to fight back is to join hands around these principles. Everything else is just a ...Read more

Washington is aflutter with the latest Trump “gotcha,” this one involving the revelation that White House officials mistakenly included a journalist on a group chat about potential American airstrikes against rebels in Yemen. It’s not a good look for the administration, but it also doesn’t appear to be the massive scandal that Democrats ...Read more

The Defense Department has been roiled by the Donald Trump administration’s desire to root out diversity, equity and inclusion programs his administration believes are divisive and unfair. This has manifested itself in closing offices focused on DEI; rescinding a variety of internal directives; restoring the names of military bases originally ...Read more

Imagine you’re a senior manager for a company. You and other members of your corporate braintrust, working in different locations, hop on a group text to discuss strategic plans relating to your chief competitor, but you mistakenly add to the group a business reporter with whom you’ve spoken in the past. That reporter then blows the cover on...Read more