One of the great conceits of California is its place on the cutting edge — of fashion, culture, technology, politics and other facets of the ways we live and thrive.

Not so with Proposition 50.

The redistricting measure, which passed resoundingly Tuesday, doesn't break any ground, chart a fresh course or shed any light on a better pathway ...Read more

South Asians have played a prominent role in President Donald Trump's universe, especially in his second term.

Second Lady Usha Vance is the daughter of Indian immigrants who came to California to study and never went back. Harmeet Dhillon, born in India and a devout Sikh, is currently his U.S. assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights ...Read more

The 19th century “doctrine of maternal impression” held that a woman’s thoughts and experiences could physically mark her child. Someone born with a strawberry shaped birthmark must have had a mother who craved strawberries during birth. The family of Joseph Merrick, known as the Elephant Man, said publicly that his disability was caused ...Read more

Bravo to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and other Republican senators for refusing to even consider President Donald Trump’s demand to get rid of the filibuster that protects the rights of the chamber’s minority. It’s rare these days for the MAGAfied GOP to push back on the wannabe king of America.

Trump is eager to change the Senate ...Read more

A stunning new study offers early evidence that COVID-19 vaccines might have a secret superpower: a precisely timed mRNA shot could help many cancer patients live longer.

The work still requires validation, but the strength of the signal in the study — which analyzed differences in outcomes between cancer patients who did and did not receive ...Read more

President Donald Trump’s penchant for impulsively making sweeping policy decisions on the fly is one of his most unsettling personality traits. Whether it’s ever-shifting tariffs seemingly based on little but his moods, or demolishing part of the White House to construct a vulgar monstrosity of a ballroom without a word to Congress, or the ...Read more

Democrats continue to hold basic government operations hostage in an effort to extend expiring health insurance subsidies and prove Milton Friedman’s dictum that nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program.

They are pointing to new estimates that average marketplace plan premiums will increase by 18 percent next year to try to ...Read more

President Donald Trump’s attempt to consolidate federal enforcement agencies into a national, occupying police force has faced growing resistance in Chicago for several months. It’s a tale of escalating overreach and of local revitalization of democratic organizing. People are working together to protect each other and their neighborhoods ...Read more

Take a walk through any of Chicago’s 15 majority-Latino communities today, and the empty storefronts will tell you everything you need to know about the state of the economy. While the murals are still bright and the smell of fresh bread still drifts from the panaderías, the rhythm of daily business has slowed. On streets once packed with ...Read more

For the first time in more than a century, migrating salmon have climbed close to the headwaters of the Klamath River’s most far-flung tributaries, as much as 360 miles⁠ from the Pacific Ocean in south-central Oregon. The achievement is the clearest indication yet that the world’s largest dam removal project, completed on the river a year ...Read more

American entrepreneurs fuel this country through resilience, job creation and hundreds of billions of dollars in economic activity. Right now, they’re caught in the middle of a congressional standoff, and the economy is already showing signs of a steep decline. Millions of small-business owners and self-employed workers are bracing for what ...Read more

President Donald Trump is urging Senate Republicans to end the filibuster to bring the month-long government shutdown to a close.

That’s a really bad idea, and the Republicans know it’s a really bad idea. They told us so when Democrats threatened to end the cloture rule after President Joe Biden was elected, and they were frustrated that an...Read more

A few weeks ago, your humble columnist took issue with the Trump administration’s legal rationale for the ongoing U.S. military campaign against drug traffickers in the southern Caribbean.

At that time, there was very little information to go on. President Donald Trump and his advisers generally kept their constitutional arguments close to ...Read more

Last Friday, the Illinois General Assembly narrowly passed a law allowing terminally ill people to end their own lives.

The legislation now awaits Gov. JB Pritzker’s signature. If he signs it, Illinois will join 11 other states (and the District of Columbia) that allow terminally ill adults to choose when and how they want to end their own ...Read more

In 2016, Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, declared an economic emergency to confront the country’s spiraling financial crisis. What was billed as a temporary measure quickly expanded – and never truly ended. The “state of emergency” was renewed repeatedly, granting the president sweeping authority to rule by decree. Venezuela’s...Read more

Policymakers shaping America’s coal policy can learn something important from the 2025 economics Nobel Prize winners about creative destruction, the process by which new technologies replace older ones through innovation. Just as smartphones overtook flip phones and cars displaced horses, such progress has improved our daily lives.

Instead of...Read more

King Charles III’s decision to strip his brother, the former Duke of York, of his last title as a royal prince is widely viewed in Britain as coming a decade too late. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, as he now becomes, has been bringing shame on the royal family for so long that he should have been exiled years ago.

It is, of course, Andrew’s ...Read more

On Election Day, I awoke to no fewer than seven press releases from the National Republican Senatorial Committee tying Democratic Senate candidates to New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

It stands to reason. President Donald Trump’s job approval ratings are tumbling. Republicans control Congress. The economy is shaky. What better ...Read more