When our son, Naser, was 6 years old, he wanted to be called Kevin, a perfectly reasonable Midwestern name. This seems to be a rite of passage with children, to name and rename themselves.

But our son was not to know the agonies we went through to name him, honoring our respective South Asian and South American cultures and balancing the ...Read more

As a species, humans possess a kind of superpower: the ability to survive on a remarkably wide variety of foods, allowing us to thrive everywhere from the Amazon rainforest to the Arctic tundra.

Now, thanks to social media, our dietary range is being tested again. TikTok and YouTube have made stars of influencers who tout — often with the ...Read more

During the 2013 government shutdown I happened to be in Philadelphia, and I was surprised to find that the Liberty Bell — which sits in its own little room with big windows — was “closed.” You could stand there and look at it, but only through tourist-smudged glass.

This time around, the Liberty Bell Center and other buildings that are ...Read more

On Friday, the United States destroyed what the Defense Department alleged was a boat affiliated with the National Liberation Army, a Colombian rebel group, using the Southern Caribbean to smuggle drugs into the country. The latest operation, which reportedly killed three people, is the seventh since the aerial campaign began in September. It ...Read more

Oh my god, you guys! Did you hear about that brat Katie Porter? Swear to God on a stack of holy Bibles, she is such a mean girl! She can never be governor of California! And she's not gonna make fetch happen, either!

All right, can we please grow up for a minute here?

Like a lot of ambitious politicians, Katie Porter, the former Democratic ...Read more

Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard as its foundation, the administration of President Donald Trump has taken a number of steps in the name of merit-based admissions, with a stated goal of advancing a more meritocratic higher education system.

Not only has the administration attacked ...Read more

I was struck, no, dumbfounded by this: Debt funded all federal government spending in 2025.

The federal government plans to spend a total of $7 trillion in fiscal 2025 but only bring in $5.16 trillion in revenue. That leaves a deficit of approximately $1.8 trillion. The big four expenditures — Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, debt interest...Read more

We spend a lot of time talking about the problem of polarization in today’s politics. If you get right down to it, however, most of that happens, well, at the fringes — either end of the pole, if you will.

What’s more normal, in our experience, is for the average American to question whether either political party cares about regular ...Read more

Schemes of national governance are complicated and subject to generalization, but for the sake of argument, let’s put “democracy” at one end of a spectrum and “autocracy” at the other and consider the bright line that separates them?

There isn’t one. In fact, since 1997 the Center for Systemic Peace has maintained a 21-point scale ...Read more

The price of gold has hit one record after another this year, and if the past is any guide, the precious metal’s wild ride means bad news could be on the way.

Gold is the doomsday prepper’s favorite commodity, a store of value for difficult times. In the 1970s, gold prices shot up alongside runaway inflation and the end of a system that ...Read more

In the 1987 book “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” Donald Trump introduced the notion of “truthful hyperbole,” which he called an “innocent form of exaggeration and very effective form of promotion.” The idea is to use sensational imagery or language to get attention and generate excitement — regardless if it has anything to do with ...Read more

LAS VEGAS — Aaron Mahan is a lifelong Republican who twice voted for Donald Trump.

He had high hopes putting a businessman in the White House and, although he found the president's monster ego grating, Mahan voted for his reelection. Mostly, he said, out of party loyalty.

By 2024, however, he'd had enough.

"I just saw more of the bad ...Read more

If you’re faced with a serious disease, you better hope it’s not a rare one.

After an often tortuous path to diagnosis, people with rare diseases are likely to find that good treatment options don’t exist and none is on the horizon. Many of these conditions are poorly understood, and conducting studies in tiny patient populations can be ...Read more

As the White House threatens to send the National Guard into more U.S. cities, its rationale seems to vary by place — and by day. In some instances, it’s to fight crime. In others, it’s to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Either way, it’s a bad idea: To the extent those problems are legitimate, they’re better ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Some witty person long ago gave us this immortal line: “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”

Humorist Will Rogers usually is credited — wrongly. Mark Twain, too, falsely.

The real author was Gideon J. Tucker, a former newspaper editor who founded the New York Daily ...Read more

Restaurant owners talk about how hard it is to survive, but they keep one gripe pretty much to themselves because the public might take offense: They’d like us to act more like our parents and less like the tourist who backed into and damaged a painting while taking a selfie at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy.

To put it in gentler ...Read more

Being a millionaire isn’t what it used to be. This isn’t a lament, it’s a fact: As Bloomberg News reported recently, almost one-fifth of U.S. households have a net worth of more than $1 million. Fully one-third of them have gained that status since 2017.

There is, however, an important caveat to this data, which is through 2023: Most of ...Read more

In the first week of October, with the government shutdown underway, the Senate confirmed President Donald Trump’s nominee to head up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Neil Jacobs.

Jacobs, who served as the acting under secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere during the first Trump Administration, is best ...Read more

Banned Books Week just ended, but the fight it highlights continues every other week of the year. This year’s theme was Censorship is So 1984: Read for Your Rights, invoking George Orwell’s famous novel to warn against the dangers of banning books.

It was a powerful rallying cry. But now that the week has ended, we need to face two ...Read more

President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are vigorously fighting for a world where your health care costs more, covers less and gives even greater power to private insurance companies.

That is not good for you. It is not good for America. You deserve a health care system that is universal, affordable and humane — one in which ...Read more