The Democrats’ Debate Debacle

Presidential primary debates are increasingly must-see TV. Voters tune in to watch candidates answer (or dodge) questions, and each debate...

Should Noncitizens Be Represented in Congress?

The Supreme Court Tuesday will hear oral arguments in the Trump administration’s appeal of lower-court orders forbidding it to ask a citizenship...

Behind the Easter Sunday Attacks in Sri Lanka

Islamist suicide bombers blew themselves up in three Roman Catholic churches and three luxury hotels on Easter morning in Sri Lanka, killing 290...

Trump Takes Aim at Caracas and Havana

As Washington and Moscow face off over Venezuela, the Caribbean has become a focal point for global politics for the first time since the Cold War....

The Resurrection of Notre Dame

Easter Sunday found Paris especially joyful. Even as the French mourned their wounded cathedral, they took comfort from a promise made by President...

The Most Telling Impeachment Poll

When asked by a reporter at the White House on Monday if he’s worried about impeachment, President Donald Trump responded, “Not even a little...

‘Early Rubens’ Review: The Bedrock on Which to Build

San Francisco Not all great artists starve. The smashing success enjoyed by the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), who was also an...

God Bless Kate Smith

I noticed my grandfather’s eyes shining with tears as he read the paper at breakfast one day in 1986. He was a retired police chief who almost...

‘How the Classics Made Shakespeare’ Review: The Bard and Antiquity

Eulogizing Shakespeare in 1623, Ben Jonson mischievously noted that the departed author had “small Latin and less Greek.” That perplexing dig...

Jamie Dimon’s Timely Warning

Socialism is now woker than a two-for-one Che Guevara T-shirt sale, with Bernie Sanders leading the Democrats’ presidential primary polls and...

‘The Moment of Lift’ Review: One Target for Smart Giving

Growing up as the daughter of an Apollo-program engineer, Melinda Gates spent her childhood watching space launches. She became fascinated by the...

Socialism vs. ‘the Person’

This week Roman Catholics mark the octave of Easter, a time when the glory of the Resurrection fills believers with anticipation of good things to...

Requiem for a Childhood Friend

Returning to my office after lunch, I heard a phone message from someone whose name rang a distant bell. The caller identified himself as Alan...

Anti-Semitism at NYU

‘I went to NYU so long ago, it was in the Bronx,” my conservative Midwestern father once joked. He wasn’t thrilled to send his left-wing...

The Case for Monetary Regime Change

Since President Trump announced his intention to nominate Herman Cain and Stephen Moore to serve on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors,...

‘Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock & Roll’ Review: Striking the Right Chord

New York Chuck Berry’s hollow-body Gibson ES-350T electric guitar, with its meticulously polished, natural maple finish and its simple but, for...

Why Should Congress See Trump’s Tax Returns?

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal has demanded that the Treasury turn over six years of President Trump’s tax returns by April...

Jailing CEOs to Please the Masses

Elizabeth Warren was one of my best law-school professors, but her political ambitions seem to have suppressed her once-reasonable instincts,...

Gambling Will Take Over TV Sports

Folks in the cable TV business aren’t taking any chances. When the Supreme Court last year struck down a federal law banning sports betting, they...

Decoding Sacrifice and Salvation

In his pioneering study of early Renaissance painting in the Netherlands, scholar Walter Friedländer characterized Rogier van der Weyden (c....

Obstruction of Nothing

Robert Mueller is certainly thorough. The special counsel makes clear across the 488 pages of his report released Thursday that he and his band of...

South Carolina’s Unlikely Crusader for Good Government

Columbia, S.C. Conservatives in South Carolina aren’t supposed to like Dick Harpootlian, the state’s two-time chairman of the Democratic Party...

City on a Hill—and Other Books to Read

Ivy Leaguers With Guns, Then and Now

‘Oh my God,” exclaimed Associated Press photographer Steven Starr on April 20, 1969—50 years ago Saturday—“look at those goddamned guns.”...

‘The Heartland’ Review: The View From the Middle

In the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995, both CBS and NBC affixed the tagline “terror in the heartland” to...

After 40 Years, C-Span’s Founder Signs Off

Washington ‘Lying is the word that I would use to describe this town,” says Brian Lamb, in his usual Midwestern deadpan. “I don’t know if it...

Mueller’s Report Speaks Volumes

By the fall of 2017, it was clear that special counsel Robert Mueller, as a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was too...

India’s Government Considers a ‘Muslim Ban’

Will India remain a secular state committed to treating all faiths equally, or will it morph into an explicitly Hindu nation whose Muslim minority...

Mueller Shouldn’t Have Taken the Job

Thanks to the work of special counsel Robert Mueller, we know that the Russian operatives who tried to interfere in the 2016 election “did not...

Out of the Ashes of Notre Dame

A few small observations on the fire at Notre Dame: It’s interesting where your thoughts go as you watch a disaster, live. Friends kept saying...

The Trump Effect Saves U.S. Soldiers From Runaway Prosecutors

For an administration reputed to be diplomatically inept, the Trump foreign policy team scored a big victory in The Hague last Friday that will...

Born Half Jewish, I Chose to Be Wholly So

On Friday night Jews around the world will recite the Passover haggadah, a celebration of the Jews’ liberation from slavery in Egypt and an...

Make New York Grow Again

On Wednesday this column noted the interesting coincidence that lightly taxed Nashville has been enjoying a population boom. Meanwhile readers will...

‘The Last Job’ Review: Once More Into the Vault

The prospect of death separates the terminally ambitious members of our species into two distinct groups: those who compose a bucket list of...

‘Gentleman Jack’ Review: A Woman of Substance

Set in 1832 Halifax, England, “Gentleman Jack” (Monday, 10 p.m., HBO) is based on the history and the several million words of an actual diary...

The Russia Probe Started With the Spies Who Marked Me

‘I think spying did occur,” Attorney General William P. Barr told a Senate subcommittee last Wednesday. He was speaking about the Federal Bureau...

‘Hadestown’ Review: A Musical Heats Up Broadway

New York Does the Broadway musical have a future? Only if a new generation of artists walks away from the old-hit-movie-into-stale-new-stage-show...

Bernie Sanders Could Win This Time

Despite any suggestions to the contrary, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s televised Fox News town hall on Monday did not come out of Bizarro World. In fact,...

The Fed and the Professor Standard

Real income for America’s bottom 90% reached an all-time high in 1999, and at the time Pew Research found that 81% of Americans agreed that free...

When’s the Next Housing Crisis?

A decade after the financial crisis, the government still maintains many of the same incentives that drove too much investment into residential...

Netanyahu Scores Another Victory for Likud’s Populism

Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election last week was more than a personal victory. The Likud Party, within which the prime minister emerged and which...

The Longest War Needs Fresh Thinking

Three American Marines and a civilian contractor were killed in Afghanistan last week, the latest casualties in America’s longest foreign war....

Escape From Collusion Hell

On Jan. 10, 2017, a news-and-entertainment website called BuzzFeed published the text of the Steele dossier. Simultaneously, most of the U.S. media...

At 100, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Is Forever Young

Los Angeles Symphony orchestras typically celebrate their milestone anniversaries by looking backward. The Los Angeles Philharmonic is doing things...

‘The Panic of 1819’ Review: Easy Money, Bad Decisions

Few will feel the urge to spray confetti in this year of the bicentennial of the 1819 panic. The wondrous thing, by Andrew Browning’s telling, is...