The Bright Line Watch survey, affiliated with institutions including Dartmouth College, the University of Rochester, and the University of Chicago, isn’t just a warning siren — it’s an admission that democracy is already under assault. The full report and methodology are available at brightlinewatch.org. The question now is who’s ready ...Read more

Propelled into office on a pledge to deport undocumented immigrants in record time, President Donald Trump quickly overreached on immigration. After just 100 days, a majority (53%) disapprove of Trump’s handling of his signature issue, according to an AP-NORC poll.

The administration’s harsh deportation tactics make little distinction ...Read more

America’s “pronatalist” movement — a sprawl of fringe activists, think tanks and current occupants of the White House — is having a viral moment.

Vice President JD Vance publicly clamors for “more babies in the United States of America.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a memo urging his department to give precedence to...Read more

I first became fascinated by death when I was 8 and my mummy took me to the British Museum to look at the mummies. When, at a slightly older age, I began to study death and the ancient world, what struck me most, despite many fascinating cultural variants, was the uniformity, and limitation of the human imagination over the millennia vis-à-vis ...Read more

Markets have stabilized somewhat as President Donald Trump’s team negotiates trade deals with various nations and the White House tempers its more extreme instincts on tariffs. The White House could also make additional headway on the economy by moving faster to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.

Tax relief remains a winning issue for ...Read more

This should be an awkward week for Republicans, shouldn’t it? Their president, having plagiarized Ronald Reagan’s slogan of “peace through strength,” kept promising during the campaign that he’d end the war in Ukraine in one day.

Yet here he is passing his hundredth in office with the conflict still raging. What, if anything, can and...Read more

Hey, computer, leave them kids alone! We should start singing a new tune. Well, at least an old one with new lyrics. That’s because we’re finally seeing some momentum on getting cellphones out of America’s classrooms. It’s also happening in Europe.

Now is a good time to take it a step further. Let’s get rid of screens.

Businessman ...Read more

He didn’t say “please.”

See, that’s the funny thing about dictators. They don’t like being told what to do.

Mussolini wasn’t too fond of outside criticism when he was spreading facism throughout Italy in the 1920s and 1930s.

Idi Amin wasn’t exactly taking opinion polls when he used his brutal army to crush certain ethnic groups...Read more

President Donald Trump has made it clear since his first term that he's no fan of libraries, or books for that matter.

In addition to attempting to cut their funding then, he created a frenzy over drag queen story hours that were hosted by some libraries, and backed book banning in school facilities.

Like so much of the Trump 2.0 agenda, it ...Read more

Credit President Donald Trump with the stunning back-from-the-dead victory of the Canadian Liberal Party. Or put another way, Trump just lost a big election, with (North) Americans rejecting him after just 100 days in office.

Only months ago, it appeared that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s party was on the verge of a knockout by a resurgent ...Read more

Let's just presume for argument's sake that the Trump administration and its chief flunky at the Department of Health and Human Services are actually serious about identifying a definitive cause of autism by September, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said this month.

I know. That's a bit of a big ask, as they say. If they were actually serious about ...Read more

Nisha Acharya, an eye doctor and UC San Francisco professor, was at her campus clinic tending patients when a surprising email arrived.

Her federal research grant had just been terminated, according to a reporter for the Washington Post, who wondered if Acharya had any comment.

She was stunned. Her research, into the workings of the shingles ...Read more

Forget the wildfires, earthquakes, water shortages and all the other factors that place the California dream in doubt, according to pundits. Gov. Gavin Newsom has some good news, citing federal and international statistics: California has just moved up a notch to become the world's fourth-largest economy.

That happened because the state's gross...Read more

No words can better capture the reality in Gaza today than this: We are dying.

Every day, in every imaginable way, we die. Death comes by missile, by gunshot, by collapsed building, by lack of medicine and by fear. And now, once again, it will come by hunger as Israel has closed off humanitarian supplies— with the agreement of not just the ...Read more

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas has never done anything bad to President Donald Trump, as far as we know. In fact, she was his loyal White House press secretary for nearly two years. She runs a state that voted for Trump over Kamala Harris by a 30 percentage point margin.

But after a mid-March outbreak of tornadoes, high winds and ...Read more

Is there such a thing as a “real America”? A battle now rages over this simple question. Some Democratic party operatives claim the real America are so-called “Trump voters,” who they say they need to better “study” in order to win future elections.

Many Republican voices argue the real America are just those who support the new ...Read more

As Donald Trump completes the first 100 days of his second term, the consequences of his early health care decisions are already coming into view. Through executive orders and agency directives, his administration has set a clear national agenda: cut costs, shrink government, and reduce federal oversight.

History shows that decisions made ...Read more

This trade war is no ordinary crisis of the kind that buffeted capitalism periodically in the past few generations. It’s less a storm, Singapore’s deputy premier asserts, and more like “a tidal wave.” When leaders of a successful, trade-dependent nation talk this way, it demands attention.

And yet... for all its power, the analogy doesn...Read more

Ronald Reagan was wrong. The nine most terrifying words in the English language are not “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” They are: “The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice.”

This is a pretty phrase that was invented by a good person, Theodore Parker, and revived by another good one, Martin Luther King Jr....Read more