Have you noticed a lot of people turning 90 lately?OK, maybe not a lot. But President Biden, 80, is saying he plans to run for re-election in 2024. His fans are going to be super-aware of anything that suggests he isn’t all that old.I was thinking about this w... More »
Last week, the same Tennessee House of Representatives that had resisted expelling a Republican member accused of sexually assaulting three teenage girls — and who was recorded apologizing to one of them, never specifying what for — expelled two young Black re... More »
When women were first hired by the New York Fire Department in the early 1980s, no red carpet led to the red doors.As Suzanne Daley reported in The Times, one pioneer female firefighter recounted that the men in her company “slammed doors in her face, swore at... More »
We’ve talked plenty about how Donald Trump’s indictment and arraignment might affect his latest presidential bid. We’ve pondered their meaning for the future of the republic.But “whither America?” isn’t the question. Whither Ivanka? A fair-haired, fair-weather... More »
Donald Trump captured one thing correctly on Tuesday: It was “SURREAL.”His arraignment on felony charges was an anticlimactic spectacle, much of it conjured by ratings-starved television news, and the rest created by Trump himself.The wall-to-wall coverage of ... More »
Dear Zoomers,Because you’re online so much you probably saw the Wall Street Journal/NORC poll that came out this week. It found that the share of Americans who say patriotism is very important to them has dropped to 38 percent from 70 percent since 1998. The s... More »
This month, an elementary school in St. Petersburg, Fla., stopped showing a 1998 Disney movie about Ruby Bridges, the 6-year-old Black girl who integrated a public elementary school in New Orleans in 1960, because of a complaint lodged by a single parent who s... More »
DURHAM, N.C. — Within a few months of joining the faculty at Duke University in 2021, I could spot them: the high school seniors, juniors and even sophomores on their pilgrimages to our verdant and coveted wonderland, with its Gothic Revival spires, ecstatic b... More »
Thank goodness that Israel’s civil society has forced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pause, for now, his attempt to impose his control over Israel’s independent judiciary and gain a free hand to rule as he wishes. But this whole affair has exposed a new ... More »
WACO, Texas — In the first big rally of his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump didn’t dwell on the symbolism of speaking in Waco amid the 30th anniversary of the deadly siege there that still serves as a right-wing cri de coeur against federal authority.... More »
So I guess we’re in a new cold war. Leaders of both parties have become China hawks. There are rumblings of war over Taiwan. Xi Jinping vows to dominate the century.I can’t help wondering: What will this cold war look like? Will this one transform American soc... More »
One thing we can be sure of: If this Stormy Daniels thing hurts Donald Trump politically, it will be for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with sex.Nobody cares whether or not the two of them once had an, um, intimate assignation. Although I do enjoy rec... More »