Q. What do you call someone who speaks only one language?A. An American.It’s an old joke, but it still works. In fact, I’m monolingual myself, even though my academic work was largely focused on international trade and finance. In my defense, the great bulk of... More »
Foreign policy can make a mockery of moral certitude. You’re trying to master a landscape of anarchy policed by violence, where ideological differences make American polarization look like genial neighborliness, where even a superpower’s ability to impose its ... More »
Stormy was working blue, and the judge was seeing red.Justice Juan Merchan chided Donald Trump’s lawyer Susan Necheles, saying he didn’t understand why she hadn’t objected to seamy details about the President and the Porn Star spilling out.“Why on earth she wo... More »
Stormy was working blue, and the judge was seeing red.Justice Juan Merchan chided Donald Trump’s lawyer Susan Necheles, saying he didn’t understand why she hadn’t objected to seamy details about the President and the Porn Star spilling out.“Why on earth she wo... More »
It is unfortunate that President Biden chose to announce his pause of some weapons sales to Israel while on a political campaign swing through Wisconsin. I use that word — “unfortunate” — not because I don’t understand why Biden did so, but because the move ha... More »
During the 2016 Republican campaign, watching Donald Trump shoulder his way past his more pious rivals for the nomination, I remarked on the platform then known as Twitter: “If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.”This ... More »
In 2020 Joe Biden ran on the theme of saving the soul of America. Once he was president, he used the power of his office to help direct hundreds of billions of dollars through the infrastructure law and the CHIPS Act to the people and places that had been left... More »
MAGA Republicans say that America is in crisis: The economy is collapsing while the nation is being overrun by hordes of violent immigrants. Not true.But if that’s what you believe, you should be laser-focused on fighting the clear and present danger, right?In... More »
Mr. Kristof is the author of a new memoir, “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life,” from which this essay is adapted.More than three-quarters of Americans say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. This year, for the first time, America dropped out of t... More »
Are many young people distressed about the war in Gaza? Yes.Are they unhappy with President Biden’s approach to the war? Yes.Does this doom Biden’s re-election bid? Not necessarily.First, a Harvard Youth Poll released in April found that the two issues frequen... More »
Readers have been asking me, and I have been asking myself of late, how I feel about the campus demonstrations to stop the war in Gaza. Anyone reading this column since Oct. 7 knows that my focus has been on events on the ground in the Middle East, but this ph... More »
Before Pope Francis was elected, conservative Catholics had fallen into a habit of dismissing the more liberal form of Catholicism as an old and faded thing, a vision of the future that belonged to the church’s past, a relic of the 1970s that had little purcha... More »