Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Articles”
“Each of the Republican candidates for the presidency declared last week that we should deal with school shootings by providing aggressive treatment of people with mental illness — not to alleviate the suffering of the mentally ill, but to protect other people from the mentally ill.” Andrew Solomon, “The Myth of the `Autistic Shooter,’ The New York Delusions are the belief in …
Giants once roamed the earth. Oceans teemed with ninety-foot-long whales. Huge land animals–like truck-sized sloths and ten-ton mammoths–ate vast quantities of food, and, yes, deposited vast quantities of poop. A new study shows that these whales and outsized land mammals–as well as seabirds and migrating fish–played a vital role in keeping the planet fertile by transporting nutrients from ocean depths …
Bernie Sanders’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination is in serious trouble. Yes, I know we still have almost three months to go before voting gets underway. Yes, I’m aware that all those unscientific click-bait Internet polls showed he “won” the Democratic debate two weeks ago. Yes, I have read all the stories about the size of the crowds he …
The retirement savings accumulated by just 100 chief executives are equal to the entire retirement accounts of 41 percent of U.S. families — or more than 116 million people, a new study finds. In a report scheduled for release today, the Center for Effective Government and Institute for Policy Studies found that the 100 largest chief executive retirement funds are …
A mostly neoconservative group of national-security analysts have published perhaps the first comprehensive outline of what they believe a Republican foreign policy should look like as of Inauguration Day 2017. It’s titled “Choosing to Lead: American Foreign Policy for a Disordered World.”Although it concedes that “there are limitations on American power,” according to the book’s “Forward” by former George W. Bush …
America’s founders believed education was insurance against loss of liberty. Jefferson said “(e)very government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render them safe, their minds must be improved…” Public education is vital because it serves the public interest – giving meaning to “we the people.” …
Benjamin Netanyahu’s bit of revisionist history about the origins of the Holocaust certainly deserves the outraged response it got this past week. One wonders why he chose to push this line given the well-established and easily cited historical fact — which many of his critics did cite — that the Nazi regime’s mass killing that would become known as the …
How a brilliant man’s profound ignorance became his greatest political asset. So it’s Ben Carson’s moment. He’s overtaken Donald Trump in a CBS/New York Times national poll and he’s ahead in Iowa now with the caucuses just three months away. The Times is writing nice profiles of him full of polite euphemisms like “lack of governing experience.” First we all got used to the idea that it wasn’t insane …
First pot, now health. In November 2012, Colorado voters approved a ballot initiative that made recreational use of marijunana legal, despite a federal ban. In November of next year, the state will have the opportunity to lead the way again—this time, by opting out of Obamacare and replacing it with ColoradoCare, a universal health care system governed by those who …
On October 6th, news reports heralded a historic development: The world’s largest incarcerator, the United States of America, was about to make the largest one-time release of prisoners in its history. The U.S. Justice Department announced that it would be releasing some 6,000 inmates from federal prisons before the end of their original sentences. It’s the first wave of an …
