Opinion

My fellow veterans in the Facebook veterans group warned me not to write about the E4 Mafia. I should have listened. My most recent column contains errors so obvious that I absolutely deserve the ”What the hell is the matter with you?” messages from readers. I should have made sure I understood the NCO ranks […]

There’s probably a nicer way to put this, but I’m just going to come out and say it: People in the ancient world suffered from major anxiety disorders. It’s fashionable these days to think of the ancients as repositories of great wisdom. We’re not supposed to use words such as “primitive” and “ignorant” to describe […]

As a measure of how lefty my upbringing was, we had a portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hanging on the kitchen wall. My parents were ’60s activists-turned-urban pioneer social workers, my father a charter member of Missouri’s New Left, and my mother a Greenwich Village folkie by way of the bus from Jersey. And […]

Last month, the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez published his seventh novel, Until August. (The pedantic might suggest that at a slim 110 pages in suspiciously large type, it is more accurately described as a novella, but never mind.) There would be nothing especially remarkable about this, save that Márquez died almost exactly a […]

“Armed with a black belt in karate and a Ph.D. in philosophy, Patrick Swayze …” — do we even need the rest of that sentence? Could the capsule summary of the original 1989 Road House append any predicate that wouldn’t be awesome? “Ups production at the local cardboard factory.” “Attends George H.W. Bush’s inauguration.” “Gets […]

Lyndon Johnson once observed that “power is where power goes.” In his new book, Jared Cohen deftly explores what the most powerful men in the world do after the power is gone. Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House examines the post-presidential careers of seven very different former […]

There is a moment in Nicholas Shakespeare’s new biography of Ian Fleming in which one of the James Bond author’s female friends, not conquests, is quoted as saying that he harbored the ambition to be “the Renaissance ideal, the Complete Man.” Shakespeare has taken the second part of this for the subtitle of his study. […]

An engaged police force is an effective police force. This is why police departments across the country often run features on their social media accounts such as “Mug Shot Monday” or “Wanted Wednesday.” The thinking is, the more members of a community engage with police online, the more likely they are to trust and respect […]

Cities controlled by Democrats have decided that arresting criminals is too hard. It is much easier to turn their cities into surveillance states. California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that 480 surveillance cameras would be installed in and around Oakland. According to Newsom, “we’re equipping law enforcement with the tools they need to effectively combat criminal […]

Christine Blasey Ford has returned to the news with the recent release of her memoir, One Way Back. You’ll remember Ford as the lead protagonist of the smearing of Brett Kavanaugh at the eleventh hour of his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in September 2018, with evermore fantastical allegations that the longtime federal judge and six-times-vetted […]