1997—By a vote of 4 to 3, the Ohio supreme court rules in DeRolph v. State that Ohio’s existing system of financing its public-school system violates the state…
President Trump has cast another mail ballot in Florida as he continues to publicly bash the voting method as a source of fraud and push Congress to curtail the practice.
Ours is an era in which elected officials, like public figures more generally, have by and large abdicated their responsibility to model good behavior. Once, politicians felt compelled by the sweeping visibility of their office to demonstrate an outward sense of virtue, decorum, and etiquette. It would have been inconceivable for President John F. Kennedy […]
The Netflix series Death by Lightning offers a compelling, dramatic look at James Garfield‘s rise to the presidency. It also explores the journey of Charles Guiteau, the man who assassinated Garfield when the newly elected president refused to give him a job in the administration under the “spoils system” that took shape over the previous […]
China’s people, as is sometimes said, are “trying to breathe,” hoping to find some freedom from central control. Four female college students in the central city of Zhengzhou tried to breathe in June 2024 as they decided to take an overnight 50-kilometer bike ride to Kaifeng, where they could enjoy a meal of soup dumplings. […]
It goes without saying that a person who is or was a famous millionaire is unlikely to elicit sympathy, but sometimes such individuals can break our hearts, despite our prejudices against them. On the strength of his stellar new Hollywood drama, Jay Kelly, Noah Baumbach understands this irony better than most. The movie, which debuted […]
As a lifelong resident of rural America, I have grown accustomed to the media periodically sending journalists out to low-population areas to discover what is wrong with us, particularly after elections that Republicans win. In Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide That Threatens Democracy, political scientists Suzanne Mettler and Trevor E. Brown continue the tradition, […]
Ask someone to explain what “revolution” is, and there’s a decent chance they will reply that, though they can’t offer a precise answer, they know it when they see it. This nebulousness, according to Donald Sassoon, is innate to the concept. No “strong definition” is possible; at best, like “most complex phenomena,” it can only […]
And so this is Christmas, and for those of us who’ve spent decades hunting down every scratchy demo, rehearsal, studio outtake, telecast, or concert the Beatles and solo Beatles ever laid down, it’s a special one. The season heralds the release of Anthology 4, a new album and documentary of Beatles rarities and oddities. Nobody […]
I have been a professional writer for nearly 40 years and have been giving speeches and appearing occasionally on television for two decades. Since 2004, off and on, I have recorded a weekly audio commentary on the entertainment business, broadcast for the first 16 years on Los Angeles public radio, then independently as a podcast. […]
Erika Kirk plainly doesn’t need our help in confronting the conspiracy-mongers and other trolls who exploit her husband’s assassination with no regard to his...
