Every fall, the American Library Association publishes a list of banned books during its Banned Books Week campaign. No book on this list is actually banned in the United States. Every single one can be bought “wherever books are sold,” as the slogan goes.  So, why does the ALA publish it? The short answer, I […]

The day after the odometer on his father’s 1973 Ford Maverick “turned over” from 99,999 to 100,000, my friend Scott skipped school for the first and probably last time in his life. Can you blame him? After all, everyone in our rather upscale suburb had seen the eight-year-old compact Ford rolling around at a walking […]

If 10 people had been arrested as part of a conspiracy to kill Internal Revenue Service agents or Environmental Protection Agency inspectors, and the crime scene had been littered with graffiti and flyers echoing Republican Party talking points, the New York Times would have made it front page news and would have immediately done detailed […]

A confrontation erupted Thursday between protesters and federal officials carrying out a raid on a Southern California farm, with authorities throwing canisters that sprayed what looked like smoke into the air to disperse the crowd.