In Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s great satire of journalism in general and foreign correspondents in particular, newspaper magnate Lord Copper sends a reporter to the African Republic of Ishmaelia to cover the crisis unfolding there. “We think it a very promising little war,” he declares. “A microcosm, as you might say, of world drama.” Phoebe Greenwood’s […]

Every year around this time, from about the age of 7 until I was 21, older people asked me the same question: “So,” they’d say with a genial chuckle, “are you ready to go back to school?”  I haven’t heard that question in about 39 years, but this week I heard it again for the […]

A federal judge ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to stop providing access to Medicaid enrollees' personal data to immigration officials.

When I was in fifth grade, I aced the Presidential Fitness Test. Not because I was some athletic prodigy — I was a large child who’d later become a big man — but because we had a pull-up bar at home. My parents had installed it in a doorway, and like my 5-year-old daughter today, […]