I regretted having children because children fundamentally altered my entire life in a way I never expected they would. For literally the first time in my life I was afraid of the future and unsure of what would happen next. I had willfully, foolishly, unthinkingly, given hostages to fortune. It was just the two of [...]
Those who make too much of Representative Ilhan Omar’s statement, and who are happy to gain some short-term win by conflating legitimate concern over Israeli influence with anti-Semitism, run the risk of permanently connecting the two terms... I was sitting under a huge oak tree on my college campus reading a political science textbook when [...]
How often have we not seen, even in our own lives, that actions we take to preserve something we cherish end up destroying that which we seek to protect? Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but the desire for security and the yearning for justice are forever the final refuge of tyrants. [...]
I had always thought it nonsense to believe in love at first sight. But that sophomoric conceit sank with that setting sun over the Venetian church spires that summer day in 1973. And with it was washed away that companion conceit that falling in love was something that could only happen between two humans… The [...]
President Trump has an uncanny knack for energizing his supporters and riling his adversaries, but to have a lasting positive impact on American society he will need to find a way to inspire a majority of the American people... Like most first-time visitors, I rambled as if in a trance through the temple complex at [...]
My concern was that once the shutdown began, it would be difficult to end it just as it is difficult to prevent a needless bloodbath once blood begins to spill. What most of the public—including most of my former colleagues in government service—don’t seem to understand is that this shutdown is unlike all those that [...]
I keep reminding myself to look beneath and beyond labels and remain focused on the individual. Because ultimately it is the individual who matters most and who is most deserving of praise or condemnation, affection or disdain. It is a surprisingly hard lesson to learn and to remember given the current political and cultural tensions [...]
President Trump’s decision to withdraw American troops from Syria, if it holds, is one of the few genuinely courageous acts of his presidency… My first thought when I heard that President Trump was finally taking our troops out of the quagmire called Syria was that he was not really serious. Given how frequently and unpredictably [...]
December 1969 (New Jersey) “Christmas,” the old priest snarled, “is an outrage!” He looked about the classroom, hoping to have awakened at least a few students. “Christmas violates the laws of nature and of man.” Some students seemed to be attentive, although it was mid-December and even talking about Christmas was too distracting when they [...]
On November 11, more than on any other day, we ought to remind ourselves that while some wars need to be fought, most don’t. We need to remember the horrors of World War I, and we need to remember the price young men and women pay whenever we allow ourselves to be duped into another needless [...]
Since I was a little boy, I have been taught that it is a sacred duty to vote. That if you don't vote, you have no right to complain—that true patriots care enough to vote, even if for a lesser evil. But how is it that the same system that dishes out the same unworthy [...]
We have all seen the scene at least once, although some of us have savored it perhaps dozens of times. The handsome, dynamic, misunderstood, modernizing young king, with his slender physique, slender beard, and even more slender morals, strutting about the banquet hall knocking the plates and goblets off the table in a drunken frenzy. [...]
Despite all the unfounded fear on the left and all the equally unfounded euphoria on the right, there will be no wholesale revamping by the Supreme Court of the liberal social order that is now deeply rooted in our culture and among our people. The conservative justices' ethos of evolution over revolution will forestall any [...]
Two questions should always be asked over and over again before security measures are implemented: At what point do security measures impede security? And at one point is a free people no longer free? It has been quiet recently here in the homeland. Terrorist bombs and other attacks continue unabated in the Middle East and sporadically in Europe, but it has [...]