Look at our spacious skies, whose blessings we welcome and whose blights we fear, as Mother Nature is both the goddess of the fruited plain and the governess of famine across the Plains. She can rain her fury upon us, but no foreign army dares descend from our ocean of a sky. No country is

Psychological trauma does not need a physical trigger. You do not have to be an eyewitness to evil to testify to its effects. You do not have to visit a killing field to speak of the forces that haunt the grounds and hallow the innocents beneath the ground: the survivors who died in the arms

An illiterate society has no heart, while an innumerate one has no head. The two are a license for the few to experiment with the many, to test a wealth of theories and to exhaust the nation’s wealth, to have the machinations to reduce people to machines, to have algorithms make us comply until we revolt

The brightness of a good idea is no less blinding than the darkness of a bad ideology. Either can enrapture the mind with visions of the Rapture: a mystical experience in which common sense yields to a singular sensation of certitude; in which what you feel is more important than what you know; in which

About that copy of the Constitution, the one written in invisible ink, where slander is lawful and silence is a form of self-incrimination, where speech is criminal and suspects must confess their crimes—this is the handiwork not of the Founding Fathers but the handmaiden of Big Brother. This is not the product of Philadelphia, but

Safe places are unsafe islands of the individual: an archipelago as disruptive as it is destructive, poisoning the grounds of our greatest institutions by encouraging each person to stand his ground, not in defense of the words others have a right to say but against any words a man or woman does not want to

Forget draining the swamp. Forget trying to conquer a city whose entrenchments and fortifications are more abstract than actual, whose spirit is as intemperate as its summertime  temperatures, whose history of war—from within and without—induces images of felled bodies and wounded soldiers, whose heat is unbearable and whose air is unbreathable, whose stench is a

To believe the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, every accusation against their enemies is true. Its truth is not a matter of evidence but an issue of their ability to evince—to divine—what is not there; to find penumbras, formed by emanations, in rights outside the Bill of Rights; to guarantee guilt by eliminating

Despite a $2.1 billion renovation of the United Nations, despite the modernization of the grounds and headquarters, I fear the area is as physically toxic as it is—and has always been—politically intoxicating. I fear the General Assembly Hall contains poisonous levels of carbon monoxide, resulting in dizziness, confusion, and euphoria among those who spend too

The Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee should surrender their law degrees and reimburse (with interest) Yale and Georgetown, respectively, for their commission of fraud. The schools are the victims in this case, unless, through a combination of collusion—a word weaponized for political warfare, dripping from the lips of every would-be prosecutor and pretend