“”Should Brazil keep its Amazon tribes from taking the lives of their children?” is the subtitle of a recent article in Foreign Policy. It describes traditional but still-existent customs of many Amazon tribes in Brazil that dictate kill...

You may have heard about actor Robert De Niro’s standing O performance at last night’s Tony awards. It was bleeped from the broadcast but is readily available:

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One of the things that struck me about this article excoriating Alan Dershowitz for his recent defense (not support, but defense) of Trump is that author Elie Mystal doesn’t actually engage in any detail with the substance of Dershowitz’s arguments.

Mystal’s attack on Dershowitz (and Trump, for that matter) is ad hominem....

Only thing is—the Economist thinks the Times hasn’t been hard enough on Israel.

Actually, the article in question from the Economist is about language, in particular, the “weasel voice” of evasion (it’s part of a continuing “Johnson” series about words/grammar in journalism, named after Samuel Johnson).
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Unlike Watergate, the current crisis in government/spying/politics doesn’t have a memorable name. But for those of us who lived through Watergate, it has a certain resonance with that event as well as major differences, imparting a strange sense of familiarity, dislocation, and increasing alarm.
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On Thursday Bill Cosby was found guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand for acts committed in 2004.

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When you do away with guns, you apparently get more knives. It stands to reason.
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Retired SCOTUS Justice John Paul Stevens (who is now 97 years old) has written a NY Times op-ed piece calling for the elimination of the Second Amendment. The reason he gives is this:

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What do these three things have in common: the recent Biden vs. Trump war of threatening words, the Dozens, and Inuit song duels? They’re all ways that people threaten each other in an almost-comical way, in which the real competition is about who is being the wittiest and boldest in speech....

Richard Landes is a brilliant man who has worked tirelessly for close to two decades to expose the biases and distortions present in worldwide media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I also count him as a friend.

I’ve written about Landes and his work many times before. Among o...

Reading reports of so many high-profile murders by teenagers, it’s not unusual for people to assume that there’s been a big increase in killings by young people, both murder and suicide. But statistics tell a much more complex story.

To the question of whether there been a rise in teen suicide, the...

It’s highly likely that the Democrats had prepared a unified strategy in advance for reacting to the SOTU. It probably went something like this:

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The latest furor is over certain remarks that Trump is alleged to have uttered during a meeting about immigration with Dick Durbin, Lindsay Graham, and “other government officials.” His alleged remarks (some of which he has disputed) were criticized variously for both form and content:...

The recently-released Strzok/Page text messages reveal a pro-Clinton and anti-Trump bias on the part of Strzok and Page that got them removed from their respective positions. The texts made it difficult for them to be seen as part of an objective investigation of the very people for whom they had such...

In the wake of the recent spate of sexual offense allegations, particularly against politicians such as Roy Moore, “credible” and “credibly” have become the latest buzzwords.

Take this Politico piece, for example, written by a former Bush speechwriter named Matt Latimer [emphasis mine]:

In the wake...

I wasn’t very concerned about yesterday’s Virginia gubernatorial election results, because I figured that Northam (D) would win and it probably had more to do with Gillespie (R) being a poor candidate than anything else, plus I consider Virginia a purple state becoming ever more blue.

But the results in the state...