“Why has there never been a woman president?” my 8-year-old daughter, Lotus, asked me in 2008 when Barack Obama became our first Black president. It was such a thought-provoking question it inspired me to write a whole book of interviews to explore the answers. Sixteen years later, Lotus said sadly, “I’m still asking the same question at...Read more

Remember the story about the elephant seen from different perspectives? Here’s a twist.

A biologist with a telescope peered at the animal and said, I see a hairy grayness horizon to horizon.

A toenail fungus specialist examined its feet, and prescribed antibiotics.

A climate change specialist didn’t see the elephant because he was fixated...Read more

Jolayne Houtz and Hector Martinez lost their 19-year-old son in 2019. And like many parents who have had that experience, they vowed to keep his memory alive. The Bellevue couple used the enormous personal tragedy of their son's death to help thousands of others.

Samuel Martinez died after being hazed as a Washington State University freshman ...Read more

No one loves the Internal Revenue Service, but we need the much-maligned agency having enough resources to make sure that everyone pays their fair share of taxes to support Uncle Sam and Republicans should not slash that funding.

For a brief moment, the IRS had the full breadth of resources it needed to investigate wealthy tax cheats, courtesy ...Read more

Across the country, a growing anti-college sentiment has been gaining momentum, positioning itself as an inclusive alternative to traditional views of success. The movement has led more high schools to promote alternative career paths and even revise their missions to exclude any mention of college.

This anti-college push comes from reasonable...Read more

Life in an animal shelter for dogs and cats and other creatures that have the misfortune to end up there is never great. They can languish for months, waiting to be adopted out to what animal advocates hope will be a “forever home.” Or worse, they can end up killed — or as shelter officials prefer to call it, “euthanized.”

Los Angeles...Read more

As an L.A. native and a professional traveler, I know getting a ride to LAX is rarely fun. But even I was tested in summer 2023 after an Uber and then a Lyft canceled on me when I needed to be at the airport in an hour and a half.

Trying not to throw up for fear of missing my flight, I drove myself to the familiar parking lot next to the In-N-...Read more

Everyone wanted to come to California — that was the generational backdrop of my parents and grandparents. Then, in the 1950s, housing was so abundant that a family of rural Norwegian immigrants could scrape together $8,500 to buy (yes, buy, not rent) the bungalow in Glendale where I spent much of my childhood.

Now, according to Zillow, that ...Read more

Defeated Democrats have once again embarked on a pointless, post-election pursuit of their political Holy Grail – finding the votes to eliminate the Constitution’s Electoral College.

It’s never going to happen, but that hasn’t stopped three Senate Democrats from introducing a purely political amendment to change the election of ...Read more

Working outdoors in Florida is dangerous, but laborers who do back-breaking work to maintain our homes, businesses and lifestyles deserve basic protections against the brutal heat.

Instead, the state tolerates this silent killer as a price for doing business. The state and federal governments need to enforce reasonable, new safeguards to ...Read more

Let’s stipulate this up front: The Des Moines Register’s poll of the presidential race in Iowa that was published just days before the election was miles off the mark.

The poll, overseen by veteran pollster Ann Selzer, shockingly had Democrat Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by three points in a state everyone assumed Trump would win ...Read more

David Walker ran the Government Accountability Office for a decade, under both a Republican and Democratic president. Elected officials should take him seriously when he warns that the nation is headed for fiscal blowup.

“The fuse has been lit on our debt bomb,” Walker, who led the GAO from 1998 until 2008, told members of the House Budget ...Read more

U.S. educators better hope Santa doesn’t check test results. New results from an international comparison of K-12 students showed they continue to fall behind their peers around the world. If American students are to bounce back, policymakers nationwide need to ignore the calls for lower—yes, lower—standards coming from some sectors and ...Read more

Because it’s apparently too hard to cut the carbon emissions heating up the planet, many countries plan to sweep much of their pollution under the rug instead. This might be fine, except the rug will have to be comically, unrealistically large — the size of the entire U.S., according to a new study.

The net-zero promises made by 140 ...Read more

President-elect Donald Trump received more than 77 million votes after having been held liable by a jury for sexual abuse in a civil case. (His previous election victory, in 2016, followed the release of a tape in which he bragged about groping women.)

In turn, Trump has nominated men for some of the most important positions in government — ...Read more

“I’m just waiting to start hearing methane explosions like they do in Russia,” says Bethel, Alaska, City Council Member Mark Springer. Until recently he and his wife would pick summer berries on a trail through the tundra outside their river town in southwest Alaska, but now that part of the tundra is too dangerous to traverse since water-...Read more

When George Lai of Portland, Oregon, took his toddler son to a pediatrician last summer for a checkup, the doctor noticed a little splinter in the child’s palm.

“He must have gotten it between the front door and the car,” Lai later recalled, and the child wasn’t complaining. The doctor grabbed a pair of forceps — aka tweezers — and...Read more

When the Nobel committee recognized Han Kang in October for her body of work exploring “the fragility of human life,” it could not have known how relevant the theme would feel in South Korea just two months later.

Han, the first Korean writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, has long been interested in the existence of the victims of ...Read more

This holiday season brings an extra reason to be joyful: A recent poll found that Americans’ belief in the existence of a “War on Christmas” has fallen dramatically since 2022, to 23%. Peace on earth and mercy mild!

Perhaps with the ongoing “invasion” of our southern border, Fox and other conservative networks have decided that it’s...Read more

The idyllic holiday scene — piles of presents, smiles all around — rarely matches reality. Who among us hasn’t faced the awkward silence of a gift that falls flat? Who hasn’t been disappointed by one we’ve received?

Why then, do we get it wrong so often? Why are we so bad at giving gifts? I’ve researched these questions through the ...Read more