Back at the dawn of the Trump age, weeks before the 2016 election, a conservative writer chided the media as it struggled with how to cover the outrageous Republican nominee. Salena Zito wrote in the Atlantic — as the title of her buzzy piece had it — that reporters should start "Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally."

That's what Donald ...Read more

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that had struck down a Pennsylvania law barring people under 21 from carrying firearms openly during declared states of emergency. It’s hard to really celebrate this as a victory given how basic common sense it is — that judges had found it proper to allow 18-year-olds to walk...Read more

This week, at an event billed as a town hall in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump spent about 40 minutes standing on stage, mostly wordlessly swaying to music that he’d selected, confusing the press and his fans in attendance.

The odd turn of events and the lack of any reasonable explanation from the campaign — along with a stream of other ...Read more

C’mon, man!

That’s the simple, urgent translation of former President Barack Obama’s plea to Black men ahead of the Nov. 5 election.

Last week, Obama was out on the campaign trail for Vice President Kamala Harris, delivering an admonition to African American voters who may be leaning toward supporting former President Donald Trump in the...Read more

Vegan food is medicine. But during a recent hospital stay, I saw an absurd number of animal-derived foods on the menu: greasy cheese, cholesterol-laden meat, fatty dairy milk. It made about as much sense as a mechanic pouring tallow into an engine.

New York City Health + Hospitals has the right idea: Vegan food has been the default for the ...Read more

In his interview this week with John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, former President Donald Trump offered a somewhat unusual argument in favor of tariffs, which he called “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” Tariffs, he suggested, are not mainly about protecting domestic industry. Rather, they may serve as a means ...Read more

Although most research and attention focus on adults, children and adolescents suffer from chronic pain and mental health disorders in numbers as high as adults.

A study published in JAMA Pediatrics last month showed that a third of children younger than age 18 who have chronic pain also meet the criteria for anxiety disorder, while 1 in 8 ...Read more

Vice President Kamala Harris this week confirmed she supports the legalization of marijuana. It’s a change of heart that acknowledges the decades of injustice wrought by the criminalization of small amounts of weed and follows a broader shift in sentiment about cannabis in the U.S. And it makes sense — if it is accompanied by a massive ...Read more

I was having brunch recently with my old friend Dan. Halfway through his breakfast burrito, he casually mentioned that his youngest child had started identifying as nonbinary. I’d known Brady since early childhood, and they had always known their own mind and been unafraid to speak it. That they were owning their identity with such ease — ...Read more

The White House raised the spirits of Hamas terrorists this week by publicly rebuking Israel. It’s the same tired tune from the Harris-Biden administration.

On Sunday, U.S. secretaries of defense and state sent a missive to their Israeli counterparts demanding that the Jewish state ensure an increased flow of humanitarian aid to the Gaza ...Read more

MODIIN, Israel — Of all the occasions my family and I have had to run to bomb shelters over the last few weeks, the most disconcerting was Iran’s Oct. 1 attack on Israel.

Even before the air raid siren sounded, our phones blared with a new Israeli alert system, deployed for the first time, directing us to take shelter until further notice....Read more

Life may be full of uncertainties but there's one thing you can count on come election day, as surely as the sun rises over the Sierra and sets over the Pacific.

Donald Trump will lose California. And it won't be remotely close.

In 2016, Trump was buried in a 25-point Hillary Clinton landslide. In 2020, he lost to Joe Biden by 29 percentage ...Read more

In 2000, when Democratic and Republican party lawyers fought over recounting Florida’s presidential votes, Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, declared that mail ballots from overseas military voters should be given the “benefit of the doubt” and counted, even if some arrived after Florida’s ...Read more

The image of Elon Musk that may be dominating people's mindspace at the moment is of his prancing about joyously — and yes, a tad weirdly — behind Donald Trump on the podium during the latter's Oct. 5 rally in Butler, Pa.

But how many people noticed the clue to Musk's worldview on display at the event? For visible under his jacket was a T-...Read more

Discussion of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia has become popular as Kyiv's battle to drive out Russian troops appears stuck in a stalemate — or worse. Many security analysts, including some sympathetic to Ukraine, now talk about the need for the beleaguered nation to concede territory to Moscow.

Much of that talk ignores the realities ...Read more

You've all heard the phony claims about how terrible the federal government's response to the recent hurricanes has been, right?

Former President Donald Trump has lied repeatedly about the effort. He's spun a preposterous tale about the feds abandoning hard-hit parts of western North Carolina because they are majority Republican. He says the ...Read more

Of the $4.5 trillion the U.S. spends on health care every year, the largest proportion — almost a third — goes to hospitals. The cost of hospital services has consistently outpaced the overall inflation rate for at least two decades. If Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump really want to reduce health-care costs —...Read more

The pandemic may feel like ages ago, but the fiscal follies of COVID continue to wreak havoc with personal and government balance sheets.

Higher prices brought about by the Biden-Harris administration’s $2 trillion federal spending binge known as the American Rescue Act of 2021 continue to bedevil family budgets. Although 9 percent inflation ...Read more