Columns, pieces and posts
The president’s State of the Union address came straight from the heart of Crazytown. It had everything—tears, cheers, spectacle. They handed out medals and honors like Oprah in the early 2000s: “You get a car! Everybody gets a car!” At one point I thought he was going to pull out a ceremonial sword and knight […]
When a major Trump administration official gives a speech in Europe to its gathered political and business elites and receives a standing ovation, you know something big happened. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s address to the Munich Security Conference last weekend had an intellectual presence and warmth not normally seen in the statements of this […]
As relates to artificial intelligence, we are people on a beach seeing a tsunami coming at us and thinking “It’s huge” and “We can’t stop it” and “Should we run? Which way?” Gathering anxieties seemed to come to the fore this week. AI people told us with a new urgency that some big leap has […]
The diminishment of the Washington Post hits hard because it feels like another demoralizing thing in our national life. Our public life as a nation—how we are together, how we talk to each other, the sound of us—isn’t what it was. It’s gone down and we all feel this, all the grown-ups. The Post was […]
Our long cold civil war heated up somewhat in Minneapolis this week, and you’d be dreaming if you think we won’t have more such moments and tensions, and not only on immigration. We aren’t at peace with ourselves. Here we take a look at some large things that went wrong and can be made better. […]
Well, that was an epic climbdown. President Trump told Davos this week that he won’t move militarily to take over Greenland. “People thought I would use force. . . . I won’t use force.” It was insane that he might, a relief that he won’t, and people thought he would only because he’d implied as […]
Next week marks the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, so it’s a good time to revisit his essential nature, which appears to drive everything. I queried acquaintances of mixed political disposition: What have you seen of Donald Trump the past year that is different from his first administration? A Trump foe said, “He […]
Nicolás Maduro wasn’t the president of Venezuela but an illegitimate head of state, brutal and criminal, whose presence was ruinous for his country and its people. No good person mourns his fall. Beyond that, some points: The U.S. military reversed the script. After news broke Saturday of Mr. Maduro’s removal, gone was the picture you […]
I don’t want to sum up the year, outline hopes for 2026, predict or warn. I want to say we all have to become better people. You won’t get through the future without faith, you won’t get through life without courage, and if you want courage to spread (and you do—you’re safer in a braver […]
I want to say a small thing about a big subject, music. I’m going to put together two anecdotes because they are important to me even if they don’t go, by which I mean they aren’t connected or an extension of each other. The first has to do with a conversation with the great opera […]