When tragedy strikes, as it did in two mass killings earlier this month, there is always the urge to pressure the government do something. Governments are animated by the belief that doing something — any demonstrable overt behavior — wil [...]

Last weekend's mass murders in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have produced a flood of words about everything from gun control to mental illness to white nationalism. Most of those words have addressed the right to keep and bear arms as if it [...]

"Now hatred is by far the Longest pleasure; "Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure." — George Gordon, Lord Byron When I was an undergraduate at Princeton University during the height of the Vietnam War, surrounded by fell [...]

During the past week, President Donald Trump excited two bitter public controversies by sending and publishing two highly inappropriate and offensively incendiary tweets. The first of these was aimed at four female members of Congress — each a [...]

Late last month, the Supreme Court ruled on a challenge to a question that the Commerce Department announced it would add to the 2020 census. The census itself has been mandated by the Constitution to be taken every 10 years so that representation in [...]