We don’t know what it was. Orange sky. The Texas school shootings. Ukraine invasion. Purple rain. A Musk tweet. Biden abandoning “strategic ambiguity.” CBT in Girl Scout cookies. Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart. An invisible sun. Dylan turning 81. The Shanghai lockdown. Perdue crying chicken in Georgia. The final season…

It seems so long ago, back on Valentine’s Day of 1989, that Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salmon Rushdie for blasphemies against Muhammad in the novel “The Satanic Verses.” Rushdie’s logorrhea offended me less lethally by failing my trusty five-page test. Despite my thumbs-down, I will defend to the…

“Politics makes strange bedfellows,” wrote Mark Twain’s friend Charles Dudley Warner in 1870. Here it is a century-and-a-half later, and the bedbugs are still biting the strange and the estranged. At the center of critical help being withheld from Ukraine lie two nations linked by genocidal past and present: Germany…

“You say you want a revolution,” John Lennon sang in 1970. Ten years later, he was gunned down by a man who should never have owned a firearm. With 434 million guns in America, the debate over whether the conditions exist for a second civil war strikes fear. Violent arms…

“Putin is Hitler.” That simple equation, by Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger, whose rants I often discount, struck a nerve. I had already found myself uncomfortably “getting” Sen. Lindsey Graham intemperately calling to “take out” Russian President Vladimir Putin. …

We are a nation whose heart and wallet are often at odds. While the extraordinary valor and terrible suffering of the people of Ukraine tug hard at the better angels of our nature, the rapidly escalating prices at the pump hit us where it hurts in the pocketbook. No matter…

Sitting atop my high horse as 2022 draws to a close, I’m amazed at how far we’ve come. Back in early March, nobody would have predicted the perfect storm that revolutionized our health care system. …

We are asleep at the wheel — a very dangerous place to be. It haunts my dreams. Recently, I awakened from arguing with a university professor over his failure to condemn violence in Palestine. I scratched my head over this imagined debate and realized it doesn’t mean as much anymore…

In this, the month of Aquarius, I feel that I am swimming upstream to wonder where we have reached in our national cultural trough when the only touchstones we share are political loves and hates and vaccine and masking belief and unbelief. We agree to disagree, but it is about…