Columnist.
Were it not for the provision that Pat Toomey, the Pennsylvania Republican, put into the Senate's proposed health care reform, this legislation would be moderately important but hardly momentous. Toomey's provision, however, makes it this century's most significant domestic policy reform.
The Bronx, the only one of New York City's five boroughs that is on the American mainland, once had a sociological as well as geographical distinction. In the 1930s it was called, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted, "the city without a slum."
Some American history museums belabor visitors with this message: You shall know the truth and it shall make you feel ashamed of, but oh-so-superior to, your wretched ancestors.
Two Junes ago, when the Supreme Court upheld, 6-3, a challenged provision of the Affordable Care Act, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, vented: "Congress wrote key parts of the Act behind closed doors.
From Little League on up, players emulate major leaguers, so Major League Baseball's pace-of-play problem is trickling down. Four innings into a recent College World Series game here, just seven hits and three runs had consumed 96 minutes. During a coach's visit to the pitcher's mound, the other team's three base runners visited their dugout to confer with their coach. The Congress of Vienna moved more briskly.
In 1859, when Manhattan still had many farms, near the Battery on the island's southern tip The Great American Tea Company was launched. It grew, and outgrew its name, becoming in 1870 The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, which in 1912 begat the first A&P Economy Store, a semi-modern grocery store.
"Contrary" does not quite capture Steve King's astringency. The Iowa native and conservative congressman was born, appropriately, in Storm Lake, and carries turbulence with him. He also carries experience of actual life before politics, when he founded a construction company, which is one reason he has long advocated an excellent idea — repeal of the Davis-Bacon law.
Sparkling in the sunlight that inspired 19th-century romantic painters of the Hudson River School, Sing Sing prison's razor wire, through which inmates can see the flowing river, is almost pretty.
Sensing that his Scottish enemies had blundered at the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, Oliver Cromwell said, "The Lord hath delivered them into our hands." Philip K. Howard, were he the exulting type, could rejoice that some of his adversaries have taken a stand on indefensible terrain.
Beginning this week, Washington hopes that infrastructure, which is a product of civil engineering, will be much discussed. But if you find yourself in Oregon, keep your opinions to yourself, lest you get fined $500 for practicing engineering without a license. This happened to Mats Jarlstrom as a result of events that would be comic if they were not symptoms of something sinister.
As changing technologies and preferences make government-funded broadcasting increasingly preposterous, such broadcasting actually becomes useful by illustrating two dismal facts.
In 1950, the year before William F. Buckley burst into the national conversation, the literary critic Lionel Trilling revealed why the nation was ripe for Buckley's high-spirited romp through its political and cultural controversies.
When in the Senate chamber, Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, sits by choice at the desk used by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. New York's scholar-senator would have recognized that Sasse has published a book of political philosophy in the form of a guide to parenting.
By the time Georgia's 6th District votes in the June 20 special congressional election, $40 million — perhaps more than $130 per ballot — will have been spent to pick one-435th of one-half of one of the three branches of one of America's governments. This is an expensive funeral for Tip O'Neill's incessantly quoted and increasingly inapplicable axiom that "All politics is local."
A blind spider creeping through America's judicial thicket might be heading to the Supreme Court, which will have to decide if the contentment or even the survival of the Bone Cave Harvestman spider species, which lives only in two central Texas counties, is any of the federal government's business. If it is, what isn't?
Although William J. Baumol, who recently died at 95, was not widely known beyond the ranks of economists, all Americans are living with, and policymakers are struggling with, "Baumol's disease."
In July 1954, a 19-year-old Memphis truck driver recorded at Sun Studio the song "That's All Right."
Southey, a pacifist, wrote his anti-war poem long after the 1704 battle for which the Duke of Marlborough was awarded Blenheim Palace, where his great-great-great-great-great-great grandson Winston Churchill would be born.
Having bestowed the presidency on a candidate who described their country as a "hellhole" besieged by multitudes trying to get into it, Americans need an antidote for social hypochondria.
It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about Donald Trump's inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.
