There are many ways to honor America. This book is mine. I have completed this journey of self-education in the belief that the most terrifying possibility since 9/11 has not been terrorism--as fright...
The law is too important to be left to the lawyers, to paraphrase Georges Clemenceau about war and generals. We laymen know too little about our Constitution and think too superficially about its infl...
The day I arrived in Yakutsk with my colleague Peter Osnos of The Washington Post, it was 46 below. When our plane landed, the door was frozen solidly shut, and it took about half an hour for a powerf...
The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity; but a wounded spirit who can bear?
History in the Middle East has a marvelous elasticity. It is easily stretched, twisted, compressed in the hands of its custodians, squeezed to fit into any thesis of righteous cause or pious grief. Bu...
Terrorism is theater. Its real targets are not the innocent victims but the spectators. Those on the political side of the dead are to be frightened, intimidated, cowed, perhaps drawn into ugly retali...
On their way to jail, to deportation from the country, or to expulsion from school, those who confront the muscle of the state frequently see their rights bruised, their liberties wounded. This book i...
Publications aren’t the only forms of expression now governed by Hazelwood’s ruling that speech can be limited when administrators claim ownership of the statement and think it’s unsuitable. Courts ha...
Time magazine found in a 2000 survey that 19 percent of Americans thought they were in the top 1 percent of wage-earners, and another 20 percent expected to be in the future. So right away you have 39...
At the extremes of the debate, liberals don’t want to see the dysfunctional family, and conservatives want to see nothing else. Depending on the ideology, destructive parenting is either not a cause o...
This right to speak serves as the wellspring nourishing other rights. Art cannot flourish, literature cannot inspire, the powerless cannot dissent, the press cannot probe, the voter cannot choose wise...
Heavy reliance on the tool of confession is lazy. It aborts justice. As a result, whoever murdered eight people that March day in Bwindi—whether the three defendants or others—was not held to account.
Since a president can easily slide into a comfort zone of sycophants, it can’t hurt him to see a few demonstrators with rude T-shirts injecting a small dose of irreverence into a triumphant appearance...
Obama has already rejected the bright sunlight of public knowledge, which is democracy's great disinfectant and cure.
The intelligence professional’s passion to collect everything possible is nicely illustrated in an NYPD report under the rubric Secret, and beneath a blacked-out box that may have contained notes from...
If every American school taught the Bill of Rights in a clear and compelling way, if every child knew the fundamental rules that guide the relationships between the individual and the state, then ever...
Being poor is a full-time job, it really is.
Wo rkers at the edge of poverty are essential to America’s prosperity, but their well-being is not treated as an integral part of the whole. Instead, the forgotten wage a daily struggle to keep themse...
A key test for any society is whether or not it is self-correcting. And to be self-correcting, it must first be open and truthful about itself.
Affairs of state tend to drive most presidents toward the center on both foreign and domestic policy, no matter where on the political spectrum they begin, and especially so in the areas of intelligen...