Breaking News

National Columnists

Epstein story is follow social network

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know — even if you may have committed terrible crimes. That’s the Jeffrey Epstein version of the famous line about success. The massive tranche of Epstein emails released by the House Oversight Committee didn’t reveal any smoking guns about Donald Trump, but they did highlight a vast conspiracy to help the disgraced financier thrive despite his guilty plea to sex charges involving a minor in 2008. This conspiracy wasn’t the work of the Deep State, or Israel, or the Jews. No, it was more pedestrian and damning than that. An element ...

Next social epidemic is here: legalized sports gambling

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association. A fractured court, led by a conservative majority, held that the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, signed into law in the final months of the George H.W. Bush presidency, was unconstitutional. The practical effect of the Murphy decision was that sports gambling, the legal practice of which had been mostly confined to Nevada casinos, became ubiquitous in short order. A few weeks after the court’s decision, Delaware became the first state other than Nevada to legalize ...

Social Security leader protects program’s future

There is a pattern in the Trump administration that if you are very good at the first job you are appointed to, you are likely to get another one, something more challenging than the first. It’s been true for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is also the acting national security adviser and acting archivist of the United States, and for several months, he was the acting director of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Frank Bisignano hasn’t hit peak Rubio yet. But the 18th commissioner of the Social Security Administration, who was confirmed by the Senate in May, was ...

America needs to build more homes

Young adults need lower housing prices, not longer mortgages. The median age of first-time home buyers is now 40, according to a recent report from the National Association of Realtors. Among all buyers, the median age was 59. Home buyers are more likely to be near or at retirement age than young, married parents. It wasn’t always like this. In 1991, the median age of first-time home buyers was 28. It has generally been around 30 for decades. In 2017, the median age of first-time home buyers was 32. In 2025, those same buyers are now 40 — the current median age for first-time ...

Mamdani’s campaign promises start to deflate

The election of Zohran Mamdani as New York City mayor set off — for his fan base, anyway — great expectations of a more “affordable” city. But the Democratic Socialist hasn’t even been sworn in, and some of his marquee promises are already history. Start with free buses. For a city dependent on public transportation, free buses are a nice idea but also a bad idea. Fares pay for the buses, and even if you plug that hole with another revenue source, free buses would siphon riders from the subways, in effect defunding them. Mamdani spun visions of the state raising taxes to ...

Important to open up about mental health

“Someone could be smiling, someone could be dancing, laughing, having a great time, expressing all this joy, but on the inside, they could really be fighting a battle that you never know about.” These are the poignant words of Dallas Cowboys defensive tackle Solomon Thomas in describing his teammate Marshawn Kneeland, who died from an apparent suicide after fleeing a traffic stop in Frisco, Texas, on Nov. 6. Kneeland’s death sent shockwaves through the Cowboys’ locker room and the NFL, and from reading teammates’ fond descriptions of him, it appears that no one detected ...