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Rebuilding industry requires celebrating masculinity

Society has spent decades telling boys that masculinity is toxic, and now there’s a shortage of skilled tradesmen. The connection should be obvious. Through his on-again, off-again tariff dance, President Donald Trump has made one thing clear. He wants more things built in America. He’s bragged about already securing more investment dollar commitments than former President Joe Biden did during his entire term. And he wants more. Trump has long championed the rural communities devastated by factory shutdowns. It’s one reason that he has enjoyed such strong support in Middle ...

Something much greater awaits us in 2026

The year 2025 passed pretty quickly, almost in the blink of an eye. It began with tragedy as soon as January hit, with 14 people being killed in New Orleans when a driver rammed his truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street. A similar deadly incident happened in Las Vegas when an active-duty U.S. Army Green Beret exploded a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel and killed himself. The news continued to be filled with troubling and sad events as political disputes on issues like immigration and vaccines intensified, and beloved celebrities passed away. I did a quick ...

Time does not pause but moves forward

The hot take that floated into my inbox this week was that resolutions are passe. Apparently, thinking about “next year” is outdated. We’re in this grind of time and marking it arbitrarily doesn’t matter. But, really, we time-travel constantly. It’s one of the best things about being human. We can rehearse future sticky conversations in the shower. We can relive our moments of wildness while folding laundry. We can imagine a future version of ourselves who has it together, so she is not constantly behind on laundry. Yet every January, the naysayers trot out the idea that it ...

These were best of times on unified homefront

Scene: the Midwest in midcentury. The Madison, Wisconsin, neighborhood lived through the 1930s and 1940s, depression, wartime and polio. President Franklin Roosevelt’s radio fireside chats built morale. My father’s mother, Marie, a widowed nurse with four children, never missed Eleanor Roosevelt’s column, “My Day.” Her husband, Reuben, a University of Wisconsin doctor, died young. “Father’s death left me with shame. And I felt shame at feeling ashamed.” At age 8, just before Pearl Harbor, Richard felt bereft. Yet the 1940s were the best of times on the unified ...

Temptation to tax rich is understandable

There is something emotionally satisfying about watching a wealthy person call for higher taxes on people like himself. It feels civic-minded, even noble. A recent commentary by former Utah senator, Massachusetts governor and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney fits squarely into this tradition. Faced with a looming fiscal cliff, Romney concludes that entitlement reform is unavoidable and that higher taxes on affluent Americans must be part of the solution. Don’t be fooled, though. Yes, the status quo is unsustainable, and pretending otherwise is reckless. But taxing the rich ...

Democrats get ready to rumble

A midterm election year is upon us, and that can mean only one thing: we have entered the realm of quickened speculation about the 2028 presidential election. On the Republican side, if President Donald Trump decides to abide by the Constitution in at least one respect, the nomination looks to be Vice President J.D. Vance’s to lose. Which leaves most of the tea leaf-reading to the Democrats, with a few gaggles of candidates eyeing a run. Congressman Ro Khanna and Senators Chris Murphy and Chris Van Hollen have telegraphed their strategy for winning support from the ...