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We should be grateful to be Americans

This well-known rhetorical flourish at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence needs closer consideration. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are ...

Biography tells us about our time

History illuminates the present. I've been reading Stephen Kotkin's widely and justly praised multivolume biography of Joseph Stalin and have encountered many passages that illuminate the present. I learned, for example, that Stalin met the exiled Vladimir Lenin more than a decade ...

Good progress, bad structure

In 2007, Hugo Chavez sent men with rifles into the Orinoco Belt. They walked into oilfields Americans had surveyed, Americans had drilled and American engineering had made productive and told ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips to take a minority stake in their own work or get out. Those two ...

Will we get price relief or trade war?

I will never understand why President Donald Trump, brought back to office partly in response to a sharp rise in prices during the Joe Biden interlude, would pursue the expensive tariff policy we've been subjected to since the beginning of 2025. And yet here we are, with another reason ...

What's in a name?

As part of Donald Trump's trade war with Canada that the administration claims isn't a trade war, the president has signed an executive order, renaming Lake Ontario, "Lake America." This follows his renaming the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America." These antics help no one, but Trump is not ...

When mental illness, medication, loss collide

The trial of Lindsay Clancy forces us to confront a tragedy almost beyond human comprehension: A mother killed her three young children – 5-year-old Cora, 3-year-old Dawson and 8-month-old Callan – inside their Massachusetts home. We must begin with those children. They were ...