Milleniucture, like an older overpass everyone depends on, but it's starting to carry more weight than it was originally designed to hold. We're trying to move things forward as we absorb tension from both directions. And increasingly, this generation is being asked to adapt to a world ...
Thursday evening, Jews will celebrate the holiday of Shavuot. This holiday, which occurs seven weeks and one day after Passover (hence the name Shavuot, which literally means "weeks"), commemorates perhaps the most transformative event in all of human history: the revelation of the Word of God to the ancient Israelite nation. It was at Mount Sinai, congregated at the base of the smoking and trembling mountain, that God promised the Israelites they would be a "kingdom of princes and a holy nation" if they accepted and maintained fidelity to His covenant. In unison, ...
We've been having a debate about "book bans" in recent years, but given the steep decline in student literacy, the deeper question is how anyone would notice whether a book is available in a school library or not. The New York Times published an eye-opening report on a study by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford documenting steep declines in student test scores, especially in reading. Over the past 10 years, reading scores have declined in 83% of school districts. What looked like a Covid-driven catastrophe is, instead, part of a long-running trend. Reading scores were ...
On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence. It did so following a United Nations vote to partition British-ruled Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. The fact Israel is still here and still flourishing 78 years later is a modern-day miracle. On the very day of its declaration, that beleaguered nation with fewer than 1 million people was attacked by Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, a coalition with a combined population more than 30 times greater. Since then, Israel has resisted aggression undertaken by its neighbors in 1967, 1973 and 2023. A loss in any ...
When White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair decided to push mid-decade congressional redistricting, Republicans had reason to be nervous. Redistricting battles are messy, procedurally arcane and easy to lose in the court of public opinion even when you win in a court of law. But Blair saw something others missed: Democrats had already boxed themselves in with maximum partisan redistricting and constitutional restrictions in some states that would prohibit radical gerrymandering. The Virginia Supreme Court's recent rejection of the Democrats' redistricting effort is more ...
Andrew Jackson is the only president of the United States who got the better of his attempted assassin. The aged Jackson was at the Capitol for a congressional funeral when a crazed man named Richard Lawrence aimed a pistol directly at his chest and pulled the trigger. It misfired. Jackson bull-charged his assailant with his cane and, incredibly, Lawrence pulled out another pistol. It, too, misfired. As bystanders intervened, an enraged Jackson supposedly yelled, "Let me alone! Let me alone! I know where this came from." Lest we think we live in a uniquely inflamed, conspiratorial ...
