In the HBO show Silicon Valley, there’s a running joke about server farms as gulags. The data center on the show is utterly removed not just from the currents of innovation and finance, but from normal human contact, and it’s…

It looks like President Trump may have lost Ann Coulter, maybe for good this time. These screamers from the entertainment wing of the Republican Party are part of the reason for our present troubles with immigration policy. Immigration is a…

“Terrorism is not just killing with a bomb, but activating ideas,” Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla told his interviewer, by way of explaining why a paraplegic activist had been “disappeared.” In Christopher Hitchens’ retelling, a few of the Argentine dictator’s staff…

Irony doesn’t come up too much when we’re talking about sports, except maybe when a color commentator is finding it “ironical” that a guy on one team went to high school with a guy on the other team. Maybe that’s…

One of the best things about leaving Washington, D.C. is that you never again feel compelled to watch shows like PBS’s Washington Week, where the first question on host Robert Costa’s mind Friday night was whether Hurricane Harvey had “changed…

“She spent evenings with the art books Yankel had bought for her in Lutsk, and each morning sulked over breakfast. They were good and fine, but not beautiful. No, not if I’m being honest with myself. They are only the…

All beautiful places are prone to natural disaster. The old Yoni Wolf lyric keeps coming back to me, as I look out the windows of my home in the Houston suburbs, or walk along the banks of a creek that’s…

Thomas Jefferson was an economic idiot. An import embargo he imposed as president cost the country something like 5 percent of gross domestic product, according to modern studies. But we remember his noble ideas, not his skills with a checkbook….

Are we really worried about the white nationalists? Are they such a threat we’re ready to surrender our one liberty that remains intact? And if the answer is obvious, then why are outfits like ProPublica, which should be champions of…

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R — San Diego, once spent $600 of campaign money on a plane ticket for his cat. So you wouldn’t expect Hunter to see the problem with a law that forces ranchers in Hawaii to charter a…