Every writer out there can learn something from reading the work of his or her fellows, but when the mass of a polarizing election pulls even apolitical work into its gravity well, avoiding ambushes becomes a challenge. It wasn’t until…
Last Tuesday, I picked up three of my kids from church after youth group. It was a little after 5:00. I wasn’t sure what had been on the agenda for the afternoon. “Dad, we had an amazing experience,” my oldest…
The secret ballot is a bedrock principle of democracy. It allows people to vote the way they feel without fear of reprisal. Without it, those who hold the elections would hold all the power. It’s also an important principle for…
It was a beautiful Saturday only a couple of weeks ago, and I sat in a foldable camouflage chair, 12 gauge over/under shotgun in hand, beneath the sparse cover of a pine tree. My host, a dozen yards away, sat…
When Americans pay good money for private health insurance, they expect their insurance company to pay their emergency medical bills. But insurers don’t always pay. So how do they get away with it? In the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable…
People take the game Monopoly™ seriously. How seriously? Back in 1991, in Pennsylvania, Michael J. Klucznik and Marc J. P. Cienkowski got together with some friends to drink a bit and play the game in Cienkowski’s basement rec room. The…
We came together after 9/11 as Americans. We formed a bond of unity the likes of which I could not remember save for when I was a child during World War II. Then, housewives rolled bandages at night for the…
Only about half of all Americans are married now, down from more than 72 percent in the 1960s — and the declines continue. Worse, the share of Americans who have never married has been rising steadily in recent decades, as…
The news is full of the New York Times’ latest initiative in enlightening the masses: “The 1619 Project.” The plan is to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first black slaves in what would someday be the…