My maternal grandparents were Lebanese Christians who came to America in the first decade of the 20th century. They settled in Atlanta, Georgia, where my mother and her older brother, Tom, were born. When my mother was a toddler, her mother…
It is clear, and has been for some time, that the November elections, in whatever form they take, will turn on how voters grade the two parties — and candidates — in their performance in dealing with the COVID-19 global…
The two biggest events in the world today are the U.S.–China trade war and the current coronavirus pandemic. Both are related to a single country: China. If a single country can adversely affect the U.S. and the world on such…
I recall reading an account of the Passenger Pigeon Project, and a related effort called Revive & Restore, the latter being an effort to genetically reproduce and bring back the now extinct Passenger Pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, long gone for over…
The government’s Washington Post command center recently used its powerful front page to announce that big government was back. Post chief political correspondent Dan Balz explained that the coronavirus crisis has changed everything. “The role of government has changed overnight.”…
The increasing outsourcing of health-care policy to medical bureaucrats during the COVID-19 crisis illustrates the dangerous temptation to remove control over policy from democratic deliberation in favor of a technocracy, i.e., rule by “experts.” In health care, such a system…
The COVID-19 crisis has given the government an enormous role in the U.S. health-care delivery system. In a national emergency, this makes sense, particularly in a few specific areas such as New York City. One fact must not be forgotten:…
I hope you will understand: I am not an advocate for tobacco. But there’s an ember inside me that flares up just a little for the thoughtful space a puff on a pipe or cigarette allotted us, back when we…
Journalists have many methods for hyping a story. Two of the more unsavory are burying inconvenient facts or omitting them altogether. ProPublica recently employed both. In an article titled “Overwhelmed Hospitals Face a New Crisis: Staffing Firms Are Cutting Their…
