Syndicated columns

If I were a mystery novelist instead of an economist, I’d call it “The Case of the Missing Workers.”

Over the past few decades, in a surge of bipartisan national self-confidence, the federal government has borrowed a lot of money, sometimes in response to national emergencies and sometimes to do the things people thought were worth doing. We gave ourselves permission to incur all this debt because interest rates were low and many people assumed that things would stay that way, so the costs of carrying that much debt wouldn’t be too onerous.

Last week, employees at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted by almost 3-to-1 to join the United Automobile Workers. By the numbers, this wasn’t a big deal: It involved only a few thousand workers in an economy that employs almost 160 million people. But it was an important symbolic victory for a labor movement that even in its heyday never made significant inroads in the South.

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, anti-Vietnam War protesters clashed with police officers – whose brutal role in the confrontation was later described by a federal commission as a “police riot” – hijacking the focus of the convention.

The phrase “often in error but never in doubt” could have been coined for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The appellate court most frequently reversed by the Supreme Court in recent years should brace itself for another reprimand during Monday’s oral arguments before that court.

One of Kamala Harris’ most memorable moments during the 2020 presidential election cycle was when, during a Democratic primary debate, she sharply criticized Joe Biden for working with segregationists in the Senate in their shared opposition to busing.

Nostalgia seems harmless enough, and then someone starts earnestly — absurdly — glamorizing the Stone Age. “Damn can you imagine being a human during the paleolithic age,” tweeted a self-described “eco-socialist” podcaster in September 2021. “Just eating salmon and berries and storytelling around campfires and stargazing … no jobs no traffic no ads no poverty no capitalism-caused traumas just ...

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared skeptical that prosecutors could use the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to go after Jan. 6 rioters. It’s a closely watched case in part because Special Counsel Jack Smith also cited this statute in his criminal charges against former President Donald Trump.

For many adults, the first and last time they willingly submit to living with a total stranger is their freshman year of college. And now is the time of year when many kids, just accepted into college, decide they won’t do it.

Imagine for a moment you wake up one morning and discover that you are holding a club in your hand. If your first thought upon noticing the club is to ask yourself, “Who should I hurt with this weapon?” you might be a Republican member of the Idaho Legislature, or as we have seen just this week, a member of the United States Supreme Court.

When Adolf Hitler was convicted of treason on April 1, 1924, for leading an armed insurrection against Germany’s democratically elected government, he discovered something remarkable: Courtrooms can make excellent soapboxes for political grandstanding. In real time, 100 years later, we’ve been watching another political leader, former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, do the same. The echoes are uncanny and disturbing.

How grotesque to watch long-term U.S. security interests hang on the outcome of a political battle between the Hamlet-like speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, and vengeful MAGA conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene.

A crucial moment in the development of modern left-wing culture arrived in 2013 when Ta-Nehisi Coates, reading books about the ravages and aftermath of World War II by historians Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, realized that he didn’t believe in God.

The comedian Jerrod Carmichael spends a remarkable amount of time in his new HBO series, “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show,” with his head in his hands like Henri Vidal’s 19th-century statue of Cain after he has killed his brother Abel.

It is never easy to re-examine one’s fundamental convictions, but now I am forced to question my previous disbelief in the existence of Satan. I am compelled to confront this ugly possibility by the fact that from time to time my electronic devices seem to fall under demonic possession.