Syndicated columns

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.

Donald Trump’s campaign is reportedly strapped for cash. Small-dollar donations are running far behind their 2020 pace. Big Trump rallies aren’t yielding his biggest cash hauls. Some large-dollar donors are hesitant, in part because they worry (with good reason) that their money will be used not for the campaign but to pay his legal bills. So he has been wooing right-wing billionaires.

It has been more than a week since the Dali, a container ship, struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. It’s still stuck there, and the images remain amazing, in part because the vessel is so huge compared with what’s left of the bridge. How could planners not have realized that operating superships in the harbor’s confined waters posed a risk?

Does America need a more searing visual image than eight men working for their piece of the America dream – filling potholes on a terrifying bridge in 1 a.m. darkness – to understand that our nation was built by immigrants, runs on immigrant labor and needs immigrants?

Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher’s abrupt resignation Friday, which followed that of Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, narrows the paper-thin GOP House majority to a single vote.

We’ve just passed the 14th anniversary of the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare – although many of the law’s provisions didn’t take effect until 2014.

At an Ohio rally this month, Donald Trump saluted the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, calling them “unbelievable patriots” and referring to those who’ve been locked up for their involvement on that terrible day as “hostages.”

In January, I had the odd experience of nodding along with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who can usually be relied on to be wrong, as he berated supervillain Mark Zuckerberg, head of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, about the effect its products have on kids. “You have blood on your hands,” Graham said.

The artificial intelligence wave is here. Thanks to the arrival of “large language models” like ChatGPT and other generative AI tools almost a year and a half ago, AI is now hitting us like a truck – head on.