Connecting.the.Dots

As 94-year-old Kirk Douglas upstages the upstarts at the Oscars comes word that the oldest living veteran of World War I has died at 110. ...

This year's Oscars are about something. One marvelous movie recalls a day in June, 1939 at the New York World's Fair, a 15-year-ol...

The opposite of hero worship is negative self-definition that tells you who you are not and could never be. Such anti-role models can influe...

As decades-long dictatorships teeter and fall, is it unreasonable to ask whether anyone in or out of our government really knows what's ...

The Daily Show offers an inadvertent seminar on the falling quality of public liars by juxtaposing a prank phone call to Wisconsin Gov. Sco...

Tea-party politicians are accomplishing what Communists never could--dividing Americans by economic conflict--but in an upside-down way that...

Schools and banks were closed, no mail was delivered but, aside from that, nobody seemed to notice Presidents Day. In a Gallup poll , Rona...

Foreign and domestic discontents come together as the GOP's Rep. Paul Ryan observes, "It's like Cairo has moved to Madison....

These times echo the opening lines of Shakespeare's "Richard III," rage against the world by "deformed, unfinished" ...

At first glance, the Massachusetts Senator's revelation of his childhood sexual abuse on 60 Minutes might be filed under the heading of...

Karl Rove has a new mission--to prove the President is a natural-born citizen. Alarmed by a survey showing 51 percent of Republican primar...

What used to be unspeakable is now not only news but fodder for tweets, blog posts and myriad forms of comment. Freedom of information has a...

Two years ago, they ran against Barack Obama, accusing him of "wealth redistribution." In two months, Republicans have been workin...

New controversies about inclusion and exclusion in American life bring to mind Groucho's dictum, "I don't want to belong to any...

This is foreign correspondence, reporting from an alien time and space, on the Grammy Awards. The music industry seems to have been infilt...

How many people plant an expression in the English language that half a century later becomes shorthand for the state of the world? I knew o...

Is political freedom contagious? Just as Tunisia ignited Egypt, how far will their example go in the wider Arab world, where many join in ce...

"Rip van Winkle meets Facebook." In a phrase, the New York Times ' Thomas Friedman nails the drama unfolding in Egypt as the ...

Update : After a day of false reports that he would be stepping down, Hosni Mubarak appears on Egyptian TV to offer a rambling self-justifi...

"In recent weeks," writes a culinary columnist , "we’ve seen a big, powerful government agency, a big, powerful person and a ...