ArcaMax

The one thing you can't make when you get old is old friends.

Pam Fleischaker was one of my oldest friends. We met more than 40 years ago as two young political activists. She commuted from Oklahoma City to help run the Democratic Platform Committee for Geraldine Ferraro. She was a charter member of the "A Team," a band of feminists ...Read more

It seems like everyone wants to be a social media influencer these days. Researcher Matthew Simoneau surveyed middle and high school students from 2021 to 2024 and more than 60% of them said they wanted to be social media influencers. People think fame and fortune will make them happy. But it's not viral significance that we need. What we ...Read more

Politics, restaurant menus and porn are the quickest ways to learn that someone likes things you find disgusting.

Good examples of that are Donald Trump, escargot and gang rape, three things that disgust me, but are keenly desired by some people. Just knowing that will make you look around for a long time before you sit next to a stranger on ...Read more

In the bad old crime days of New York City, I spent a Christmas Eve waiting outside an emergency room. Our foursome had been violently robbed in a subway station, and I was eager for the doctor's report on one member who'd suffered a concussion fighting off a mugger.

Because someone got hurt, city detectives took the case seriously. They ...Read more

At a campaign rally this week in Nebraska, President Donald Trump made what can most generously be described as a tasteless joke. In his flailing effort to justify a war that most Americans oppose, and that Trump himself has been unable to explain, he exaggerated the threat Iran poses, at California's expense.

"They can take out a city, let '...Read more

"The rich are different from you and me." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald

I read two books in one weekend: "Just Mercy" by Bryan Stevenson on Saturday, "Strangers" by Belle Burden on Sunday. They're true stories, told well, about two countries, both inside America's borders: Death Row in Alabama, Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.

Defense attorney ...Read more

I've got to hand it to Washington's Republican policymakers. They've come up with a truly remarkable way that, they promise, will vastly expand the number of small businesses in America. Great!

This is personal for me, for I grew up in a family that had a Main Street business in small-town Texas, so I know how hard it is for little guys to ...Read more

The attempt to massacre Israelis that played out on a flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv last week was both extraordinary and more of the same. The Omani co-pilot stabbed the pilot and tried to seize control of the plane, telling investigators that he intended to crash it at Israel's Ben Gurion Airport. A devotee of radical Islam, he hoped...Read more

Where did this guy come from? How did a TV personality end up leading America's defense department, especially in a time of war?

Donald Trump put Pete Hegseth in charge of the Department of Defense. It's now officially called the War Department, but I'm not ready to go there.

In one of his stranger announcements, Hegseth vowed to rid the U.S...Read more

On a cloudy Saturday in March 2025, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., called an emergency hearing over the fate of more than 100 Venezuelans. The U.S. government had invoked the Alien Enemies Act against them, a wartime law used only three times before in U.S. history.

The Department of Homeland Security was rushing to fly the men out of the...Read more

Imagine there were a simple test, using AI, that could accurately predict a man's chance of developing prostate cancer in the next five years.

Would insurance pay the $249 for the test?

You bet they would. "Men fund what they fear," then Rep. Pat Schroeder so famously observed when fighting for increased funding for breast cancer research.

...Read more

It's that time again, and I know you're excited: time to start handicapping the 2028 presidential campaign.

First, for my left-of-the-Democrats readers -- in other words, my fellow travelers -- a disclaimer: handicapping the dancing bears of electoral democracy should never be construed as an endorsement of the two-party trap, the Democratic ...Read more

"I'm being taken, please fight for me."

This is the text that came through on Ryan Davis' phone on Aug. 12 from his former student Armelle Bondonga Bradshaw.

Armelle and her husband Terrance had gone to their final marriage-based green card interview. They had already received approval from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on ...Read more

As a reporter, I wasn't the guy who caught the big cases.

If I was covering the trial of someone who'd killed or injured someone, the alleged perpetrator was almost always a poor, drug-abusing member of a widely despised minority group. Usually, it was a male, and he always had a police record. Sometimes, he'd done time, and he'd killed ...Read more

An in-law, age 95 and on her deathbed, was having some final conversations. She brought up a memory of her own mother, who had lost a 2-year-old daughter to a childhood disease. When she misbehaved as a child, the elderly woman recalled, "My mother would say, 'I wish you had died instead of Alice.'" She then tried to reason that her mother, ...Read more

They are known as "stumbling stones" -- little brass tiles that for the last 30 years have been installed in the sidewalks outside the homes of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. More than 116,000 stones have been installed across Europe. It is a small thing, but an important one.

Last week, an ugly coalition in the German town of Heidenau voted...Read more