No one even knows how many girls there were. Federal prosecutors identified 36. In “Perversion of Justice,” a stunning piece of investigative work by Julie K. Brown that was published last week, the Miami Herald reported that it has found 80. But accounts given by the girls themselves suggest there may be hundreds. Hundreds. We’re […]

“Imagine all the people, sharing all the world.” — John Lennon A few words about “us” and “them.” It is, of course, the baseline division of human existence, probably dating from when the first person sparked the first fire. It’s a division that has been painful, bloody — and useful. Particularly in American politics. “Vote […]

So Georgia voters decided against Stacey Abrams as their governor. Maybe. With all the shenanigans perpetrated by Republicans in that state, we’ll never know for sure. Had they not passed a restrictive “exact match” law that put 53,000 voters (most of them reportedly African American) in electoral limbo over misplaced commas and transposed letters in […]

There has always been about her a sense that she did, indeed, have a truth of her own and that it was, if not at odds with the one her husband expressed with high-flown eloquence, more real and more rooted, as befits a girl from the South Side of Chicago. “You wait till Barack gets […]

Maybe this is futile. After all, there’s little point in talking back to a deranged person, especially if he is dead. Both descriptions fit the man who took his own life after opening fire in a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, last week, killing 12 people, among them Ventura County Sheriff’s Sgt. Ron Helus, the […]

“The fact that a man is a newspaper reporter is evidence of some flaw in character.” — Lyndon Johnson “They are a sort of assassins…” — John Quincy Adams “I look forward to these confrontations with the press to kind of balance up the nice and pleasant things that come to me as president.” — […]

“What are these politicians going to do for us?” A guy in Texas asked that question a few weeks back on “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” by way of explaining why he won’t be voting in the most important midterm election in modern American history. His words have been playing on an endless loop in […]

Rob Rogers is an editorial cartoonist who was fired in June after 25 years with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His departure, he said, came after weeks of tension with a publisher who wanted a more pro-Trump stance. “We’re living in a very dark time,” Rogers told the local NPR station, “in terms of who’s in the […]

“If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.” — Donald Trump, Feb. 1, 2016 “I’d like to punch him in the face.” — Donald Trump, Feb. 22, 2016 “You […]