“Where have you gone, Bob Woodward? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.” I asked that question in January, repurposing a Paul Simon lyric to implore the dean of American political reporters to help us make sense of the mess that is the Trump White House. On Tuesday, Woodward finally came through. That was […]

A prediction. When the history of this era is written, when future generations wonder how a mostly educated and largely literate nation became mired in “truthiness,” when they ask how we became so mentally muddled that we lost the ability to identify facts and the capacity to care, they’ll find many culprits. They’ll blame Fox […]

Colin Kaepernick is staring at you. It’s a black-and-white image, a portrait taken from a distance that feels painfully close, even intimate. Kaepernick, the reviled and revered NFL quarterback who has been unemployed and unemployable since he sparked a movement of athletes and others kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality against African-Americans, […]

The Queen is dead. Aretha Louise Franklin, a preacher’s daughter from Memphis who was broadly acclaimed the greatest singer of the last half-century — indeed, one of the greatest singers in the history of American song — died of pancreatic cancer Thursday at her home in Detroit, surrounded by family and friends. She was 76. […]

And now here is this week’s episode of Great Moments in Black History. The year is 1979. Jimmy Carter is in office, disco is on the radio and Ron Stallworth has just joined the Ku Klux Klan. We are indebted to the Deseret Morning News, of Salt Lake City, for revealing this in an article […]

Jeffrey Whitman feels he got a raw deal. It’s true that Whitman, a contractor in central Ohio, has had a rough last few days. His life, he says, has been “completely and thoroughly ruined.” He doubts he’ll ever work in Columbus again. That may be an accurate prediction, given the scalding scorn his name engenders […]