Sometimes, the directness of children is unsettling. They just have this way of making things plain. I am thinking of a 10-year-old white boy I met in Montgomery, Ala., in 1995. My late colleague Michael Browning and I were driving across the South, visiting battlefields of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement. We […]

Let us give the jury the benefit of the doubt. Let us assume that, within the narrow constraints of the evidence at hand and Florida’s bizarre gun laws, six good women rendered the only verdict they could Saturday night in acquitting George Zimmerman of murder and manslaughter in the killing of Trayvon Martin. Even so, […]

As Christina Cordero remembers it, the doctor would not take no for an answer. “As soon as he found out that I had five kids, he suggested that I look into getting it done. The closer I got to my due date, the more he talked about it. He made me feel like a bad […]

Mohandas Gandhi went to Yeravda Central Prison. Martin Luther King Jr. went to Birmingham jail. Nelson Mandela went to Robben Island. Edward Snowden is going to Venezuela. Or not. His destination was up in the air as these words were written. A Russian lawmaker tweeted on Tuesday that Snowden, the fugitive former U.S. contractor, had […]

I was standing in line with God, buying tickets to see Monsters University. He’s a big Billy Crystal fan. “So,” I said, “have you heard about these religious atheists?” God gave me a look. “Is this a joke?” He asked. “Like, two rabbis and a duck walk into a bar?” “No,” I said. “It’s a […]