Syndicated columns

A sound of morning silence is coming to Atlanta. The sound of newspapers landing on sidewalks in residential neighborhoods will vanish when, at year’s end, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, joining a national trend, stops publishing print editions.

President Donald Trump struck a Middle East deal by following a simple strategy: Do the opposite of what Joe Biden did. The same approach will help him bring peace to Ukraine.

Philip K. Howard, a graduate of Taft prep school, Yale and the University of Virginia School of Law, says he never wore “white bucks.” This 1950s campus fashion waned before he matriculated. Those buckskin shoes were popular among young blades destined to become “white-shoe lawyers” at prestigious “white-shoe law firms,” such as Covington & Burling, where Howard, 76, is senior counsel.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnificent new movie “One Battle After Another” arrived in theaters last week, but it was made in the America that existed before Donald Trump’s return. Watching it, I kept wondering if such a forthrightly anti-fascist film could be produced in Hollywood today.

Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny is coming to television screens everywhere, and many members of the MAGA movement are melting down over it.

Democrats have decided to enter their fight era.

Murder is mimetic. The Zodiac Killer – who murdered at least five people in Northern California in the 1960s and sent cryptic messages to the news media – inspired copycats and established a dark cultural archetype: the serial killer who leaves taunting clues for his pursuers to try to decipher. School shooters, often emerging from irony-poisoned, meme-addled online subcultures, tend to perform for one another. The same day Charlie Kirk was assassinated, a 16-year-old apparent white supremacist opened fire at his Colorado high school; one of his TikToks included a picture of Natalie Rupnow, who killed two people at her Christian school in December.

Because there is a silver lining for most things in life, maybe there is also one for ABC’s craven (if brief) suspension, under thuggish government pressure, of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show. To wit: Now the left is once again all but unanimous in wanting to defend free speech.

Sept. 21 was International Day of Peace. In the days leading up to it, I found myself reflecting on the theme for 2025, "Act Now for a Peaceful World," while flying home from Japan. August marked 80 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Japan's subsequent surrender to the Allied forces. This is also the 50th year since the end of the U.S. wars in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

When Walt Disney Co. announced it would end the suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” on Monday, after several days of protest, subscription cancellations and boycotts, defenders of the First Amendment (on all points of the political spectrum) rejoiced.

In the time since Tyler Robinson was charged with fatally shooting Charlie Kirk, I’ve been thinking about Robinson’s parents. Despite their anguish and fear, they convinced their son to surrender to police instead of becoming accessories after the fact.

Democrats in Congress might have finally found a viable political message to fight back against their Republican colleagues and President Donald Trump, after getting repeatedly steamrolled this year.

The juxtaposition of a 9/11 anniversary and the shocking assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk should have marked the moment when President Donald Trump finally called on all Americans to reject the political violence that has become characteristic of this country.

For male workers, the short-term news about wages is good but the long-term news isn’t. For female workers, it’s the other way around. As for the gender pay gap – well, it’s complicated.

President Donald Trump is in the United Kingdom for a state visit, where he is expected to again lecture that country's leaders about their civil and criminal policies on what should be free speech.

The First Amendment is in a sorry state, especially on college campuses. A survey of students released Sept. 9 from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression shows a steady decline in support for free speech – with a new high of 34% saying that using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable in some cases.

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade recently apologized for an “extremely callous remark” where he said that homeless people who experience mental illness and refuse treatment should be executed.

A guy I knew in college once told me, as I struggled to make a point in a dorm lounge argument, that I had “the verbal acuity of shampoo.” The put-down was so devastating that it immediately ended discussion. I think of the line nearly every time I fumble for a word or write a bad sentence.