Syndicated columns

Jeffrey Epstein, who took his own life in 2019 while imprisoned on charges of being a sex trafficker and a pedophile, continues to haunt the Republican Party and its leader, President Donald Trump.

In one scenario for the pop cultural future, soon we’ll have movies without movie stars. In this scenario, generative artificial intelligence will produce infinite movie-like stories on the cheap, bespoke and tailored to micro-audiences, featuring “actors” created exclusively for the purpose. Maybe some of these creations will be digitally pilfered from the library of departed greats – want to see Humphrey Bogart in a “Star Wars” movie? Here you go! But mostly people will accept that the characters in any given AI-generated movie exist only for that story, not as Robert Redford or Diane Keaton once existed as recurring faces in a moviegoing life.

If owning a home is still the American dream, then it is increasingly out of reach for many young Americans. The average age of a first-time homebuyer is now 40, up from 33 just a few years ago and 29 in 1981.

By any metric, Tuesday’s elections were a blowout. Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani is the new mayor of New York City. The new Democratic governors in Virginia and New Jersey won with double-digit margins. Voter turnout was off the charts.

Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer who was assassinated in September, and Nick Fuentes, the young Hitler-loving white nationalist at the center of a growing schism on the right, were bitter enemies.

By Patricia Lopez

This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.

This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.

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.