Syndicated columns

Frank Bruni: Bret, steel yourself for a sentence I never expected to write, a preoccupation I never expected to have, words that shock, shake and shame me. I cannot stop wondering if I’ve sold Marjorie Taylor Greene short.

Today’s Republican Party is big on manliness and masculine virtues. The MAGA right in particular is forever obsessing over who is the biggest, the strongest, the most fearless among them.

Say that Donald Trump has by now realized that attacking, or even invading, Venezuela might turn into a disaster. He wants to back down and redeploy the mighty American armada in the Caribbean to do something more useful elsewhere in the world. Could he?

Donald Trump said Friday that he had “sort of” made up his mind about his plan for Venezuela, but he “can’t tell you what it would be.” With an aircraft carrier strike group and some 15,000 service personnel deployed to the region, it is sort of hard to imagine that the president’s decision will be to stand down and go home.

This weekend, Donald Trump picked a fight with two Republicans in Congress and lost.

Republican Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina has made several names for herself – some of which can’t be printed – in part by rejecting the bless-your-heart paradigm of the polite Southern belle in favor of the congresswoman’s apparently more profane personality.

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.