Syndicated columns

Let’s start here: A second Donald Trump presidency is a disaster scenario.

January is a time to redo, revise and recommit. It is also the time to return things.

Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard University who announced her resignation Tuesday after her problematic congressional testimony about antisemitism and mounting questions about missing citations and quotation marks in her published work, was, in part, pushed out by political forces beyond academia and hostile to it.

Almost four years have passed since COVID-19 struck. In America, the pandemic killed well over 1 million people and left millions more with lingering health problems. Much of normal life came to a halt, partly because of official lockdowns but largely because fear of infection kept people home.

Almost everything I hope for when it comes to foreign policy in 2024 seems outlandishly Pollyanna-ish. But a person has the right to dream, don’t they? So here goes.

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I spoke to a friend in Istanbul about my boundless horror, and while I can’t remember the exact words she said in response, they amounted to “Welcome to my world.” I told her about all the protests breaking out, and she gently warned me not to get my hopes up. She’d also demonstrated against Turkey’s authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, she said, but eventually those protests had died out, and ours would too.

Earlier this month on the Senate floor two senators rose to express disappointment with the House of Representatives. This was by itself routine enough, but the senators, Mike Rounds, R-S.D., and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., weren’t complaining about Ukraine funding or border policy. They were complaining that the House was impeding transparency on UFOs.

These are troubling times for American higher education. On one side, some students at a handful of elite universities have made harsh anti-Israel statements, some crossing the line into outright antisemitism, and some university presidents have been diffident and mealy mouthed in their responses.

Around the world, authoritarianism is ascendant and democracy is in decline.

Have you heard that there’s a huge wave of organized shoplifting – coordinated theft by groups effectively looting stores – sweeping the United States? You probably have. A couple of years ago, Walgreens said that organized shoplifting was behind its decision to close several locations in San Francisco. In April, the National Retail Federation issued a dire report claiming that “organized retail crime” was responsible for almost half of the store merchandise that vanished in 2021. The putative shoplifting tsunami has been relentlessly hyped by the usual suspects, such as Fox News, and by some politicians.

On Dec. 5, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology testified at a congressional hearing on “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.”

It seems obvious to say, but if you want a real sense of the differences between America’s two major parties – and if you want a sense of what the future could bring if either party wins full control of the federal government next year – all you have to do is look at the states.

Soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, horror stories started emerging of women denied medically urgent abortions for pregnancies gone dangerously awry. In response, the anti-abortion movement developed a sort of conspiracy theory to rationalize away the results of their policies.

Homelessness is an American tragedy, but it’s not hopeless.