Syndicated columns

Nearly every story about an American university could start with the caveat: “Most of the people mentioned in this article are either teenagers or at least somewhat crazy.” But, to borrow the parlance of Silicon Valley, higher education’s embrace of oddballs and their out-of-the mainstream ideas isn’t a bug – it’s a feature.

I feel like I spend all of my time lately beating up on the Trump administration. But as they say in the military, it’s a target-rich environment.

At some point in his life, Donald Trump looked at a world map and saw something he wants – something that, as president of the US, he now says he will take “one way or the other.” It’s Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, one of America’s closest allies. “I love maps,” Trump once explained. “And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’ ”

In trying to distract from their alarming incompetence of having Jeff Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, in their Signal group chat about bombing Yemen, top Trump administration officials lied that there were no military secrets divulged to Goldberg.

One of the most electrifying shocks of the new Donald Trump era is how quickly the president has moved to ally with the Kremlin against Europe – and the security of the United States.

Do not mistake the results of Tuesday’s phone call between President Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin for progress toward peace in Ukraine. Instead, it marks one further step in Trump’s alliance with the Kremlin against the security interests of Ukraine, Europe, and the United States.

It used to be common knowledge – not just among policymakers and economists but also high school students with a grasp of history – that tariffs are a terrible idea. The phrase “beggar thy neighbor” meant something to regular people, as did the names of Sen. Reed Smoot and Rep. Willis Hawley. Americans broadly understood how much their 1930 tariff, along with other protectionist and isolationist measures, did to turn a global economic crisis into another world war. Thirteen successive presidents all but vowed never to repeat those mistakes.

Last month, close to 1,000 National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration workers, including weather forecasters, were fired. The Trump administration has now told agency leaders to fire another 1,000 people. Along with 300 resignations to date this will approach 20% of its workforce.

On Saturday, immigration agents showed at the apartment building of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last year’s pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, and told him that his student visa had been revoked and that he was being detained. Khalil is married to an American, and his lawyer, speaking to the agents by phone, informed them that he had a green card, but they said that had been revoked as well. He was taken away, and as of this writing appears to be in a detention facility in Louisiana.

Cottbus, Germany, a modest-sized east German city near the Polish border, with its historic town square whose buildings date back as far as the 15th century, might seem a strange place to visit for ideas on how Democrats can reach MAGA voters in the United States.

America holds its warfighters to the highest standard, expecting them to defend our nation at a moment’s notice. In exchange, we pledge to support them after their term of service ends.

Bloomberg editorial board

From an unlikely place – the upper reaches of the technology industry – comes an unexpected summons to an invigorated patriotism. The summons will discomfit progressives by requiring seriousness about the nation’s inadequate defenses, which endanger peace immediately and national survival ultimately. Conservatives will flinch from the new – actually, a recovered – patriotism that calls them up from an exclusively market-focused individualism, to collaboration between public and private sectors in great collective undertakings.

For a prosecutor to drop a case for political reasons is an appalling breach of professional ethics. That’s exactly what seems to have happened in the Trump Justice Department’s move to dismiss the corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams.

In 2021, JD Vance gave a speech to the National Conservatism Conference, a gathering of Trumpist thinkers and politicians, titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.” It contained the usual complaints about critical race theory and gender ideology, but it went further, arguing for a frontal attack on the power and prestige of higher education writ large. Comparing universities to the sci-fi totalitarianism of “The Matrix,” in which parasitic machines have seized control of reality , he said, “So much of what drives truth and knowledge as we understand it in this country is fundamentally determined by, supported by and reinforced by the universities.” Why, he asked, have conservatives consented to intellectual tyranny?