Syndicated columns

The presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania testified before a House committee on Tuesday about the state of antisemitism on their campuses. It did not go well for them.

By Patrick Massey

And now, the end is near

Should the blessed day ever arrive when Donald Trump is sent to federal prison, only one of his acolytes has earned the right to share his cell: George Santos, who on Friday became the sixth person in history to be expelled from the House of Representatives, more than seven months after he was first charged with crimes including fraud and money laundering. (He’s pleaded not guilty.) A clout-chasing con man obsessed with celebrity, driven into politics not by ideology but by vanity and the promise of proximity to rich marks, Santos is a pure product of Trump’s Republican Party.

I know all the warnings and caveats about polls taken a year before an election. But much of the recent polling on the 2024 election is still frightening and disconcerting.

How many American evangelicals know their faith is being targeted by Russian military forces in Ukraine?

Last month President Joe Biden issued an executive order on artificial intelligence, the government’s most ambitious attempt to set ground rules for this technology. The order focuses on establishing best practices and standards for AI models, seeking to constrain Silicon Valley’s propensity to release products before they’ve been fully tested – to “move fast and break things.”

The new House speaker, Mike Johnson, gave federal workers, U.S. troops and the American people a Thanksgiving and Christmas present: no government shutdown for the rest of the year.

The latest opinion denying a challenge to Donald Trump’s eligibility to run for president has occasioned a lot of teeth-gnashing about how the court, in the words of Colorado’s secretary of state, gave Trump a “get-out-of-jail-free card for insurrection.” The frustration is understandable but shortsighted.

Nearly 82 years ago, my father was born in Nazi-occupied Belgium. When he was only 3 weeks old, his own father, Max, was captured and murdered by Nazis; my dad survived because he was hidden by a series of Christian foster homes. I was born in a peaceful time and place – Victoria, Canada, in 1974 – but my own life was shaped by those events that happened decades before my birth.

Is it possible that Israel could win a military victory in Gaza and still lose the war?

Many adjectives have been deployed to describe House Republicans. Hapless. Thuggish. Clownish. Ineffective. But the most politically descriptive: Minority.

Last week, I gave a lecture at the University of California at San Diego about politics and social justice. Afterward, as I was signing books, a young Black woman approached my table and whispered a question, asking me what I thought about the horrors playing out in the Gaza Strip.

Here’s a suggestion for American fashionistas eager to do what they can to prevent climate change: Contra the ads, don’t buy American. For each dollar’s worth of clothing it manufactures, the U.S. textile industry emits nearly three times as much carbon dioxide as its Chinese counterpart. Stick to sourcing your wardrobe from China.

In announcing last week that he will not seek reelection to the Senate – and hinting at a third-party presidential bid – Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W.Va., wrote an op-ed in which he decried the lack of bipartisanship in Washington. His first example? The Senate’s failure to pass his legislation to reverse Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and codify Roe v. Wade.

In his first big test as House speaker – coming up with a credible plan to avert a government shutdown, which passed the chamber on a bipartisan vote on Tuesday – Mike Johnson, R-La., has offered a sign that he might be a more skillful and pragmatic leader than many thought possible.