On Thursday, three days before Easter Sunday, Pope Leo XIV delivered a message that went straight to the point. “Leadership is not measured by authority, but by the willingness to kneel.” That’s humility. Not the kind we admire in passing. The kind that asks something of us. Today, when leadership is measured by loudness and control, Leo offered a different...

Thomas Jefferson once wrote that if forced to choose between “a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government,” he would prefer the latter. The statement was not an attack on government; it was a recognition that transparency is the lifeblood of liberty. In a democracy, the press asks questions. The government answers them. And the public, armed with facts,...

SPECIAL REPORT  I recently received an email message from a nationwide grassroots political network. The message reads as follows: “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is spending millions on warehouses they plan to repurpose as ICE detention ‘mega-centers’ to hold as many as 10,000 human beings per warehouse. “Draft layouts show ‘pods’ in which individuals are to be held, each...

In a quiet office in San Francisco, a philosopher is deep in thought, attempting something that until recently belonged to science fiction. She is trying to teach an algorithm the difference between right and wrong. Her name is Amanda Askell, and she works at the artificial-intelligence company Anthropic. Her assignment: help design the moral framework that guides Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude....

New information has now confirmed what many feared from the start: Alex Pretti was disarmed before he was shot—multiple times—by federal agents in Minneapolis. Whatever uncertainties once clouded this tragedy, that fact changes the moral terrain entirely. This is no longer a case about split-second judgment under imminent threat. It is a case about what happens after the threat is...

I first read Clarence Darrow for an American Jurisprudence class in college and have returned to his work several times since. He is widely regarded as one of the most intellectually and morally impressive attorneys in American legal history. And he spent his career standing beside people most of the country didn’t want to see. Darrow, the legendary Chicago defense...

On October 7, 2025, Pam Bondi, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, appeared before a Senate oversight committee and refused to answer question after question, so many, in fact, that committee member Adam Schiff was compelled to read them aloud. It was an extraordinary moment, not of legal restraint or principled caution, but of open arrogance, an unmistakable display of...

I have stopped watching national news about Donald Trump because the coverage now mirrors the damage itself. What once informed now exhausts; what once clarified now amplifies. The daily cycle no longer explains what is happening to the country—it re-enacts it. His indecent words following the death of beloved filmmaker Rob Reiner were the last straw. They recalled Joseph N....

Every December, I look forward to reading and watching Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. While there are countless versions of the classic, I always return to the film with Reginald Owen as Scrooge, not only because Owen embodies the part, but also because it features Gene Lockhart as Bob Cratchit. A brilliant character actor with a gift for sincerity, Lockhart brings...

CONTEMPT—Raw, in-your-face, unapologetic, and morally bankrupt. Every so often, the country reaches a point where character is not an abstraction but a requirement. We’re in one of those moments now. The country’s cynicism level has reached DEFCON 1. You can feel it in the way the culture has shifted. You can see it in how some treat once-trusted institutions with...