Walter Isaacson’s latest book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, has arrived at a pivotal moment for the country: the 250th anniversary of the American experiment. I found it especially meaningful at a time when we need to return to the words that first set America on the path toward democracy. This should be more than a season of fireworks and...

Justice… begins with fairness. Not fairness for the powerful, or the people we happen to like. Fairness for everyone. CBS News 24/7 reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez pressed Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche on whether President Trump could involve himself in Justice Department decisions about whom to investigate or prosecute. Blanche responded by pulling out a copy of the Constitution and...

Donald Trump has never hidden his disdain for anyone or any institution he believes stands in his way. Near the top of that list is the media: news organizations, comedians, late-night hosts, critics, any voice unwilling to bend to his narrative or gets under his thin skin. Which is why the sudden cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,...

Two voices, both alike in reach and power, Speak into a divided world. One feeds grievance. The other calls for grace. Influence still carries power. What it often lacks now is responsibility. The contrast between Nick Fuentes and Pope Leo XIV makes that clear. Both command attention. Both reach people who feel ignored. But what they do with that attention...

Recently, I found myself returning to a question I’ve asked in different forms for years: what does it actually take to hold a country together when its people don’t agree? We like to believe the Constitution emerged from unity, shared purpose and a kind of moral alignment that made agreement certain. It didn’t. As Max Farrand makes clear in The...

As distilled from an email update from Michael Waldman, President and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court struck down what remains of the Voting Rights Act. Soon, it will rule on the president’s birthright citizenship executive order, one that, as Waldman writes, “could upend what it means to be an American.” That is not...

Britain’s King Charles III spoke to a chamber that, for a moment, set aside party labels—Democrat and Republican—and listened not as factions, but as participants in a relationship that has endured for more than two centuries. What stood out in Charles’s address was not grandeur, but restraint. Not proclamation, but purpose. And beneath it all, a quiet ethical framework worth...

How does a country move from argument to action? The shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not an isolated event. It is part of a pattern, a deepening reflex in this country to divide the world into friend and enemy. We have been moving, steadily and dangerously, toward seeing one another not as fellow citizens, but as sides...

There are moments when events reveal more than they intend. What unfolded Saturday at the Washington Hilton was not simply an isolated act. It was what happens when something deeper begins to intersect—when grievance meets amplification, when suspicion hardens into certainty, and when language that once stopped short of harm no longer does. We often look for a single cause....

What is power accountable to when it no longer accepts limits? We have seen what happens when power turns inward—when it begins to believe it answers only to itself. There was a time when presidents understood that authority came with limits. Not just legal limits, but moral ones. They did not see disagreement—especially from moral voices—as something to be attacked...