The populist liturgy of Ron DeSantis is simple: The Courage to Be Free, the title of his new book. And it’s more than a little contradiction considering the restrictions the Florida Governor has put in place against corporations, the press and schools’ curriculum. DeSantis is not Donald Trump. He’s a smarter, sharper and a somewhat, more “acceptable” conservative who believes...

With so much unrest and division in the country, I wondered if there were any issues Americans could agree on. So, I typed “what issues do Americans agree on?” into the search engine and . . . lo and behold, there are many issues. Utilizing YouGov polling, last September, CBS News reporter Jennifer Martin came up with a list of...

At the end of the month, 30 teams will step out of the dugout to begin another season of Major League Baseball. Thirty rookies are among them. Seventy-six years ago, a rookie stepped out of the dugout and into history. His name was Jack Roosevelt Robinson. In a conversation for my book, What Do You Stand For? documentarian Ken Burns...

Lying has become far too pervasive in American culture today. When it’s done by politicians, it’s become normative. When it’s done by the media, it’s reprehensible. For 19 years, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite was the gold standard of trust when it came to reporting the news of the day. Today, some 24/7 cable news programs have become a hodgepodge...

Think about this. Because of Putin’s war against Ukraine, millions of Ukrainian men, women, and children are enduring the harshest conditions imaginable: nightly bombing; an absence of light, heat and water. Ukraine’s health system cannot keep up with the sick and injured. Schools have closed in much of the country. Despite help from European and Western allies, life in Ukraine...

There is a little-known science fiction film where an American scientist and his team design and build a supercomputer—a colossus of such computational scale and skill that it can assess, calculate, and respond to situations in seconds. Colossus: The Forbin Project tells the story of a massive artificial intelligence-equipped computer the size of a mountain designed as the perfect system...

As the death toll rises after a devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake in Turkey and Syria, one dramatic story—a miracle, really—took our collective breaths away. Amid the rubble and the bodies in the town of Jinderis in northern Syrian, rescue workers recovered a baby which doctors believe was only 3 hours old. With the umbilical cord still attached, the mother had...

Violence, upheaval throughout much of the world, what would Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi, the father of nonviolent resistance, say? This week marks the 75th anniversary of Gandhi’s death at the hands of an assassin on his way to a prayer service in Delhi. While Gandhi was an anti-colonialist who practiced and taught his followers non-violent resistance to deal with injustice, Gandhi...

How much anger and rage do five police officers have to have to beat a man to death after being pulled over for a traffic stop? Watching and listening to Tyre Nichols’s plea for help during a police gang attack in Memphis, Tennessee, the most heart-wrenching moment came when Nichols called out to his mother, twice. Nichols’s death is another...

Let’s cut to the chase: Americans expect a higher standard from the US Supreme Court than the other two branches of government . . .  much higher and we’re not getting it. Let’s start with Justice Alito. “A former leader of the anti-abortion movement wrote to the chief justice to report an alleged earlier breach, of a 2014 contraception decision,...