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...

The day after her fall in the women’s downhill at the Winter Olympic Games in Milan-Cortina, Lindsey Vonn posted a message on Instagram. Not just a medical update,  but a reflection: “I dreamt, I tried, I jumped.” No polish. Just truth. “Life is too short not to take chances on yourself. Because the only failure in life is not trying....

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....

In moments of national crisis, a nation discovers whether its founding principles are merely words on paper, or values worth defending. As the 150th anniversary of the United States Bill of Rights approached in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted the anniversary to do more than commemorate history, he wanted it to remind Americans what they stood for. To...

I had just learned of the passing of a good friend and colleague, Colman McCarthy when the memories began to return. Before I ever met him, he had already lived a life that quietly defied the usual measures of success. For nearly three decades, from 1969 to 1997, he wrote columns for The Washington Post, covering politics, religion, health, sports,...

In 1927, Sinclair Lewis gave America a character it did not want to recognize in the mirror: Elmer Gantry. Gantry is loud, magnetic, insatiable — a sinner with a capital “S.” He does not discover faith; he discovers its usefulness. He learns that fear, properly stirred, can fill a sanctuary. Redemption, properly marketed, can build an empire. Gantry bellows and...

It’s just a photograph: a wartime dog sitting alert, ears up, wearing a military harness. But the story about a World War II sentry dog named Chips turns out to be less about lore than about something rarer and more unsettling: courage without calculation. In July 1943, in Sicily, Chips, without hesitation, ran straight at a machine-gun nest, scattering the...

A cancer has been growing in our national life, so embedded in our culture that we’ve stopped acknowledging it. In the 1940s and the decades that followed, there were certainly moments of disrespect—some private, some national—but they weren’t worn as badges of honor. Today, they’ve become normalized and set the tone in our national discourse. Ethics specialist Michael Josephson teaches...

“How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.”— Yvon Chouinard “Every new adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem”—Eric Hoffer “Retreat, Hell! We’re just advancing in another direction.”–General O.P. Smith, UN Forces Leader, Korean War. “I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right”–Albert Einstein. “Of...