What kind of leadership… what kind of citizenship, will it take to restore and live the values we claim to believe? It begins with service. Leadership without service is merely power. Public office was never meant to be a stage for self-glorification. It was meant to be a trust.  A president’s first question shouldn’t be, “How do I win?” but,...

There’s a scene in the Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day when Phil Connors—trapped in the same day over and over again—turns to two guys in a bar and asks, “What if there were no tomorrow?” One turns to him and says, “That would mean there would be no consequences. We could do whatever we wanted!” It gets a good laugh...

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...

In the winter of 1863, as the Civil War dragged into its third year, prices in the North rose sharply. Coffee, flour, and coal steadily became more expensive. Newspapers carried the numbers. Housewives felt them at the market. Even then, Americans did not see the same hardship in the same way. And that divide, between what is experienced and what...

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...

There are moments when a single arrest tells us more about the state of the country than a thousand speeches. The recent detention of Don Lemon while covering a protest inside a church is one of those moments—not because of who he is, but because of what it signals. “I was walking up to the room, and I pressed the...

Over the past several months, I’ve written commentaries revisiting moments in our history when individuals confronted serious challenges and rose to meet them — to remind us who we are and what we stand for. After writing about the tragedy in Minneapolis, I briefly turned to Steve Allen, an entertainer known for his intelligent wit — not to diminish what...

For nearly sixty years, the CBS News program 60 Minutes has stood as one of the few remaining institutions in American journalism recognized as serious, independent, and unafraid of difficult subjects. Its authority was never theatrical. It came from persistence, restraint, and the belief that citizens deserve to see uncomfortable facts and decide for themselves what they mean. That legacy...

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....