I’ve played chess about two dozen times, and every match feels less like a game and more like mental boot camp. It’s not difficult; it’s torture. Each move demands navigating hundreds of possible combinations in your head before making a single move. Then I came across a grandmaster whose strategy began long before the first pawn moved. Her preparation wasn’t...

“There’s a difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.” United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said that. But it was not part of any written Supreme Court opinion or legal case. While it’s been widely quoted as Stewart’s judicial philosophy, there is no record of it in any official Supreme Court...

The measure of a public servant isn’t how tightly they hold onto power, but how faithfully they hold their integrity when the pressure to bend is greatest. Few can withstand the pressure; fewer still have the character and courage to act. In October 1973, amid the growing Watergate scandal, Attorney General Elliot Richardson faced a test that would ultimately define...

I happened across Frances Perkins while searching files at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library. She was the first woman in U.S. history to serve in a cabinet post, as Secretary of Labor under the most consequential president of the era. She shined brightest, not in seeking headlines, but in advancing the rights and well-being of ordinary Americans. Born in...

How do we reconcile the integrity of a leader to whom service to the country was exemplary, but held slaves in service to him? Washington D.C. is far too often remembered for its scandals than its triumphs—a reality that would have stunned and saddened our first president. Yet history’s true measure lies with those who chose conscience over expedience, and...

“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.” – Henry David Thoreau I first read Walden back in high school. At the start, the pace felt slow, but once I settled into the rhythm, I was pulled in. Henry David Thoreau wasn’t simply a nature lover; he was...

It is the First Amendment that allows President Donald Trump to repeatedly say he won the 2020 election—when, in fact, he did not. It is the First Amendment that permitted Donald Trump to call those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, “patriots.” That same Amendment allowed the president to say COVID-19 would “disappear, like a miracle.” It is...

UPDATE AT THE END OF THIS COMMENTARY  I said I would ease up on writing about Trump, and I meant it. Yet the president’s recent actions have been too blatant, too corrosive, to let pass without comment. Eight months into his second term, Donald Trump continues to show that his goal is not to bring Americans together, but to drive...

The murder of Charlie Kirk–gunned down while speaking at Utah Valley University–is another brutal reminder of how political beliefs can metastasize into hatred. On the night of April 4, 1968, after learning that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy stood on the back of a flatbed truck before a largely African American crowd in Indianapolis...

Returning from summer vacation, the atmosphere in the country, sadly, remains unchanged. While future commentaries will highlight America’s triumphs as well as the times we found the courage to correct our course, the challenges before us now are too flagrant to ignore: the same divisions, the same anger, the same refusal to face reality persist. With armed National Guard units...