What will define us at 250 years—not our disagreements, but what we are willing to believe about one another, and about the truth itself? As we approach the 250th anniversary of our democratic republic, I find myself returning to a familiar concern, now sharpened by the widening divide in our country. Disagreement has always been part of the American story....

On Thursday, three days before Easter Sunday, Pope Leo XIV delivered a message that went straight to the point. “Leadership is not measured by authority, but by the willingness to kneel.” That’s humility. Not the kind we admire in passing. The kind that asks something of us. Today, when leadership is measured by loudness and control, Leo offered a different...

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,...

I first read Clarence Darrow for an American Jurisprudence class in college and have returned to his work several times since. He is widely regarded as one of the most intellectually and morally impressive attorneys in American legal history. And he spent his career standing beside people most of the country didn’t want to see. Darrow, the legendary Chicago defense...

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 recently read about a group of explorers who located a ship deep beneath the dark, cold waters off Antarctica: a vessel whose very name says a great deal about the man who once led her. Ernest Shackleton’s greatness didn’t come from a great feat. It came from the humility to set aside his own ambition the moment his men...

Wisconsin’s night sky opened to a rare sight, one usually reserved for places far colder and farther north—the Northern Lights. The colors pulled against each other, as if the sky itself were wrestling with something unsettled. Striking, but what held me wasn’t the sky; it was everything beneath it: a farmhouse, some outbuildings, a scatter of lights. Chaos above; calm...

“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...

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...

French philosopher Voltaire once observed, “Common sense is not so common.” Thomas Paine trusted it anyway and helped inspire a revolution built on it. In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a pamphlet that spoke in plain, direct language ordinary colonists could understand. English by birth, Paine became an extraordinary patriot. His words cut through chaos at one of...