THE people who created this country built a moral structure around money. The Puritan legacy inhibited luxury and self-indulgence. Benjamin Franklin spread a practical gospel that emphasized hard work, temperance and frugality. Millions of parents, (...)
In January 1841, Abraham Lincoln seems to have at least vaguely thought of suicide. His friend Joshua Speed found him one day thrashing about in his room. “Lincoln went Crazy,” Speed wrote. “I had to remove razors from his room — take away all (...)
IT took Christopher Columbus about 70 days to get to the New World — a bit less than half as long as it took us to get through the 2008 primary calendar. But by Tuesday night, we'll have reached our destination, and people in the Obama and McCain (...)
Dear Senators Obama and McCain,
You are now engaged in a campaign debate over whether to talk with Iran. As I'm sure you both know, this is a political exercise that will have little relevance should you actually take office.
In the White House, (...)
MY first thought on the running mate question is that to balance his ticket, Barack Obama should pick a really old white general. Therefore, he should pick Dwight Eisenhower. John McCain, on the other hand, needs to pick someone younger than (...)
In 1950, Dr. Seuss published a book called “If I Ran the Zoo.” It contained the sentence: “I'll sail to Ka-Troo, and bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP, and a PROO, a NERKLE, a NERD, and a SEERSUCKER, too!” According to the psychologist David Anderegg, (...)
IN 1965, Mancur Olson wrote a classic book called “The Logic of Collective Action,” which pointed out that large, amorphous groups are often less powerful politically than small, organized ones. He followed it up with “The Rise and Decline of (...)
FOR years, American and British politics were in sync. Reagan came in roughly the same time as Thatcher, and Clinton's Third Way approach mirrored Blair's. But the British Conservatives never had a Gingrich revolution in the 1990s or the Bush (...)