December 3, 2018

A recent Washington Post report on the exploding market for school security equipment and services caught our attention. It’s now a $2.7 billion industry, a figure that doesn’t include the millions spent on armed campus security officers. Metal detectors, facial recognition software, pepperball…

How Cameron Hanes is redefining masculinity for a new generation

In 1918, Henry Ford ran for the Senate and lost. Did he concede? Are you kidding?

He that hath knowledge spareth his words,” says the biblical proverb. All of us can profit from these words, but perhaps Donald Trump needs to hear them more than most. His helter-skelter, self-exculpatory statement on his administration’s relationship with Saudi Arabia was Trump at his logorrheic…

A new report details the U.S. military is ill equipped to meet the threats of the next decade.

This fall Harvard College has been defending its admissions program against charges of racial discrimination brought in federal court. Ironically, this is not the first time that Harvard’s admissions practices have lain at the heart of an important case that could affect college enrollments across…

What happens when the president's son and one of his closest allies spar over criminal justice reform?

With Gary Hart, political journalists went from covering “the issues” as a public service to servicing the public with prurient material.

One is hard put to see how a government commissioned to negotiate in good faith for independence could have come up with a deal quite this bad.

Negotiating with terrorists won’t bring peace to Afghanistan.

Federal forest (mis)management is high on the list of reasons.

Florida counts the number of ways to screw up a machine recount

The GOP can’t even win in Orange County.

Noemie Emery on the year that all the political nightmares came true.

John Wilson on “the Short 68,” “the Long 68,” and what’s missing from a new account of the protests and their legacy.

The extraordinary fidelity of Christopher Tolkien, last of the Inklings.

Every year, the folks at Oxford Dictionaries announce a word of the year, and the word this year is toxic. “The Oxford Word of the Year,” the release reads, “is a word or expression that is judged to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year, and have lasting potential as a…

The Christmas season has begun, and ballet companies across North America are blessing their towns and cities with performances of The Nutcracker. For The Scrapbook, it’s the season’s highlight.

An item in the New York Times on November 19 brought our attention to the Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest at Columbia University. The contest is named for the famed author of the 12-line poem “Trees,” first published in 1913: “I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a…

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One of the nice things about getting old these days is that you no longer become an old person. You become a senior citizen. Another is that we old people—wait, we seniors—are able to discern the sudden and sweeping changes in manners and morals and politics that seem to a young person to be just…