Alice B. Lloyd

Welcome to 2018, people: Nixon’s the one.

A teenage citizen-journalist battles the bureaucracy over the Parkland shooting.

A 12-year-old girl in Baltimore County, Maryland, complained to her teachers, her guidance counselor, and her middle school principal when a boy wouldn't stop harassing her. He leered at her in class, and, she says, touched her out on the playground in a way state law classifies as a sexual…

It shouldn't take the popularity of Jordan Peterson or the presidency of Donald Trump to tell us masculinity has been in a bad place. Better evidence abounds. Look no further than long term demographic decline concurrent with the culturally ascendent denial of gender differences. Or consider the…

"I have come to Albany mad as hell about Republicans, and I have come to Albany mad as hell about Democrats," said Cynthia Nixon in a speech in Albany Monday. Knowingly or not, she was quoting the movie Network, a dark 1976 satire of TV's corrupt command of America.

There may be no better showcase for the sociopolitical contortions our culture’s made in the last two decades than what the #MeToo ethic makes of the campus novel Blue Angel, by Francine Prose. Recently adapted—honestly but shallowly—into a movie starring Stanley Tucci under a toupee, the limited…

Vice President Mike Pence’s daughter Charlotte wrote—and his wife, Karen, illustrated—a children’s book about the family bunny Marlon Bundo. It’s not Beatrix Potter or Watership Down. But it’s on time for the Easter theme, charmingly illustrated, and needless to say well-intentioned. Who doesn’t…

One of the great legislative challenges of history, from the Hittite abominations to the regulation of internet porn, has been anticipating the latent evils unleashed by man’s ingenuity. Now, child sex dolls—robots engineered to warm to the human touch and disturbingly lifelike in their…

Press coverage of the acquittal of former Yale student Saifullah Khan on sexual assault charges has distorted the facts of case, jurors say. Khan’s case—an alleged campus sexaul assault that triggered a police investigation and worked its way to criminal court—concerns an encounter between the now…

Tracking the rise and fall of Rose McGowan’s sheroism (and I have for months) certainly adds color to anyone’s comprehensive reading of the modern women’s movement. But now, in a recent podcast, McGowan has opened up about being a movement outsider and revealed herself to be genderqueer. “I don't…

Nickolas Meyer spent his early adulthood trying to hide the fact that he hails from Findlay, Ohio. But a return to his hometown is probably the best he can hope for after being arrested for allegedly stealing and selling $1.2 million worth of wine that belonged to his former boss, Goldman Sachs…

For anyone counting #MeToo casualties with a wary eye, one of 2018’s first will have stood out. On January 13, in a lengthy exposé published on a website for college-age women, a 23-year-old photographer charged comic Aziz Ansari with the crime of being a bad date. The pseudonymous “Grace”…

It might come to the surprise of the average woman who has been bombarded with inspirational corporate hashtags and ads for #girlpower T-shirts that what we now know as “International Women’s Day,” started as an anti-capitalist protest: The first National Women’s Day took place February 28, 1908,…

The Oscars couldn’t stray far from politically tense themes; in fact, the ceremony strained to fit in almost all of them.

The 2018 Oscars were always going to be weird, but in a mostly predictable way.

Last week’s latest indictments by special counsel Robert Mueller added dozens of new counts to the charges already leveled against former Trump campaign manager, lobbyist Paul Manafort and his disloyal deputy Rick Gates, who pleaded guilty late last week. Manafort, arraigned Wednesday morning,…

Mona Charen shook this year’s Trumpified CPAC by the shoulders.

The Supreme Court heard arguments Monday morning in a case set to undo a seminal 40-year-old precedent that required all public sector employees to pay their union a “fair share fee” whether or not they’d elected to join.

One stalwart Trump critic dared to take the stage at this year’s CPAC. “If we want an audience with young people, we have to separate ourselves from the men on our side who’ve behaved atrociously toward women,” said conservative writer Mona Charen—a think tank fellow, and TWS contributor—during a…

The Missouri governor indicted Thursday on charges stemming from alleged sexual misconduct and blackmail has a history of extolling his ethical leadership.

"If unions are so good and doing such a great job, why do they have to force people to pay them?" That’s the question Mark Janus, an Illinois child services specialist, posed to assembled reporters on Friday. It’s the Supreme Court who will give him an answer. His case will be heard on Monday.

In Brave, a book she was writing even before Harvey Weinstein’s reckoning kicked off last fall, actress and activist Rose McGowan tells her life’s story as a series of brain-washings: “Here’s the thing about cults,” she begins, “I see them everywhere.”

Trump-supporting Twitter users the world over logged on Wednesday morning to find their follower counts diminished. Appearances suggest the targets of this so-called Twitter "purge" were suspected bot accounts, and unverified users whose tweeting patterns reflect those of Russian bots: Locked out…

An impermanent high-art graffiti gallery in Queens was, for the five years since its whitewashing by a real estate developer, considered another casualty of cold-hearted capitalism. Its absence was a monument to the unwinnable war against the Man. Now the building owner who erased it has to pay…

Nick Meyer, 40, became briefly famous a few weeks ago for allegedly stealing more than $1 million of wine from his banker boss. As Goldman Sachs president David Solomon’s personal assistant from 2008 until 2016, Meyer’s job involved such chores as the transport of hundreds of bottles of extremely…

For Rose McGowan, it was only a matter of time. She’s an ice-cold operator who’ll verbally shiv with military precision anyone who crosses her. She’d have to be, to survive the hellhole of Hollywood hypocrisy with her sanity mostly intact. It was only a matter of time, then, before she’d turn on…

A man calling himself Nicolas De-Meyer was arrested in Los Angeles last Tuesday. His crime: allegedly stealing $1.2 million worth of wine from his boss, David Solomon, president of Goldman Sachs.

The “Shitty Media Men” list that came into a short-lived existence during the Harvey Weinstein awakening enjoyed a second life of sorts Tuesday and Wednesday, in the form of a viral controversy about its creator and a pending magazine story about the #MeToo movement. The result is that we now know…

The flu is coming—and eventually, another pandemic. Consensus says, we’re not prepared. But don’t take it from me. There have been warnings.

“I’m not sure a lot of people will come at midnight,” said the sales clerk who picked up the phone at Kramer Books when I called Thursday evening, wondering whether they were bracing for a crowd later that night.

Eight years after his release from federal prison, Joe Ganim is ready to run.

The new year is shaping up to be one of reckoning for public-sector unions. Just a few days before Christmas, Janus v. AFSCME got its slot on the calendar of the Supreme Court—which, with Neil Gorsuch on the bench, is not stacked in labor’s favor.

For most of November and December, an unusual modern art exhibition down from New Haven didn’t seem to be getting its due notice. At least whenever I returned to these beautifully installed, dark back galleries of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the rooms holding Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the…

It certainly stands to reason that the news most likely to unite a nation divided against itself would win so little notice in a year like 2017. Maybe we just don’t want to overcome our differences in fearsome awe of the intergalactic Other, OK? The popular appetite for otherworldly updates is…

Earlier this month, the Department of Education released the latest figures on high school graduation: After rising every year for five years, the national rate hit an all-time high of 84 percent in 2016. Good news, surely.

Women are more likely to have been sexually assaulted by the age of 44 if they didn’t go to college, according to a new study from the University of Michigan. The study, spearheaded by sociology professor and researcher William Axinn, found that the risk of “experiencing forced intercourse” is more…

Americans really don’t care about a “war on Christmas” anymore.

Thérèse Dreaming, by the Polish-French painter Balthus, is undeniably creepy. Creepy enough to launch, in this day and age, an online petition demanding it either be removed from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, or that “context” be added to the display. The museum abstained from any action,…

Members of the Republican National Committee are responding to the news that Joyce Simmons, committeewoman for Nebraska, resigned her post Monday in response to the RNC renewing its support for Roy Moore.

The Republican National Committee reversed its decision to withdraw financial support from Roy Moore’s Senate campaign last week, in the wake of President Trump’s endorsement and Moore’s gains in the polls.

In the wake of President Trump’s official endorsement of Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore, the Republican National Committee chose to resume funding Moore’s campaign for the U.S. Senate, a move that state-level members of the RNC greeted with a range of sanguinity.

I’m not sure who coined the term “pervnado” to describe the torrential whirlwind of sexual harassment allegations roiling the already morally unhinged mirror worlds of show business, media, and politics. (Although, from the looks of it, we can thank headline writers at the New York Post for the…

When this fall’s rampant #MeToo movement rippled overseas, it found a far superior French hashtag—#BalanceTonPorc, meaning “squeal on your pig”—and an already pending piece of legislation.

There’s no denying it now: In the hurricane of sexual harassment scandals felling powerful men from Kevin Spacey to Matt Lauer to, now, Garrison Keillor—no one is safe. Not even women of paramount grace and accomplishment who engage in a single instance of wrongthink. Yesterday the beloved Dame…

The most remarkable thing about actress Meghan Markle’s engagement to Prince Harry is not that the princess-to-be is a woman of color—her mother is black, her father is white—or that she’s older than he is and has been married before. What’s really remarkable is that none of this would-be fodder…

Everyone has their two cents about how to talk politics, or not talk politics, or how silly we’ve become for talking about politics, at Thanksgiving. We suggest looking forward instead of dwelling on the miserable present: It’s never too early to speculate about who’ll jump into the next…

“This is my truth,” says Donna Brazile, the two-time DNC chairwoman of her self-contradictory bestseller.

A pop-cultural fixture—in life, in prison, and now in death—mass murderer and master manipulator Charles Manson embodied the evil underbelly of the free-loving 1960s. And from his conviction in 1971 for seven counts of murder, to his death Sunday at age 83, California kept him alive.

One of the more puzzling aspects of Paul Manafort's indictment for conspiracy, money laundering and other charges was the line items detailing the he epic sums he reported spending from Cyprus-based accounts on antique rugs in Northern Virginia. There's really no reasonable way, THE WEEKLY STANDARD…

A moderate paid leave policy made quiet progress this week, as a popular proposal authored by Nebraska senator Deb Fischer found its way into Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch’s tax reform markup.

Sunday morning, a video of a man tossing his Keurig coffee machine from a second-story balcony made the (g)rounds. It’s been tweeted more than 13,000 times between just the original poster and one who implored his followers to “retweet to offend a liberal.” The destruction owes to the manufacturer…

Winners this Election Day ranged from governors-elect Ralph Northam and Phil Murphy to new Virginia state rep. Danica Roem, far from the first transgender legislator in the land, and the 93-year-old new mayor of Tinton Falls, New Jersey. But they weren’t the only ones: The legal marijuana industry…

Philadelphia

While we’re distracted reliving last year’s election, a graver anniversary will be passing by. On Nov. 8, 1917, at 2:10 a.m., Vladimir Lenin’s soldiers stormed the Winter Palace after a two-day siege and found the men who’d fall to their coup. They stopped the clock in the former imperial dining…

Detroit

Detroit

The indictment of Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort reveals, among other things, that the man knew how to spend money. In the five years between 2008 and 2013 he dropped several million dollars—from offshore accounts in Cyprus and the Grenadines—tricking out his houses in Florida and the…

Can there be such a thing as a “pro-life feminist”? The question gained new currency just as the Trump presidency began, when Women’s March organizers dropped the New Wave Feminists, a Texas-based group led by libertarian-leaning pro-lifer Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, as partners—because the…

It was just last September, in rural Pennsylvania, that Ivanka Trump first introduced supporters to her father’s promises of six weeks’ paid maternity leave and tax relief for child-care costs. These were policies she hoped to shepherd. A year later and an hour away in Bucks County, she held a town…

The Sacramento statehouse, according to conventional wisdom, is a bellwether for social policies that soon sweep the nation. This week, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the legislature's attempt to give Obama-era Title IX guidance the force of law that it never had nationally.

The hardest thing about teaching, and teaching middle school especially, is all the stuff you can’t cover with students on the fragile border between childhood and young adulthood. You can’t do it all, and you shouldn’t try. The mark of a good teacher is that she cuts the right amount of difficult…

Reasons for an institution like the Boy Scouts of America to go coed fall into roughly two camps. First, there’s the stark reality of dwindling membership: The Scouts are down to a mere third of their 6.5-million-member peak reached in the early 1970s. (Admitting girls, theoretically, doubles their…

In a Columbus Day scandal for the ages, a measured but provocative essay reconsidering the evils of colonialism got the axe a month after its publication. First, critics of Portland State University political science professor Bruce Gilley’s “The Case for Colonialism” launched a 10,000-signature…

The upcoming Supreme Court case most threatening to the Democratic establishment will revisit the 40-year-old ruling that created public-sector unions as we know them today.

Sherman, Conn.

Just as she told the public she would, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded the Obama administration’s controversial guidance on Title IX Friday. A new set of guidelines—in the form of an interim “Q&A on Campus Sexual Misconduct”—will take its place until replacement rules receive full notice…

“It looks like tin foil balled up and woven through bubble wrap,” observes Katrina Bridges, 52, a federal employee on her lunch break outside the LBJ Education Department building on a sunny Wednesday afternoon in September. We’re looking at a sliver of an impressionistic metal landscape of the…

On the same day last week, two Democratic women published political memoirs. One was a frank and engaging tale of butting heads with the media and doing battle with an upstart populist progressive. The other was written by Hillary Clinton.

The start of classes was just a week away when white supremacists clashed with counterprotesters in Charlottesville. The town that is home to the University of Virginia is now synonymous with American carnage. At the heart of the August 12 riot that left one young woman dead sat Robert E. Lee atop…

Eight months into the Trump administration, a long-awaited campaign to unwind Obama’s legacy on Title IX appears to have begun in earnest. Early Thursday afternoon in a speech at George Mason University, Betsy DeVos condemned the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague Letter,” that has had an…

As the summer of 2016 wound down, the University of Chicago’s dean of students sent a letter to the school’s incoming cohort of freshmen telling them not to expect the sort of coddling that had become worryingly commonplace at elite American colleges. His welcome to the class of 2020 aimed to…

Let’s call her Jane. She’s 32 and a junior vice president at a big investment bank. The firm’s attempt at more manageable hours has made it possible for her to reshuffle her work and stay on after having a baby. But growing responsibilities to clients pull her away from her new role. She totes…

Title IX is a Nixon-era federal law barring sex discrimination in schools. Under the Obama administration, it became a mandate for colleges to adjudicate claims of sexual misconduct with an imbalanced extrajudicial standard. The Department of Education’s infamous “Dear Colleague Letter” of April…

Let’s call her Jane. She’s 32 and a junior vice president at a big investment bank. The firm’s attempt at more manageable hours has made it possible for her to reshuffle her work and stay on after having a baby. But growing responsibilities to clients pull her away from her new role. She totes…

Zoe Katz, a 22-year-old college student, waited six months to go public with her side of the scandal that's darkened her senior year at the University of Southern California. She waited not because she fears retribution from an abusive partner, as her school’s Title IX office reportedly insists.…

There’s a secret society in Silicon Valley. “Imagine an engineer at Google, let’s say he’s a conservative—a red meat conservative. Does he want to go work at the Heritage Foundation? Probably not,” Aaron Ginn, age 29, tells me at a “hacienda-style” D.C. bar called Mission, apparently in reference…

Bernie Sanders might be the most popular politician in all of America, and his constituents give him the highest approval rating in the Senate—but the Vermont social worker who just announced his intention to challenge Sanders says it’s all for show. “The electorate is ready to see who Senator…

Burlington, Vt.

Burlington, Vt.

“All women are witches” would be a truly provocative premise. But what is a witch in 2017? The author of Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive, dishes up different definitions, framing a witch-as-everywoman thesis to suit the modern day feminista. The witch is less a sorceress…

It’s up to the legislative branch, not bureaucrats, to decide whether Title IX of the Higher Education Act actually applies to gender identity, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Thursday afternoon, after a day of meetings with Title IX stakeholders at the Department of Education.

There’s a lot riding on a Title IX summit that’s happening at the Department of Education today. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos will meet privately with sexual assault victims and advocates who want her to maintain the campus sexual assault provisions decreed by the Obama administration (and plan…

Bhavini Bhakta loved her union—until she got to know it. As a fifth-grade teacher in southern California’s Monrovia Unified School District, she put her trust in her local chapter. But after Bhakta’s principal had to fire and rehire her six years in a row because of a nonsensical seniority law, she…

Republicans' faith in the American higher education has sharply diminished since 2015—as it well should have. A national survey from the Pew Research Center found a growing majority of Republican and rightward-leaning independents believe colleges and universities have a negative effect on the…

The Senate Judiciary Committee tackles social and philosophical questions out on the edges of constitutionality. They process proposed constitutional amendments, and their subcommittee on the Constitution oversees constitutional rights’ protection and enforcement. It was only a matter of time,…

Could "cultural appropriation"—a term that applies to everything from a drug company’s poaching an ancient herbal remedy to Katy Perry in cornrows—ever be banned by international law? Not exactly, but a U.N. committee that convened last week has been working on it for 17 years. The 189-member group…

Nerds the world over go all out for Bloomsday. It's June 16, the anniversary of James Joyce and his wife Nora Barnacle's first date in 1904, also the day Joyce chose for the events of Ulysses—three characters, Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, going about their lives in Dublin. Revelers…

A college preparatory school for black and Latino boys opened in Washington, D.C., last year to a burst of public interest—and the inevitable question from the American Civil Liberties Union of the Nation's Capital: What have you done for girls lately? In the city's newest public high school,…

Last winter over lunch, CNN anchor Dana Bash got the idea to profile powerful women serving in politics and government. She and two female colleagues were mourning Hillary Clinton's failed campaign when inspiration struck. There would be a web series. To celebrate women. But it needed a name. Why…

Without having to pour a single free drink, the Capitol Hill bar that promised to buy a round every time President Trump tweeted Thursday morning during James Comey's must-watch congressional testimony drew at least 500 customers. That was Union Pub general manager Ashley Saunders's best guess…

A college preparatory school for black and Latino boys opened in Washington, D.C., last year to a burst of public interest—and the inevitable question from the American Civil Liberties Union of the Nation's Capital: What have you done for girls lately? In the city's newest public high school,…

A nation of Trumpster Fire watchers will be glued to our screens Thursday morning, in anticipation of bombshell revelations from former FBI director James Comey's testimony to Congress. CNN's countdown started with three days to go and on Sunday switched to an actual clock tick-tick-ticking down…

The fanfare that greeted D.C.'s first public college preparatory school for African-American and Latino young men—Ron Brown High School in northeast has given way to an inevitable nag from the ACLU. If they're not going to admit young women, the ACLU says, then D.C. should at least give girls a…

A reader alerts TWS Fact Check to a "news" story that the Supreme Court has banned public schools from teaching about Islam. The post, which has been making the rounds on Facebook for several weeks, claims that Justice Neil Gorsuch issued the deciding opinion in an April 10 ruling to restrict…

Hillary Clinton spread around the blame in a candid interview with Recode last Wednesday. She called her private email server a "nothingburger" and the Times endorsement of her candidacy a hypocritical reversal—they reduced up the scandal to "a matter for the help desk," after having "covered it…

President Trump's budget request for defense spending is at once too much and not enough.

President Trump took to Twitter Tuesday morning to amplify comments he made during the European leg of his overseas trip. He controversially, and indelicately, invoked one of his key issues — trade policies that put America first, or fail to — in a meeting of E.U. leaders last Thursday, during…

A reader sent to TWS Fact Check this Memorial Day weekend an internet meme claiming that of the more than 58,000 fallen service members commemorated on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall, only eight are women. The engraved wall of names cuts into the topography of Washington, D.C.'s monumental core…

The morning after the Washington Post and the Intercept linked to a leaked transcript of President Trump's late April phone call with Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, reports surfaced alleging that Trump had given Duterte sensitive intel about American nuclear submarines located near North…

Reports spread over the weekend that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault had "flooded," succumbing to the same force it was designed to protect the world's food supply from: global warming.

Ten months after his death, reports continue to circulate concerning the murder of Seth Rich, a 27-year-old data analyst for the Democratic National Committee. Seth Conrad Rich died hours after what police investigators (who are still working on the case) have long said was likely an attempted…

Protesting political commencement speakers—presidents past and present, former or current Cabinet members who wax platitudinous on graduation day—is not a new phenomenon. SoVice President Mike Pence knew what he was walking into at Notre Dame last weekend. He came prepared. And while he condemned…

Senator Ben Sasse's new book The Vanishing American Adult calls attention to a coming-of-age crisis: The undeniable drag that consumerism, technology, and other modern forces have had on the institution of family and the work ethic for which Americans were once recognized around the world.

Contentious school board elections in Los Angeles served up a dramatic victory for education reformers in a district, the second-largest in the nation, that has long been dominated by teachers unions' hand-selected board members.

Novelist Curtis Sittenfeld will be recasting Hillary Clinton's life in a bizarro world where Ms. Rodham might have met but never married Bill. The same Bubba who softened her hard heart, we're to understand, hardened the last glass ceiling over her head.

The statistic that 1-in-5 college women are the victims of sexual assault is so ubiquitous, and advocates so insistent that "the science is settled," that it can lead to predictable outrage when different reports—like a new analysis from the American Association of University Women showing 89…

Save for a few peaceful patches in the commencement program—when the concert chorale sang, when the brass band played, when the the charismatic chaplain called graduates and guests to prayer—students at the historically black Bethune-Cookman University's commencement ceremony on Wednesday clamored…

Political scientist and law professor Carol Swain retired from academia just when some of her research had become remarkably relevant. She doesn't see it quite that way, though. Swain prophesied the rise of the alt-right 15 years ago, but she won't call Donald Trump's election victory a vindication…

Dismantling Obama-era over-regulation is supposed to be a top priority of the Trump administration. And few regulations have caused as much consternation as Obama's reinterpretation of Title IX. Alas, no amount of subsequent policy can easily disentangle this overreach from campus life.

Education policy is prone to extremes. Cozy bipartisan cooperation brought big, messy compromises like the Bush-era "No Child Left Behind." Then, an oppositional fervor stoked by Tea Party-flavored federalism attacked the Common Core, and now bitter battles with big labor consume the school choice…

Political scientist and law professor Carol Swain retired from academia just when some of her research had become remarkably relevant. She doesn't see it quite that way, though. Swain prophesied the rise of the alt-right 15 years ago, but she won't call Donald Trump's election victory a vindication…

On the day of Freddie Gray's funeral—April 27, 2015, when the city of Baltimore erupted in a wave of violence, crime, and arson—the police force did not employ a single chaplain. In the two years since, they've grown an ecumenical corps of 134 men and women of the cloth who ride along with officers…

In the contemporary campus climate, that lovely stretch from the latter half of April to the first blush of May is also controversial commencement speaker season. The most contested, in a year in which her raked-over confirmation proceedings garnered outsize news coverage, will probably be Betsy…

Rand Paul's going to be teaching a course on "dystopian visions" at George Washington University next fall. Because of course he is.

In a digital-age fulfillment of its mission as a land-grant college, Purdue University has acquired the for-profit, mainly online Kaplan University. Purdue’s board of trustees voted Thursday on a deal that would make Kaplan a public university, affiliated with Purdue and dedicated to extending…

To restore free expression and the unfettered exchange of ideas to censorious college campuses, the nation's liberal thought leaders will have to admit we have a problem on our hands. Events of this week presented some encouraging signs that they're getting closer. While restless campuses erupted…

When former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg banned smoking in public parks, it made logical sense from a certain autocratic urban-beautification standpoint. Who wants tobacco smoke stinking up their stroll along the Lilac Walk? I grumbled at the time, but the prohibition, which was followed…

That heady scent of open-air pot-smoking is just another sign of springtime come to D.C. nowadays. (Move over, cherry blossoms.) Wednesday near dusk I met an otherwise upstanding young guy on the sidewalk in leafy residential Northwest, waiting for a ride with a crackling joint in hand—not an…

"The odds are good, but the goods are odd," an embarrassed daughter's dad noted of Harvey Mudd as the Claremont tour guide walked us past the science-and-engineering-focused campus of the five-college consortium. Harvey Mudd, in those days, was still mostly male. Single ladies at Scripps,…

Three weeks after a coalition of professors publicly defended their right to censor Title IX naysayer and feminist intellectual Laura Kipnis, a Wellesley News editorial has caught viral flak from civil libertarians, conservatives, copy editors, and other sensible sorts for its clumsy defense of…

Wall Street's three-and-half-ton bronze Charging Bull has stood frozen in mid-charge, to meet oncoming traffic just above the bottom of Broadway for nearly 30 years. It's a symbol, the artist Arturo Di Modica would say, of achievement and optimism—of the American capitalist's unbridled bravado.…

The campus novel is overripe for a renaissance. Because it will take a satirical rendering à la Lucky Jim—or perhaps dozens of them—to expose the painfully silly social politics of campus protest culture to the clarifying light of enough readers' wry, self-aware laughter. Unsurprisingly, few have…

Never again will a non-holiday pass without some sort of public #Resistance exertion. While anti-Trump emotions run high, festivals of malcontent give the aggrieved opportunities to vent in vague opposition to the administration. International Women's Day, that Soviet feast day sanitized and…

The school choice movement finally has the federal platform it never really needed. Donald Trump, in campaign mode, pledged to invest $20 billion in private school vouchers for poor children—an epic sum that will likely fund a federal version of the tuition tax credit scholarships 17 states already…

A photograph of 14-year-old Emmett Till's mutilated face snapped during his open-casket funeral in Chicago made international news in the fall of 1955. For supposedly flirting with a white woman (the woman finally admitted this year that she'd lied in her testimony) while visiting Southern…

When congressmen last fall considered cures for what ails the American university (repeal large college endowments' tax exemption to lower tuition costs, they said), a hero emerged in one witness from Kentucky's Berea College, where students labor to learn. Maybe, the unspoken prospect hung in the…

On a Capitol Hill morning otherwise dominated by Gorsuch hearings, the deafening drip of surveillance revelations, and a possible health care upset, one much quieter event might have presaged what normalcy may, one hopes, come. Alexander Acosta, Labor secretary-designate number two, answered…

The least suggestion of genetic engineering throws rational people into a blind panic, as it should: Man-made innovations threatening to out-mode humanity have freaked out every right-thinking person for most of modern history. This entirely natural anxiety has driven a whole subgenre of…

Signs inside in this season's hot-ticket exhibit encourage visitors, or "viewers," as art critics still insist on calling them, to be the show. It's a concession, common nowadays across the art world, to the fact that most people's vanity overwhelms their interest in fine art: Museums might as well…

An Obama administration guidance, sidestepping law to serve an albeit well-meaning social agenda, may have deepened the very injustice it was meant to correct. Haven't I heard this one before?

Politicians' children are supposed to be off limits to reporters, per the rules of what we used to call "common decency." (It was a thing, I'm told.) The agreement holds because it's a shared standard of upright social practice and interpersonal ethics that helps the world run smoothly. And because…

Driven by a class discussion to scratch at her face with the pointy end of a protest pin, a University of Michigan student played off her awkwardly conspicuous injury as a politically-motivated mauling by a strange man in downtown Ann Arbor.

For nearly six years now, a federal mandate has manhandled American colleges. The Department of Education's 2011 guidance on campus sexual misconduct reinterpreted a gender parity law—Title IX of the Higher Education Act—to police colleges' responses to reported sexual assaults. In so doing, the…

Ladies who don't like the president, and who can afford to skip a day of work—"paid or unpaid labor," according to the organizers of January 21st's Women's March—aren't showing up on Wednesday. It's in alignment with a global labor strike, but the domestic "Day Without A Woman" is more closely a…

President Trump's first full month in office coincided with Black History Month. And on the face of it, February was a predictably Trumpian mess: His administration not only blundered from its February 1st listening session to last week's awkward statements and bungled photo-ops. What began with…

For nearly six years now, a federal mandate has manhandled American colleges. The Department of Education’s 2011 guidance on campus sexual misconduct reinterpreted a gender parity law—Title IX of the Higher Education Act—to police colleges' responses to reported sexual assaults. In so doing, the…

Slam or spoken word poetry, and its sometimes extemporaneous hip-hop-style recitation, is a trendy way to prove to students that a poem has a life beyond the page. But one teacher and her middle school English class in Madison, Wisconsin have taken the curriculum in an R-rated direction.

Sixty-five million dollars is a lot of money for a book that Barack Obama said he would have written anyway—a labor of love, and part of a narrative to "train the next generation." He has a lot to say, a "writerly sensibility" primed to be set loose on the page. And, helpfully, the (so far)…

Rosie O'Donnell, the president's longtime enemy, might like to lead a coup. The former comedienne and conspiracy theorist headlined a resistance rally behind the White House on a rainy Tuesday evening, to protest President Trump's address to the Joint Session of Congress.

The Congressional Review Act of 1996 is a “sleeper statute" (aka, a secret weapon) in that its practical application took 20 years to enter the realm of viable possibility. The CRA allows Congress to overturn executive regulations by a simple majority—and this is the moment it's been waiting for.

President Nixon's memo to staff after the 1971 White House Correspondents Dinner made the rounds on Twitter this weekend—with Trump's Saturday afternoon announcement that he wouldn't attend the yearly banquet for press, traditionally hosted by the president, inviting an historical comparison.

The bathroom wars wage on. Repealing the Obama-era edict that hardened the conflict, as President Trump did Wednesday, changes little in practice.

Social science has a way of confirming what we humans already knew about ourselves. Data that validate one's intuitive gleanings about the species make a timeless gift, always in season. "Extreme Protest Tactics Reduce Popular Support for Social Movements," from sociologists Matthew Feinberg of the…

New York governor Andrew Cuomo pulled together a Spotify playlist, apparently following the lofty two-year tradition of President Barack Obama's summer playlists. But Cuomo, a likely 2020 presidential hopeful, might have put more thought into his. Obama's lists, tapestries of hidden meaning and…

Skeptical conservatives who remain wary of "America First" populism might want to listen closely to Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a constitutional conservative and a strong critic of Trump's candidacy who not that long ago wondered whether the party was done for. Now, he has a plan to deliver…

The Obama administration set up the play pretty perfectly for Team Trump. Student loan policies that disproportionately diminished historically black colleges and universities’ funding and enrollment, and an arrogant posture toward these institutions evident in Obama's public remarks, disappointed…

Not a new idea, this. Dropping off the District of Columbia's residential neighborhoods into Maryland, whence they came, has come up before—usually as a counter proposal to D.C. statehood, that political pipe dream Democrats can't let go.

Freshly-confirmed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos greeted an anxious-seeming assembly of her staff at the Education Department headquarters with reassuring remarks Wednesday afternoon. On an unseasonably warm day in Washington, the assembly hall was hot and stuffy, only more uncomfortable as…

President Trump's nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, won Senate confirmation Tuesday afternoon, but just barely. She lost two of the Republican majority's 52 votes, with Senate education committee members Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska having announced they would…

A small story from a small town grew legs and got around last week. A local essay contest prompting high school students in and around Westport, Connecticut to consider the role "white privilege" has played in their lives didn't sit right with a handful of parents and a mob of Internet hecklers,…

A procedural vote along party lines early Friday morning decided to close contentious debate in the Senate over the confirmation of Betsy DeVos, which is now expected to fall to a 50-50 tie broken by Vice President Pence.

The new administration's uncertain higher education policy took two strides into the light this week. First came the announcement of Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr.'s appointment to lead Trump's White House task force on higher education reform. And then, responding to fiery, riotous…

A homeless man, woman, or child needs a bed, a roof, a meal—and typically a lot besides. Just as home means something greater than the presence of these three, homelessness is much more than their absence.

Democrats on the Senate's education panel toed the line Tuesday morning, bringing along a fighting spirit with their votes against Betsy DeVos's nomination to lead the Department of Education. As foretold, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee recommended her confirmation to…

Hot on the heels of 1984, Sinclair Lewis's speculative satire It Can't Happen Here is surging to the forefront of a suddenly very popular genre, prophetic dystopian lit. It Can't Happen Here will probably be the next novel to sell out on Amazon; right now, it's the number-two recommended read by…

Tuesday's Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee vote on Education secretary-designate Betsy "Cruella" DeVos will most assuredly fall along party lines. With a Republican majority weighing in her favor, every remaining Democrat, according to Minnesota senator Al Franken, (and every…

Not a one Democratic Senator will vote to confirm Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos. Or so Minnesota senator Al Franken told Rachel Maddow Thursday night.

Being bumped from the partners list for the Women's March on Washington was "one of the best things that ever happened in my career," said Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of the pro-life feminist organization New Wave Feminists. Blatant hypocrisy on the part of the inclusive movement's…

You can learn a lot from one largely overlooked confirmation hearing. And WWE mogul Linda McMahon's confirmation hearing Tuesday morning—she's been selected to run the Small Business Administration—was nothing if not largely overlooked. The SBA, founded in the 1950s, is a federal agency tasked with…

Those of us left feeling uninspired by both the inauguration of President Trump and the politics of the Women's March will find a sympathetic perspective in writer Sarah B. Anderson's essay "Inauguration Day, the Women's March and the Lonely in Between." Anderson invites all those in the middle…

Old habits die hard. And using the Department of Education to dispense federal mandates in service to an overarching agenda has been habitual practice these past eight years.

"Don't try to divide us," said Gloria Steinem, the reigning queen of second-wave feminism, now 81, who first rose to fame for going undercover as a Playboy bunny. She'd come to help rally a crowd reportedly surpassing 500,000 women, male allies, and acquiescent children—all of whom find a common…

Months after Labor Day, three of the inauguration's top billing women came out in white suits. Hillary Clinton and the Trump sisters Tiffany and Ivanka were all wearing the color of sisterhood, according to CNN's Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash who noted the significane of Clinton's styling.

At her confirmation hearing Tuesday, Education Secretary-designate Betsy DeVos fought back against allegations that her school reform efforts in Detroit were a failure.

At a heated three-and-half-hour confirmation hearing Tuesday evening, Senate Democrats predictably pressed the president-elect's Education Secretary-designate. Betsy DeVos, a major Republican donor and school choice advocate, has proven one of his more controversial appointees: Her decades of…

What makes a meaningful life? It's an often strenuous, and in no way uniformly happy, existence compelled by service to some higher calling—higher, anyway, than selfish gratification. It's also an explainable life, simple enough to be told back to you as a story, but it keeps in touch with the…

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush was quick to praise the president-elect's choice of Betsy DeVos for Education secretary when the transition team announced her nomination in November. And on Tuesday, the day of her confirmation hearing, he expounded his support for DeVos in USA Today, praising her…

The president-elect's boorishness allegedly fired up a new generation of bullies to pick on their peers' essential insecurities—a phenomenon doomily dubbed the "Trump Effect."

While members of the press gradually filled their designated seats at the back of the hearing room where Dr. Ben Carson would undergo uncommonly friendly questioning about his plans to lead the federal department of Housing and Urban Development, members of the Carson family linked up in the…

Democrats critical of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump's choice for education secretary, find plenty of reasons to pillory the school-choice advocate and Republican donor. Plans to improve equal opportunity in public education—growing public charter schools and voucher programs, and testing district…

To hear Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer tell it, Democrats intend to block the confirmation of any justice President-elect Trump nominates to the Supreme Court. They'll inherit guardianship of the eight-member panel they dreaded just last year—and, by God, they'll guard it with their lives.

2015 was the year campus culture wars broke out into mainstream consciousness—from Laura Kipnis's Title IX witch trial to the Halloween costume crisis at Yale's Silliman College, the dark side of trigger warnings and microaggressions met the harsh light of public debate.

As the Prufrock newsletter noted Monday morning, students at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies have asked for a "decolonized" curriculum—lighter on the dead white guys, in other words.

Democratic criticism of Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump's nominee for Secretary of Education, holds a dark lesson for us all: Sometimes it's just not worth it to tell the truth. In a letter released Thursday, six members of Senate's Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee called into question…

In case your awareness hadn't been sufficiently raised, the Obama White House, once more in its final weeks, elevated the campus rape narrative that it has helped spin into a panicky national conversation. The "It's On Us" campaign, launched in 2014 to combat "rape culture," bid farewell to its…

In an exit interview on Monday, President Obama and his longtime friend and former adviser David Axelrod discussed the lame duck's peak popularity, his unbeatable chances had he run in 2016, and the early legs of his journey to greatness.

The 1940's pop duet "Baby, It's Cold Outside" perpetuates a predatory, patriarchal rape culture, we're to understand. The premise of the song, written Frank Loesser and made famous by Esther Williams, is that in some dark corner of a Christmas party that's winding down toward dawn, a handsome…

Repeal of North Carolina's controversial House Bill 2, the so-called "bathroom bill," was expected to take place Wednesday with bipartisan support. But without consensus in the state legislature's last session, the repeal effort failed.

The largest accrediting agency of for-profit educational institutions—some of which, like ITT and Corinthian Colleges have shut down, displacing thousands of students—now faces its own undoing by a vengeful administration. The Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools had its federal…

In late September what Vanity Fair called the "Ultimate Exit Interview" was far from ultimate—rather it fell among the first of many. Timed to coincide with the first presidential debate, before Donald Trump's lewd tape leaked or Comey's blasted letter, President Barack Obama and his favorite…

A delightful tabloid rumor gained substance Sunday night—when Sylvester Stallone issued a statement through his publicist taking himself out of the running to chair the National Endowment for the Arts.

At a middle school in Texas, a nurse's aide plastered her office door with a festive handmade poster quoting Linus's scripture recitation from A Charlie Brown Christmas:

This was not your typical film premiere. The Bleeding Edge depicts the live-organ harvesting of religious dissidents by agents of the Chinese government and its reigning Communist Party—and the film's starring actress, human-rights activist and religious dissident Anastasia Lin was allegedly almost…

The president-elect may be about to appoint economist and architect of the Trump tax plan Larry Kudlow chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, based on public statements from the tax plan's co-architect, economist Stephen Moore, according to the Detroit News.

Anna Wintour, the widely feared and revered editor of Vogue, visited Trump Tower on Tuesday, according to ABC News. We cannot know for sure where her ring-kissing ranked in comparison to Kanye's—but it's safe to assume she found herself on the less familiar end of an icy awkwardness.

University of Pennsylvania students took down a large, centrally-located portrait of Shakespeare from the English Department to send a message of inclusivity, according to the department's chair.

America's favorite Glamazonian wonder goddess didn't fit in at the United Nations. She's a powerful agent unafraid to defend the free world against encroaching evils. She gets the job done and she looks good doing it.

Controversial FDA rules for e-cigarette producers will badly damage the growing vaping industry. The regulations, finalized in August, require that any product not on the market before 2007—when there were no vaping products available—undergo a costly retroactive application process for federal…

The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act passed the Senate in a late-night session Friday, rolling through with unanimous support. A bipartisan bill from its inception, the HEAR Act will likely become federal law and institute a universal reset of the statutes of limitation for Holocaust-era art…

The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights may not last long in Trump's America, its employees and advocates fear. The transition's stated intention to "streamline the department," coupled with a stated goal to overturn Obama-era executive overreaches, spells trouble for the department's…

New test results place American high schoolers well below their global contemporaries in mathematical literacy. The Program for International Assessment 2015 scores, released Tuesday, confirm a downward trend that appears to track the rocky implementation of the Common Core State Standards.

The 15 percent of American adults who still smoke cigarettes despite the well-known damage to their lungs, throats and lifespans are, it's fairly safe to assume, the stubbornest brand loyalists alive. And yet Philip Morris International (PMI), the maker of Marlboro, claims it's their new corporate…

Hours after Fidel Castro's state funeral ended a national mourning in Cuba, a small but intent crowd gathered at the Victims of Communism Memorial in downtown Washington, D.C. Dissidents like Sirley Ávila León and advocates from Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation led mourners on a Sunday…

Congressional Republicans criticized announcements from the White House and Pentagon in support of a controversial amendment to expand the draft to include young women Friday, even though the amendment had already been removed from annual legislation setting defense policy.

Republican governors are reaffirming their faith in the electoral process despite claims from President-elect Donald Trump that millions of unlawfully cast ballots cost him the popular vote, according to statements provided to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

The Obama administration's income-driven repayment program will cost more than twice as much as the Department of Education initially thought it would, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

A controversial amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress's yearly defense policy package, would have required young women to register for the draft. On Tuesday night, Armed Services Committee staffers made known that this "draft our daughters" amendment, as critics call it, had…

In the wake of Donald Trump's election, many colleges and universities vowed to become "sanctuary campuses" for students in the country illegally. The matter will take on a special urgency in the event that soon-to-be President Trump repeals the executive-ordered Deferred Action for Childhood…

If the spirit of the Obama administration endures anywhere, it will be in the form of a policy directive from a small office in the Department of Education. The prime example of fiercely ideological federal overreach of the Obama years, the 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter from the department's Office…

A literal reading of scripture and faith in an interventionist God strengthen church attendance. According to a new academic study of what drives a mainline Protestant church to die out or succeed, preaching these two theological precepts makes all the difference.