Life

What can be done about Americans’ declining life expectancy?

If you have lived almost any kind of active life, after age 50 someone you know dies every day. Not necessarily someone you knew well. Not necessarily a spouse, a child, a parent—one of those whose death is like a part of yourself, crushed and torn away. But someone you knew, yes: an acquaintance,…

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. possessed the most sparkling intelligence of his generation of historians. He may not have had the most subtle or profound mind, but his was the most effervescent disposition, and no one could surpass him in sheer energy, knowledge, and skill as scholar and writer.…

Samuel Johnson, about to tuck into a pork roast, is supposed to have said that the only thing that would make the food before him better is if he were a Jew. Stendhal, I years ago heard, said that the only thing wrong with ice cream was that it wasn’t illegal. The question both these men raise is…

During my teaching days, along with courses on Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather, I taught an undergraduate course called Advanced Prose Style. What it was advanced over was never made clear, but each year the course was attended by 15 or so would-be—or, as we should say today,…

During my teaching days, along with courses on Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Willa Cather, I taught an undergraduate course called Advanced Prose Style. What it was advanced over was never made clear, but each year the course was attended by 15 or so would-be—or, as we should say today,…

The media are cooing over the news that Medicare will reimburse doctors $86 for half-hour consultations about the kind of treatment patients would—or would not—want should they become incapacitated. Such coverage was slated to be part of Obamacare, but was dropped after it became controversial when…

Presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton finds herself under growing scrutiny over the classified contents of dozens of emails (perhaps hundreds once the State Department finishes releasing them all) she sent and received as head of the State Department. As it turns out,…

Anyone reading this knows where he was on September 11, 2001. A diminishing number remember where they were on January 30, 1965—the day we said farewell to Winston Churchill. (He died fifty years ago, January 24, 1965.)

At a press conference today, Speaker John Boehner addressed the arrest of a man who allegedly planned to poison him in Ohio:

In 2012, Democrats ran a well-coordinated campaign to demonize and distort pro-life candidates as anti-woman misogynists hell-bent on taking away birth control. The Republican response to this line of attack consisted mostly of pivoting away to focus on “jobs” and the “economy.” With rare…

New York governor Andrew Cuomo came under fire for criticizing pro-life and pro-Second Amendment citizens of his state -- and saying "that is not who New Yorkers are."

In a bid to confuse and/or deliberately mislead voters in her native Texas, gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis announced today that she is “pro-life.”

Abortion advocate Wendy Davis has a strange claim. She now says that she's "pro-life," a term usually associated with those who are against abortion.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) today agreed to be the lead sponsor of a Senate bill to ban abortion after an unborn child is 20 weeks old.  A similar measure passed the House last month and a state version is now being debated in the Texas legislature, where it is likely to be approved.

Many Republican insiders continue to push the narrative that the GOP lost in 2012 because of the Hispanic vote and social issues, rather than because a badly broken Republican nomination process produced a candidate who didn’t emphasize Obamacare and didn’t motivate downscale rural white Americans…

After the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) student government failed to silence the campus pro-life group, a newly formed pro-choice organization intends to target those students with harassment charges—while taking off their shirts in protest.

Vice President Joe Biden made the case last night at a Washington, D.C. hotel that abused women fear getting "raped again by the system." Biden made the comments in remarks to a fundraiser for the Volunteer Lawyers Project, which is co-chaired by his daughter.

It must be one of those inversions of this age of the media that the issues raised by the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia have faded into the background, while the main attention has been drawn to the screening of this story by the liberal media. But even more curious has been screening…

Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, the Republican party's 2012 vice presidential nominee, delivered the following address at Thursday night's Susan B. Anthony List gala:

I have known Ben Stein for 50 years. We met as rival high school newspaper editors in early-1960s Washington, and then forged a close, lasting friendship a decade later as colleagues in the beleaguered Nixon White House.

A powerful benediction this evening by Cardinal Dolan after President Obama's speech at the Democratic convention in Charlotte: 

Charlotte

The Los Angeles Times reports that, “A reusable grocery bag left in a hotel bathroom caused an outbreak of norovirus-induced diarrhea and nausea that struck nine of 13 members of a girls' soccer team in October 2010.” This grim news comes on the heels of a 2010 study, which found that more than…

Worth watching or reading: Leon Kass's Irving Kristol Address, "The other war on poverty: Finding meaning in America," delivered earlier this week at the American Enterprise Institute's annual dinner: