When a man knows he is about to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully, said Dr. Samuel Johnson. If there is any benefit to be realized from the collision between China and the U.S. over Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s proposed trip to Taiwan, it is this: America needs to reflect long and
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Nine months after the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann died at the end of a noose in Israel, a controversial but thoughtful commentary about his trial appeared in The New Yorker. The public reaction stunned its author, the famed political theorist and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). It was February 1963. Arendt’s eyewitness assessment of
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The weeds needed pulling. Branches needed trimming. Dishes and silverware had piled up on the sink board. Books, papers, and crayons—the grandchildren were visiting—littered the dining room table and needed to be stowed away before supper. Yet there I sat on the front porch, drinking a Diet Coke, mesmerized by Rose Wilder Lane’s Let the
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Baltimore’s homicide rate has risen since 2014. Over 200 people have been killed in Baltimore in just the first seven months of this year, about as many as died in all of the year 2014, even though Baltimore’s population has shrunk a lot since 2014. Murders have risen there because prosecutors haven’t been seeking long
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Church was crowded, and I ended up, as I often do, sitting near the back. Just as Mass began, I glanced over my shoulder, as I also often do, to see whether some elderly person or pregnant mom might need a seat. (Saint John’s is jammed full of young families and children.) I spend a
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The California State Assembly has been studying a bill, SB 107, to declare the state a sanctuary for minors who have been denied transgender-affirming medicine and surgery elsewhere. SB 107 would permit insurance companies, physicians, and contractors to disregard subpoenas about child custody if the child is being medically treated for gender dysphoria. It would also
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