Year: 2014

This weekend on “Fox News Sunday,” anchor Chris Wallace credited his guest, Republican Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, with leading the nation as the “first state to fall out of the Common Core national education standards.” If only it were true. Wallace didn’t do his homework. And presidential aspirant Pence was too busy daydreaming about 2016 […]

Did you know that I started Facebook? Really! Well, sort of … When I was in college at all-male Princeton, I tried to make money by adding photos to a snarky guide to neighboring girls’ schools. The guide had been a profitable publishing success, and my idea was simply to add the girls’ pictures. Schools […]

Let me run through a few good ideas. I think it’s a good idea for children to eat healthful, wholesome foods. In the raising of our daughter, before-dinner treats were fresh vegetables, and after-dinner treats were mostly fruits. I arrive at my gym sometime between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m., at least four times a […]

An unwritten American novel is playing out in Los Angeles. It’s about rich, whiny racist Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. And it’s about his cooing kitty-cat of a girlfriend, who infuriated him by bringing black people to his games. It will make an even better American movie, with an inside look […]

French economist Thomas Piketty’s book “Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century” has been inspiring a lot of comment and controversy. The English translation published last month zipped to No. 1 on: amazon.com. It has given a lift to economists on the Left who have cheered on Barack Obama’s flagging attempts to make income inequality a voting issue. […]

Of the last eight people who have won the Republican nomination for president, six ran for the office and lost before eventually getting their party’s designation. To win as a Republican, it would seem you have to first go through losing. Romney, McCain, Dole, Bush-41, Reagan, and Nixon all lost before they won. Only Bush-43 […]

While there is wide agreement that the cost of college education has risen far faster than the incomes of most Americans, there is some debate as to whether the quality of the product has kept pace with the price. Not surprisingly, almost all who argue that it has (college administrators, professors, and populist politicians) are […]

PARIS — A Cold War is purely an intelligence war. If you go on a Ukrainian geopolitical bender in front of a former KGB chief like Russian President Vladimir Putin without having a firm grasp of the opposition’s mind-set, you risk launching yourself into a wall like some kind of drunken frat bro on a […]

The pristine natural world has been gone for a long time; get used to it. Nearly all of the earthworms in New England and the upper Midwest were inadvertently imported from Europe. The American earthworms were wiped out by the last Ice Age. That’s why when European colonists first got here, many forest floors were […]

In November 2009, Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling settled a lawsuit in which the Department of Justice alleged that Sterling had discriminated against Hispanics, blacks and families without children in his rental properties. The lawsuit contained testimony that Sterling had suggested Hispanics were poor tenants because they “smoke, drink, and just hang around the […]

Top Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Washington, is walking back comments attributed to her that Obamacare can’t be repealed. But she’s not the only one suggesting that the goal should be making changes within the framework of the health law. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, says the goal is to get the law “fixed.” […]

It is not easy to demonize people who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money to help educate poor children. But some members of the education establishment are taking a shot at it.   The Walton Family Foundation — created by the people who created Walmart — has given more than […]

Of all the cynical frauds of the Obama administration, few are so despicable as sacrificing the education of poor and minority children to the interests of the teachers’ unions. Attorney General Eric Holder’s attempt to suppress the spread of charter schools in Louisiana was just one of the signs of that cynicism. His nationwide threats […]