The fate of the U.S. Department of Education is currently in limbo. President Donald Trump came into office promising—among other things—to rid us of this unnecessary federal bureaucracy. Democrats, closely aligned with teachers unions, vowed to prevent him from doing anything of the sort. The Trump administration has offloaded many of the department’s responsibilities and […]
Friday is the Fourth of July. What will you celebrate? Freedom from the English monarchy? To me, the Fourth is about freedom, period. When the Founders signed the Declaration of Independence, they put forth a radical idea: Rights don’t come from kings or presidents. They come from being human. Government’s job is to protect those […]
President Donald Trump’s domestic policy agenda advances: At 3:30 a.m., House Republicans advanced the policy bill. “After a day and night of paralysis on the House floor, and haggling and uncertainty in the Capitol, Speaker Mike Johnson scored a preliminary victory in his bid to overcome resistance within his party when the House voted to […]
The city of Douglas, Michigan, is determined to take the “free” out of “free range.” In 2023, Kathryn Sarkisian, a resident of the Lake Michigan tourist town, wanted to do something that seemed simple enough: raise chickens in her backyard. She then sought—and received—a permit directly from the city, authorizing her to do so. Barely […]
The course of Lyle McNeal’s life changed in 1972. Then a professor in California Polytechnic State University’s Animal Science Department, McNeal led the college’s Boots and Spurs club on a weeklong trip to the state’s agricultural Salinas Valley. The group visited a ranch whose owners, a father and son duo, provided horses to Hollywood productions. […]
F1 is not the best movie I have seen this year. It is formulaic, predictable, frequently absurd, and more than a little bit shameless. But while it is not the best, it is the most roaringly entertaining, a nearly perfect summer movie fueled by real movie star charisma, heart-stopping racing footage, and more than a […]
Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, by Clay Risen, Scribner, 480 pages, $31 Clay Risen, a New York Times reporter who has written several volumes of popular history, has now tackled the familiar story of the Second Red Scare—the period after World War II, when the nation’s institutions mobilized against the Communists believed […]
As military parades go, the celebration in Washington, D.C. turned out to be an innocuous affair and not the triumph of fascist pageantry its loudest critics feared. Soldiers paraded in period uniforms and old and modern equipment rumbled through the streets (and roared overhead) in sufficient quantity to satisfy most history buffs. Nary a uniformed […]