ONE late summer afternoon when I was 17, I went with my mother to the local bank, a long-defunct institution whose name I cannot remember, to apply for my first student loan. My mother co-signed. When we finished, the banker, a balding man in his late 50s, congratulated us, as if I had just won some kind of award rather than signed away my young life. By the end of my sophomore year at a small private liberal arts college, my mother and I had taken out a second loan, my father had...

The comedic firebrand talks about the first candidate he’s been excited about in years, and Bill Cosby’s entirely hypocritical sanctimony.

Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s escape highlights a fatal weakness in the fight to make Mexico safer.

I have had so many conversations or email exchanges with students in the last few years wherein I anger them by indicating that simply saying, "This is my opinion" does not preclude a connected statement from being dead wrong. It still baffles me that some feel those four words somehow give them carte blanche to spout batshit oratory or prose. And it really scares me that some of those students think education that challenges their ideas is equivalent to an attack on their beliefs. -Mick Cullen

A view of history in the long term, even of European Christian history, may help us understand what to expect and what, realistically, to hope for in today's Middle East.

In the fall of 2011, a friend and I got on to discussing Tibet. “Do you know,” he said, “that Tibetans are setting fire to themselves?” I had spent from 2005 to 2008 in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, but I had never heard of acts of self-immolation. My friend filled me in on the ghastly details, and then added, “Everyone beyond the wall knows this. A writer who cares about China, but who doesn’t go over the wall, suffers from a moral deficiency. You shouldn’t let a wall decide what you know.”

For regular people, terrorism and wars are tragedies. For our leaders — in every country — they’re something very different.

College students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. They say it’s a skill they mastered in middle school when they wanted to text in class without getting caught. Now they use it when they want to be both with their friends and, as some put it, “elsewhere.” These days, we feel less of a need to hide the fact that we are dividing our attention. In a 2015 study by the...

My hand was raised, my body half-way out of my back-row seat, when Gov. John Kasich finally acknowledged me. "I'm sorry, I don't have any Taylor Swift concert tickets," he said, his eyes meeting mine. The older members of the audience chuckled as my friends' jaws dropped to the floor. It was astonishingly clear that Gov. Kasich did not come to Richmond for my vote.

Economic benefits of ecosystems extend far beyond exploiting them for resources

Technology means getting lost is more unlikely than ever before. While for many this is a thing of joy. Are we missing out?

Conservative New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks mourns the death of "conversation, calm deliberation, self-discipline, the capacity to listen to other points of view and balance valid but competing ideas and interests" and describes how his party "abandoned traditional conservatism for right-wing radicalism."

Well, that escalated quickly. Airbnb’s recent ad-campaign rained on San Francisco to boost their image – on bus shelters and on billboards large and small. The ads carried snarky messages like this one: “Dear Public Library System, We hope you use some of the $12 million in hotel taxes to keep the library open later. Love, Airbnb.” Airbnb’s ads touted all the uses for its tax dollars by telling parking enforcers how to do their jobs...

Ohio may be on the brink of creating America’s first marijuana ‘monopoly.’

recent poll of college students’ attitudes toward free speech (in general and on campus) is a mixed bag. The survey by McLaughlin & Associates for the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale shows that 87% of respondents agreed with this statement: “There is educational value in listening to and understanding views and opinions that I may disagree with and are different from my own.”

I walked across the University of Texas campus on a warm, breezy night in April, trying my best not to look too middle-aged. It had been half a lifetime since I lugged my backpack across these sidewalks as a freshman from Dallas, clad in steel-toe Doc Martens and a big flannel shirt from the men’s department because I was always looking for ways to hide and smother my vulnerability. Now I made my way to the main mall, where a modest...

Silvestre Segovia had vowed many times over that he would never return to solitary confinement. Languishing in the vast Texas prison system's solitary confinement wings for more than a decade had exacted a heavy emotional toll. And there was so much to discover about a new world that confronted him on a much-anticipated exit that chilly morning, Nov. 15, 2002. A loyal girlfriend waited 255 miles away. There might even be a market for the catalog...

I found Essena O’Neill’s story to be depressing but unsurprising. I’ve written before about the high cost of having a high profile on social media and the dangerous addictiveness of having constant attention paid to you—but that attention being superficial “fan” attention that can turn hostile in the blink of an eye. I think her story is likely only the beginning of many online celebrities turning against the toxic side of online fan culture and the way...

On Nov. 4, 2010, a small cell of al-Qaeda operatives convened at a Starbucks in Corvallis, Oregon, to review the details of their plot to kill 25,000 people in downtown Portland. The cell had three members: Hussein, an explosives expert; Youssef, a businessman turned jihadi recruiter; and Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year-old Somali-American college student. The would-be terrorists had met earlier that year, after one of Mohamud’s friends from the mosque...

“If you had asked most mainstream development experts in the year 2000 to name those factors they thought would most imperil their efforts to reduce poverty globally in the new millennium, it is highly unlikely they would have mentioned a sudden radical spike in the price of the principal agricultural commodities, and the staple foods made from them, on which the poor of the world literally depended for their survival.” By 2006, as David Rieff goes on to show...