Syndicated columns

One oddity of Donald Trump’s Bronx rally last month was when the former president invited two rappers – Michael Williams, who performs as Sheff G, and Tegan Chambers, who performs as Sleepy Hallow – to the stage.

Mark my words.

At a time when Americans can barely agree on whether the sky is blue or the grass is green, five women and seven men, all strangers until two months ago, agreed that former president Donald Trump was guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records in the first degree – a felony. They rendered their verdict Thursday evening with solemnity and care after deliberating over the course of two days.

In 2022, European monitors who track Russian disinformation spotted an ambitious online influence operation they called Doppelganger. The Moscow-run effort cloned the websites of legitimate newspapers, magazines and news services, including Britain’s Guardian and Germany’s Bild, posted replicas under similar domain names and filled them with Kremlin propaganda.

What do you call a woman who holds no paying job, and who spends her days engaged in child care, domestic scheduling and general housekeeping?

If Donald Trump wins the election, the main reason will surely be that a majority of voters believe that America’s economy is in bad shape. And no matter how much you may dread a second Trump administration, electoral defeat for an incumbent who is seen as presiding over a bad economy is, at least in one sense, politics as usual.

When I entered the world of professional journalism more than four decades ago, I quickly discovered that certain colleagues felt so strongly about the mere appearance of political bias that they abstained from voting. This is not true of most reporters, but you can still find some who choose not to affiliate with a political party nor even to cast a ballot. They liken it to umpires calling ...

If I’d pictured Donald Trump’s first criminal trial a few years ago, I’d have imagined the biggest, splashiest story in the world. Instead, as we lurch toward a verdict that could brand the presumptive Republican nominee a felon and possibly even send him to prison, a strange sense of anticlimax hangs over the whole affair.

Last week, for the first time in history, the Dow Jones industrial average closed above 40,000.

It’s one thing to say the Northern Hemisphere summer of 2023 was the hottest of the 150 years people have been making measurements. This well-documented claim is often dismissed by skeptics of global warming who point out that the Earth has a long history of temperature fluctuations. That’s why it’s important that a new paper shows last summer was actually the hottest in the last 2,000 years — ...

It’s disappointing to watch an increasing number of Republicans fall in line behind former president Donald Trump. This includes some of his fiercest detractors, such as U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu and former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, who raised eyebrows during a recent interview by vowing to support the “Republican ticket.”

In her new book “Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History,” Nellie Bowles, a former New York Times journalist grown disillusioned with both the mainstream media and the left, writes about the year 2020, when the combustible confluence of the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the prospect of Donald Trump’s reelection made politics and culture go “berserk.” She describes a liberal intelligentsia “wild with rage and optimism,” brimming with “fresh ideas from academia that began to reshape every part of society.” Her name for this phenomenon, often derided as “wokeness,” is the “New Progressivism,” and her book attempts, with varying degrees of success, to skewer it.

As we approach the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, a crucial question arises: Why are our nation’s schools experiencing increased segregation despite progress in neighborhood integration? A new study by Sean Reardon of Stanford University and Ann Owens of the University of Southern California provides a startling answer — more than half of the blame is due to the expansion of ...

At a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, last weekend, Donald Trump said that if he is re-elected, he will “immediately deport” any campus protesters who “come here from another country and try to bring jihadism or anti-Americanism or antisemitism.”

Q. What do you call someone who speaks only one language?

Here they go again.