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Are you chasing false Gods?

My sadly departed friend, Frank, was a unicorn. He lived 89 years in the town he grew up in, a village on the Connecticut shore. A reporter at his local newspaper for over half a century, he had turned down offers to work for more glamorous publications, among them Sports Illustrated and The New York Times. Frank had considered the priesthood in his youth. He stopped going to church and claimed he wasn't part of it anymore, but the church's moral teachings clearly stayed put. Frank approached reporting as a kind of ministry, spending much time talking with his "flock." His showered ...

Reflections on the US Supreme Court

The United States Supreme Court is the most powerful and respected tribunal in world history. It commands the power of judicial review to invalidate acts of the president or Congress. Its relative impartiality, compared with the legislative and executive branches, finds expression in consistently higher public confidence ratings. The number of justices has remained at nine since 1869, making it a quasi-constitutional norm. The sole serious political attack on the independence of the Supreme Court by then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1937 proved DOA despite his landslide victory ...

Spain stymies France in semifinals 2-0

ARLINGTON, Texas (AP) — Mikel Oyarzabal scored from the penalty spot after a heady play by teenager Lamine Yamal, Pedro Porro added another goal and Spain advanced to its first World Cup final since winning in 2010 with a 2-0 victory over France on Tuesday. A day after his 19th birthday, ...

Blaney wins 3-wide battle on final lap of OT

HAMPTON, Ga. — A late brush with the wall wasn't enough to send Ryan Blaney to pit row. The decision paid off with a dominant victory. Blaney emerged from a three-wide battle on the final lap of overtime in the weather-delayed NASCAR Cup Series race at Atlanta early Monday. Blaney won every stage of the race and led 171 laps after starting on the pole, but the Team Penske Ford driver had to fight off challenges from Bubba Wallace and Christopher Hill, who finished second, on the final lap. Carson Hocevar and Ty Gibbs rounded out the top four. Wallace was penalized for passing ...

What a 700-year-old Fresco can teach America

There are moments when history reaches across the centuries with startling clarity. Standing in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy, and looking at Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "Allegory of Good and Bad Government," I had one of those moments. Nearly 700 years old, the series of fresco paintings includes a depiction of a bustling city that illustrates the effects of good government, as well as representations of the decay that results from arbitrary and unjust rulers. The visual treatise on political economy holds important lessons for us today. Lorenzetti's city isn't thriving because its ...

Call of the Vile: Mayor Pete gets swatted, and so does America

Everything about President Donald Trump's Independence Day-eve speech at Mt. Rushmore was a much-unneeded reminder that the personification of crude, self-glorifying narcissism occupies the White House as we celebrate our 250th birthday. He chose the venue to suggest, not subtly, that he deserves to be etched on a mountainside along with -- God help us - former Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Lincoln, rather than, say, incarcerated. Trump cast himself as a great president, naturally, rather than inarguably our worst, one who has debased not only our image but ...