ArcaMax

Bribery, inflation, plagues, crumbling trade links, stalled innovation -- all these negatives helped bring down the once-mighty Roman Empire. But Rome needed centuries of bad leadership to collapse.

Donald Trump seems to be undoing American greatness at warp speed. Sure, the United States possesses strengths that will maintain an aura of ...Read more

He did it again. Consider the pattern. On Dec. 8, President Donald Trump went after Rachel Scott, who happens to be a woman of color, for asking him whether the administration would release the controversial video of the strike on the Venezuelan boat.

Scott: "Are you committed to releasing the full video?"

Trump: (reportedly growing ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- I often amuse myself by asking which member of the Trump administration is most insane and dangerous.

Dear reader, share your thoughts.

The White House is turning the lights out on democracy. Take deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, seen as a sinister Svengali for his ruthless immigration policy. Masked federal agents are ...Read more

What a mess.

I mean America's corporatized, bureaucratic, profiteering medical system. It's as though the Marx Brothers and Franz Kafka conspired to create it.

Yet, in the midst of that mess, there is one saving grace -- namely the everyday workforce of dedicated nurses, therapists, hygienists and other skilled, hands-on professionals who ...Read more

If you were looking for a great choice for a terrible Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth was always your man. It was entirely unsurprising that President Donald Trump picked him. No rational person could want Hegseth anywhere near America's chain of command, and it's unclear that any rational person ever has.

For starters, there was highly ...Read more

It seems half the country's political figures have been instructed to grin like a theme-park greeter. Supposedly, that makes them seem friendly, approachable, relatable.

When I want humanoid patter, I turn to chatbots. They're more convincing.

Why this epidemic of wax museum smiles? One reason, certainly, is social media, where every sour ...Read more

Searching for an apartment online, applying for a loan, going through airport security or looking up a question on a search engine -- you might not think anything of these exchanges other than that they are mundane things you do, but, in many of these instances, you're actually interacting with artificial intelligence.

Avoiding AI in our ...Read more

The news on Friday morning that a CDC panel is now recommending that newborns not be vaccinated for Hepatitis B is frightening. As The New York Times put it, "the divisiveness and dysfunction surrounding the decision raised questions about the reliability of that process -- and the future of the C.D.C." Not to mention questions about the ...Read more

To ordinary MAGA voters in the American heartland -- who may have witnessed the ravages of narcotics up close in their own families -- the recent conduct of their favorite president must be troubling. While they may not know all the details, many have heard by now that President Donald Trump ordered deadly missile strikes against boats ...Read more

Americans know that they discriminate against one another by race, sex, religion, looks, income, etc. Yet they're unaware that the United States has a caste system every bit as rigid and objectively odd as India's -- and it's so subtle that almost no one notices it.

None of this is to say that the forms of bigotry that journalists and ...Read more

Like the song says, it's time for mistletoe and holly. The holly tree has been a winter favorite throughout human history, but the genus, which includes hundreds of species, goes back much further than that. The oldest holly tree fossil came from Victoria, Australia. It lived alongside dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period more than 90 million ...Read more

"You're a columnist," the wing-tipped, gray-haired inner voice bellows. "Write about politics. Write about impending disaster. The Federal Reserve Bank. Gunfire. Donald Trump."

"It's almost Christmas," my 8-year-old self says. "Write about Frosty the Snowman."

I'm happy to say the 8-year-old won. He should win sometimes, too. Anyone who is a...Read more

Sean Duffy's entreaty to "dress with respect" on airplanes rapidly ran into some turbulence. The transportation secretary's request had a bumpy touchdown, landing so close to Donald Trump boorishly telling a female reporter on Air Force One, "Quiet, Piggy."

Duffy's boss often struggles to maintain the thinnest veneer of courtliness -- a ...Read more

The "fog of war" is Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's latest explanation for what was going on with the second strike on the boat in the Caribbean. He told a Cabinet meeting, "I did not personally see survivors. The thing was on fire. It exploded, there's fire, there's smoke. This is called the fog of war."

Not exactly, according to military ...Read more

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claims he had nothing to do with killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage of their boat, following U.S. missile strikes on Sept. 2. The first strike killed most of the 11 people on board. The Washington Post, citing multiple unnamed sources, reported two people survived, and the officer in charge of the ...Read more

Reader, who are the people who have stood up to President Donald Trump and confronted him, face to his furious face?

Answer: Women, and only women, have done so publicly.

Running for president, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Vice President Kamala Harris put Trump's misogyny on public display in 2016 and 2024, but that's...Read more

Look out -- the corporate cat is out of the bag!

This particular "cat" is the fast-metastasizing software technology called "artificial intelligence." A cadre of multibillion-dollar high-tech giants has surreptitiously been advancing AI for a couple of decades, literally creating a new, autonomous species of thinking beings. These are computer-...Read more