My sister will celebrate her birthday this week, but it won’t be much of a celebration. Never mind how old she is. I’d tell you, but if she found out, I might not live to see my next birthday.

President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer have based the future of the entire Democratic agenda on a trick. And now many Democrats are increasingly concerned — terrified, actually — that the trick won’t work.

I grew up in the buckle of the Bible Belt. Although Norman, Oklahoma, is home to a large state school (Boomer Sooner!), the area is steeped in religious tradition. As a child, I wasn’t allowed to cuss, curse, swear or otherwise utter profanity. For that reason, I collected bad words like bas…

Last week's 20th anniversary commemorations of the terrorist attacks of 2001 stirred passions deep and wide. They reminded us of the fear that gripped us, the urgency we felt and the sense we had of sharing a perilous moment of history. And the remarks uttered to mark the passing of two frau…

Partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts has been a uniquely American problem since our founding: As long as we’ve had politicians, they’ve exploited the power to pick their own voters before the voters get to pick them.

The influenza pandemic of 1918-’19 is the worst infectious-disease outbreak in American history.

Two leading House Republicans, Reps. Steve Scalise and James Comer, are asking the Food and Drug Administration for documents that might relate to GOP suspicions that President Joe Biden has politicized the process of administering vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Restaurant menus have gone through a rapid evolution over the past few years. Gone are the doorstop-thick novels at places like The Cheesecake Factory; they’ve been replaced with QR codes so we can scroll through appetizers and entrees on our smartphones. Although many paper menus have been …

I have been in only one earthquake. It was in Izmir, Turkey, in 2014. The earth moved, undulating under my feet. Buildings shook and people’s fear could be felt.

Biden administration officials are proud of their effort to airlift about 118,000 Afghans, plus somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 U.S. citizens, from the Kabul airport in the final days of the president’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. But still unanswered are two key questions: One, w…

As we paused for the traditional end-of-summer celebration known as Labor Day, it’s worth reflecting on how things have changed for workers since the holiday was first observed — and how they haven’t.

I’ve been getting into native perennial gardening this year. Of all the plants I’m growing, I love milkweed the most. Seventy-three species of native milkweeds grow in the United States, and these plants are the exclusive host plants for monarch butterflies. When people hear “milkweed,” they…

On that day 20 years ago this week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared war on Pentagon bureaucracy, saying that it was a threat to national security and “a matter of life and death.” A day later, the nation’s security would be breached and there would be a new threat that truly wa…

At 9:05 Monday night, State Department spokesman Ned Price issued a plaintive message to the new rulers of Afghanistan. “The Taliban needs to meet its commitments and obligations in Afghanistan,” Price tweeted. Those commitments and obligations include respecting freedom of travel, safeguard…

The precipitous withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan should teach America’s allies a basic lesson. You cannot trust the Americans as true alliance partners and should not believe all the reassurances of American leaders, diplomats, and bureaucrats.

An educated guess: Joe Biden is not doing what every first-year president starts doing around Day 200 of his presidency: running for reelection. After the two weeks he has just endured, he is doing the thing presidents don’t do until their last months: running for history.