I never thought I'd quote from Heart of Darkness to take issue with a black guy.

Then I listened earlier this week to President Barack Obama's speech on the Libyan intervention. My thoughts kept drifting to Joseph Conrad's unforgettable description of a late-nineteenth century colonialist warship shelling...

Nothing lasts forever, the saying goes, unless it's online.

Since hearing the news, I've been rather blue about Christopher Hitchens' esophageal cancer -- in part because he's among the finest intellectuals we've got, and in part because the diagnosis is another thing keeping mortality in the foreground.

To...

President Obama has said his opinion on gay marriage is "constantly evolving." Social conservatives were hopeful -- evolution is only a theory, after all.

And during Obama's first two years in office, their hopes were answered. The President cultivated something of a reputation for indifference regarding gay rights -- an...

America needs a Plan B, in case God flakes.

President Barack Obama agrees, stressing science's pivotal role in securing America's future, and so do the courts, which consistently find the teaching of Creationism in public schools unconstitutional.

But a recent poll found that only...

I've long suspected that Republicans get their history from Elseworlds comics.

So it was no great surprise when Michele Bachmann told a crowd in Iowa last month that the founding fathers ended slavery, or when Sarah Palin told a Fox News reporter last week that the...

The times I've pitched this column to friends, the response has been mostly negative. Something vague about it not being worth it.

Probably so. But some things need saying.

To the point, then?

Cornell's Greek system is a lump on the student body, and it's high time we hack it...

This President is soft on progress.

Yes, he inherited an economy driven to the brink by Republican irresponsibility and, yes, preventing a second Great Depression was priority one.

The problem is that President Obama too often values consensus over conscience, overestimates Republican decency and, as a result, sells...

First a black President, next the Chinese overlords.

Last week, a conservative organization called Citizens Against Government Waste unveiled "Chinese Professor," a peculiar attack ad shot almost entirely in Mandarin with subtitles.

The commercial, set in "Beijing, China 2030 A.D.," depicts a futuristic American dystopia where,...

Will the president have to sprout wings?

For the past six months or so, there has been a peculiar narrative developing about the Nov. 2 congressional elections: Democrats are going to lose the House and Senate, and it's all Barack Obama's fault.

The president has failed to live up to...