Four to five percent of the population is born without a capacity for empathy. It is a neurological lack. A psychopath may be a genius and become a multimillionaire, but he will never be able to understand empathetic values. In fact, because of the grandiosity of these personalities and consequent...

Regarding your New York Times op-ed, "Easy Money, Hard Truths," your figures comparing federal civilian salaries with private sector wages are bogus.

First, federal employees are heavily weighted toward the highly educated and the highly skilled - lawyers, scientists, engineers, economists, physicians, educators and accounting professionals. There is...

Two comments about your latest column, Mr. Brooks.

First of all, the perception of a gap in the political center is largely illusory. Burkean, constitutional conservatives like yourself have been supplanted in the Republican Party by primitive authoritarian extremists. Authoritarian politicians and media regularly demonize...

The recent poll showing how high percentages of Republicans cling to irrational beliefs is not surprising. It is the natural result of the rights' conscious choice to use dehumanizing hatred as its principal tool for recruiting and manipulating its followers.

For forty years after World...

They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal....

Even so, many Goldman employees are stunned by the public resentment directed at the bank in general and Mr. Blankfein in particular, who, after first steadfastly defending Goldman's profits and pay, recently offered a vague apology for "mistakes" that led to the financial crisis.

How do you...

A friend of mine got into Bill O'Reilly some years ago. We had been friends since her sons were little guys, long before she and I morphed from really, really hot (okay, maybe just one "really") into women of the vintage marketers target when they're hawking hundred dollar face creams.

When the history of this, the Age of Irony, is written from the cool perspective of the future, the Greatest Irony of all will be this: by the time we elected our first African-American president the Party of Lincoln -- the Great Emancipator -- had been completely taken over by...

My neighbor Lisa has seen the Wise County Clinic personally. Her family owns a farm just over the mountain from the fairgrounds where the annual health care road show gathers. She described the experience of watching it in a recent email: "Just the line of cars -- literally for several...