Say goodnight, Earthlings.

That message -- plus the slimmest of shots at an eleventh-hour reprieve -- was announced to the people of the world last week.

When this happens in science fiction -- 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still is the classic -- the planet pays attention. The...

Maybe the problem with Washington isn't that there's too little comity -- there's too much.

Old hands lament the passing of the era when, by day, partisans went after one another red in tooth and claw, but when the sun hit the treetops, the enmity took a breather. Thanks to...

I ain't letting no computer grade this column. No way.

For one thing, essay-grading software can't tell the difference between the intentional errors I just made and the kind of mistakes that would torpedo a college or job application. For another, who needs a machine to tell me I'm a...

The final inch of the story turned me into an emotional puddle.

At 6 a.m. last Friday, the FBI arrested Michael S. Steinberg, a 41-year-old stock trader for New York hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, at his $8 million Manhattan co-op.

This brings to nine the number of SAC...

Scott Prouty buried his lede.

That's journalism jargon for not recognizing the most newsworthy part of a story -- for delaying the real attention-grabber for later. (Calling a story's first words the "lede" instead of the "lead" is a beloved fossil from the days when typesetters used lead -- the...

I couldn't believe my eyes.

I was in a Minneapolis branch of Byerly's, an upscale grocery chain in Minnesota. Scanning the aisles for a small extravagance for my dinner hosts, I noticed that the shelf labels included not just the price-per-unit, which I'm used to, but little blue and white...

NASA scientists say that meteor explosions like the one last week injuring 1,200 people in Chelyabinsk, Siberia, are 100-year events. The last time a big meteor crashed into our planet, incinerating 80 million trees in the Tunguska region of Siberia, was in 1908. So if you're feeling a...

With Pope Benedict XVI stepping down after two terms, the race to broadcast the first head-to-head debates among potential Vatican successors has been won by CNN. Sowing his oats, new worldwide network president Jeff Zucker announced that papabili will first square off on March 1 in a debate moderated by...

"Americans are sicker and die younger than people in other wealthy nations."

That stark sentence appears in the January 2013 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and it comes from the authors of a landmark report -- "Shorter Lives, Poorer Health" --...

I wonder where Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan had dinner last night.

Four years ago, while Democrats danced at inaugural balls, Reps. Cantor and Ryan dined at The Caucus Room, a Capitol Hill steakhouse, along with other top Republicans, including Rep. Kevin McCarthy, and Sens. Jim DeMint, John Kyl and...

Some day not all that far in the future, a new kind of entertainment is going to be perfected that will either be the coolest video game ever, or the media equivalent of a lethal man-made super-virus.

You can predict what that entertainment might be like just by extrapolating from...

"We have got to get Michelle to make this her priority."

It was my friend Judith, a wise woman, a mother and grandmother, on the phone from across the country, the evening of the day of the Newtown massacre, trying to figure out how to enlist the first lady...

So Grover Norquist turns out to be a colossus with feet of clay.

Norquist, in case you don't watch too much cable news, is the Washington lobbyist who for years has threatened hundreds of conservative candidates with defeat unless they signed a pledge to never, ever vote to raise...

They threw Derek Khanna under the bus.

On Friday afternoon, the Republican Study Committee -- the House caucus that promulgates right-wing orthodoxy -- posted on its website a startling policy brief about copyright law.

Written by RSC staffer Derek Khanna, a 24-year-old Georgetown Law student, the...

I was against Chris Christie before I was for him.

If Obama wins, when all the exit polling gets sorted through, it's those images of the Democratic president touring the hurricane damage arm-in-arm with the Republican governor that may turn out to have given him his advantage. If that...

If you watched any of the debates on CNN, you saw two worms at the bottom of your screen. Well, they looked to me like worms, or maybe caterpillars, scrunching and stretching throughout the 90 minutes. Actually they were real-time graphs -- with one color for men, another for women...

A couple of week ago, when I wrote a "Romney Wins First Debate" column, I didn't think I was going out on a limb. Obama's re-election was looking increasingly likely, but audiences don't show up to watch paint dry. The business model of journo-tainment required that "Game Change!"...

If the media-industrial complex obeys its usual laws of supply and demand, the political headlines over the next four weeks are fairly predictable: Romney Wins First Debate. Ryan, Biden Debate to a Draw. Obama Wins Second Debate. It All Comes Down to the Last Debate.

I'm of course exempting...

What just happened in American politics is not just that Charlotte mopped the floor with Tampa. It's that Democrats connected with the country beyond their wildest dreams.

Here's my fantasy: Coming out of their convention, Democrats will realize that their message sings.

It will dawn on them that eking...

It shouldn't have taken Todd Akin's crackpot contraception comment to alert us that Paul Ryan thinks rape is just another "method of conception."

If the news media hadn't grown blasé about the Republican war on women, plenty of pre-Akin Americans would have already known that...