In a year or two, the controversy over removing the seven-foot statue of Joe Paterno outside Penn State's Beaver Stadium will seem perplexing. How could there even have been a debate about whether to continue to honor a fallen patriarch who turned a blind eye to child rape?...

For once, we are treated to a sports star ascending the national stage and talking not about his own greatness, his Hollywood girlfriend or his pimped-out fleet of Bentleys, but about self-awareness, the wisdom of his mentors, and the Zen of the knuckleball.

New York Mets ace...

The bombastic Republican Congressman Joe Walsh of Illinois has raised an uncomfortable question by criticizing his Democratic opponent, Tammy Duckworth, for talking too much about her military service.

Duckworth is an Army National Guard officer who lost both her legs when a Black Hawk helicopter she was...

In his 2009 book Enough, the visionary investor John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard mutual-fund company, recalled an exchange he had read about between Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller as they were chatting at a party thrown by a billionaire. Vonnegut pointed out that their host made more...

We have an inventive president.

The new David Maraniss biography, Barack Obama: The Story, depicts a young "Barry" Obama struggling to forge his personal identity as a multiracial black man moving from Indonesia to Hawaii to Los Angeles to New York and finally to Chicago,...

We've had a lot of congressional hearings -- way too many, in fact -- in which business leaders explained away some huge mistake or insisted that a disaster wasn't their fault. Jon Corzine of MF Global. Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. The Detroit auto executives who flew into Washington on...

Income inequality used to be an obscure topic reserved for sleepy academic conferences. Today, it's a dinner-table topic that everybody seems to have an opinion about.

It's obvious why: For a lot of people, it's getting harder to get ahead, even if they feel they're working hard...

Most of us won't stumble nearly as badly as John Edwards, the former political wunderkind who once seemed like White House material and is now a late-night punchline. But many ordinary people do face challenges similar to those Edwards did, with the same choices about responding recklessly or finding a...

Mitt Romney made a kind of evasive blanket apology after the Washington Post reported recently that he was the ringleader in the bullying of a fellow student at the Michigan prep school Romney attended in the 1960s. "If I did stupid things, why, I'm afraid I've got to...

I graduated from college in 1988 with about $11,000 in student-loan debt, which is slightly less, when adjusted for inflation, than the $27,000 that the typical indebted student owes today. The monthly payments seemed onerous at first, but as time went on they become manageable. While paying back...

Now that women are empowered, they feel guilty about it. They tried out equality and decided it's not so hot. And they're tormented by the fuzzy boundaries between sex and aggression.

Am I getting this right, ladies?

These, apparently, are the startling revelations generated by the surprising success...

Most parents want their kids to be inventive and clever -- perhaps even the next Steve Jobs. But parents also want their kids to perform well by the standard measures of success. Prioritizing one of those pathways, it turns out, may close off the other.

In the...

There's a can't-look-away controversy simmering over a British writer named Samantha Brick who keeps writing columns extolling (or is it bemoaning?) her own beauty.

Brick first stirred transatlantic passion with an adolescent commentary in the Daily Mail in early April, in which she explained "why women hate me...

As if men and women don't already have enough to bicker about, the media is now gleefully stoking a made-up battle over who matters more: men or women?

In her new book The Richer Sex, for example, journalist Liza Mundy musters reams of data to show that women...

Oh goody. The Mommy wars are back. As if the presidential campaign weren't tawdry enough already.

Just as Mitt Romney's wife Ann has taken a more prominent role in her husband's campaign -- stepping up as his surrogate on issues relating to women -- Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen has questioned...

Should childhood be an adversity-free zone?

To many parents, the obvious answer is yes. Protecting kids is a natural parental instinct, and over the last 50 years, we've made notable strides in rousting out pedophiles, treating adolescent drug abuse and mental health problems and making kids far safer in...