Well, the President has been rolled again -- this time about the scheduling of his speech on jobs.

While the rescheduling of even a major speech may seem a triviality, especially compared with prior cases of being rolled (the raising of the debt ceiling, to give just one example), it...

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make a word mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

President Obama has been criticized by both left and right for poor communication. That may be true, but the fault...

Because of the DSK and Schwarzenegger scandals, there has been probably more than enough public consideration in the last week or two of questions like: Are powerful men pigs and if so, why? But I have yet to see any discussion of a related and relevant question: Why are powerful...

Conservative Republicans have been very busy lately making inroads into teaching and learning at all levels -- a curious program, especially at a time when more serious voices have been urging America to strengthen its investment in science and technology in order to remain globally competitive in the twenty-first century....

As a Democrat and a liberal, I used to worry about the party becoming ineffectual. Like others, I urged party members to man up, talk tough, avoid falling into the trap of becoming the girlie-party. But I have stopped worrying. We no longer have to worry. The Republicans have --...

As an educator, my first response to the State of the Union was delight because the president focused so much of his discussion on the importance of education to our economy, present and future. We can only "win the future," he told us, "if we improve our educational system and...

It is pretty obvious that progressives will not fight for their beliefs. The very fact that we have jettisoned "liberal" in favor of "progressive" (because some people made fun of the former term) illustrates the point. But what is even more unfortunate is that, even when progressives fight, we cannot...

Now that the midterm elections are over, it is time to decide what they were about. The right answer, of course, is many things. The economy, to be sure. The future direction of the nation, definitely. But I think they were also about something else, the signs of which are...

If you want to succeed as a pundit, first of all you have to man up: eschew wussy ambiguity and make flat out all-or-nothing statements. So it is not surprising that the election has been described, pre- and post- variously as a "bloodbath," a "cataclysm," and a "shellacking" for the...

The reviews of President Obama's Tuesday night Oval Office address are in, and they are decidedly tepid - like the response to many of his presidential speeches. But in this case the response is often one of puzzlement. The President had a golden opportunity to hit a home run: the...

A remarkable number of women achieved success in today's primary elections. But what do their victories suggest about the current status of women in U.S. politics, and elsewhere, at this time?

I think there are several possible answers, any, all, or none of which may be true.

First, the predominance...

As I learn about Elena Kagan, my first responses are of pride and delight. She is, as everyone knows by now, an alumna of Hunter College High School, as am I. And although my experience there was a long time ago, I consider my six years at Hunter the formative...

The anti-immigration bill passed in Arizona last week is unquestionably a bad bill in many ways, and the criticism of it and actions that are being contemplated against it are well justified. But there has been much less attention paid to another pair of laws that were passed by the...

I have been puzzling over the concern about language that has been demonstrated recently by several prominent conservatives. First there was the jihad a few months ago led by RNC Chairman Michael Steele about Harry Reid's reference to Obama's ability to use (or not) "Negro dialect." From the right came...

At least since the 2008 primaries I have been noticing a tendency on the part of media commentators and pundits to explain political in terms of "narrative." Thus during the Democratic primary Clinton and Obama were compared with respect to the compellingness of their narratives, and later, similarly, Obama and...

University of California President Mark Yudof has suffered a lot of criticism for his decisions about the running of the university during a tremendously difficult period: the state's financial distress has forced a great reduction in the university's budget, leading to firings (staff), tuition increases (students), and furloughs (staff, faculty,...

Ever since 9/11, Americans have engaged an ongoing debate on how to make sense of terrorism, and along those lines, what measures to take when terrorists are caught.

There are two basic schools of thought on the matter. The first: terrorism is "war," and the second: terrorism is "crime."...

You can argue with the ways Republican conservatives use language: prevarication, exaggeration, equivocation, and yes, indeed, one may invoke the much shorter "l"-word. But one thing has become clearer than ever in the light of the health care debate:

Republicans have gotten the trademark on the two most potent words...

Since we live in a hurry-up culture, it's not surprising that we like to find ways to speed up communication -- or at least appear to be doing so. But linguistic shortcuts are not an altogether new thing. Some have been around for centuries (at least), though one seems to...

In his youth my father was a Socialist. Toward the end of his life he did an oral history in which he told this story, set during the Great Depression.

He was setting up the chairs for a Socialist meeting. The Communists (sworn enemies of the Socialists) turned up...