Theologians tell us to hate the sin, but love the sinner. I confess to having those feelings about New Jersey governor Chris Christie. I hate the politics, but love the politician.

As a progressive, I detest most of Christie's political positions -- on unions, education, reproductive rights, you name it,...

Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

Deb Roy's video, "The Birth of a Word," is truly extraordinary. The methods its author has developed offer new ways to examine and understand the complex...

Suppose you have just been defeated in a tough political contest. Suppose further that it was one that, in your heart, you expected and felt entitled to win.

Suppose in addition that most serious analysts attributed your loss, to a significant extent , to your antagonizing several key groups of...

Americans are rightly proud of their increasingly democratic form of government. But too often, we call ourselves a "democracy" without asking just what that means, or ought to mean. If we were to do so, we might discover that we are less democratic than we think. Occasionally, too, candidates for...

Debate One is over, and the pundits have declared Mitt Romney the victor. The only remaining question is: was his victory overwhelming, or did Romney only win because Obama didn't?

That is today's story. But will it be the way we tell it after November 7?

On the surface it...

The world of the early 21st century is one divided by factionalism and suspicion, and connected by new channels of communication that are uneditable, instantaneous and anonymous. Therefore the most important thing a modern president must know in order to be effective is how to use language, both interpretively and...

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...