I’ve talked about it lots of times before: The high cost of lying and deception — by politicians and police, corporate executives, and clergy, even journalists, accountants, and educators — has been to weaken every major social institution.
As each of these institutions wages its separate battle to remove the cloud of suspicion and cynicism that hovers over it, there are certain truths about trust that must be understood and dealt with.
President Donald Trump’s second administration has been defined by its assault on the federal workforce. With Elon Musk at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump administration fired tens of thousands of federal workers, jeopardizing services that working families across the country rely on. Yet the attacks on workers have gone beyond firing public sector workers and will not end just because Musk has left the government.
President Trump says it was necessary for him to order U.S. pilots to bomb Iran to prevent that nation’s government from building a nuclear bomb.
Wait a minute. Something is coming to me. Just give me a moment. It’s coming into my mind. Oh, yes, I remember:
“WMDs! WMDs, Jacob! We have to invade Iran, I mean Iraq, because Saddam Hussein is coming to get us with his WMDs! We have to invade now! Tomorrow will be too late. WMDs! WMDs!”
My mother left a small village in western Ireland when she was 17.
She had good reason. Her public education ended at age 14. At the time, public high schools did not exist in Ireland. The fifth child of a Irish farmer’s 10 children could only get a secondary education with a scholarship to a private school. And she did not get that. Many people in her village in County Mayo were migrant workers, traveling to Scotland to pick potatoes.
She didn’t want that life. So she left. So did most of her sisters.
And decades later, she’s still angry.
Since the early 1990s, the small blue Energy Star label has appeared on millions of household appliances, electronics, and even buildings across the United States. But as the Trump administration considers terminating some or all of the program, it is worth a look at what exactly this government-backed label means, and why it has become one of the most recognizable environmental certifications in the country.
Energy Star was launched by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1992 and later expanded in partnership with the Department of Energy with a simple goal: making it easier for consumers and businesses to choose energy-efficient products, helping them reduce energy use and save money, without sacrificing quality or performance.
After a two-day manhunt, Minnesota authorities arrested and charged 57-year-old Vance Boelter on June 15, 2025 after he allegedly shot and killed Minnesota House Democratic leader Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home and seriously injured another state senator and his wife.
Boelter, disguised as a police officer, went to other Minnesota politicians’ homes late in the evening on June 13. In his parked car, he left behind a list of names and addresses of other Minnesota state and federal elected officials, as well as community leaders and Planned Parenthood locations.
This incident is the latest to demonstrate how political and often hate-based violence is becoming a more common part of American politics.
A man named Mohamed Soliman is charged with multiple crimes relating to a brutal Molotov cocktail attack on people in Boulder, Colorado, who were demonstrating in favor of Israeli hostages in Gaza. Some of the victims suffered second- and third-degree burns, but all of them are expected to survive. Soliman yelled “Free Palestine” as he lobbed his firebombs into the crowd.
It goes without saying that Soliman is being accused of antisemitism. But the discomforting fact is that the Israeli government bears responsibility for much of the antisemitism here in the United States and the rest of the world.
We demonstrate the virtue of respect for others by being courteous and civil and treating everyone in a manner that acknowledges and honors basic human dignity.
An important but often neglected aspect of respect is listening to what others say. Respectful listening is more than hearing. It requires us to consider what’s being said. That’s hard when we’ve heard it before, aren’t interested, or don’t think much of the person talking. It’s even worse when we act like we’re listening but are just waiting for our turn to speak.
President Donald Trump’s idea of a “Golden Dome” missile defense system carries a range of potential strategic dangers for the United States.
Golden Dome is meant to protect the U.S. from ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missiles, and missiles launched from space. Trump has called for the missile defense to be fully operational before the end of his term in three years.
The Trump administration, on June 4, announced travel restrictions targeting 19 countries in Africa and Asia, including many of the world’s poorest nations. All travel is banned from 12 of these countries, with partial restrictions on travel from the rest.
The presidential proclamation, entitled “Restricting the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats,” is aimed at “countries throughout the world for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a full or partial suspension on the entry or admission of nationals from those countries.”
Tommy Tuberville, our reputed gubernatorial inevitability, should not have a clear path to the governor’s mansion.
His Senate career is almost all cable news hits, conspiracy thinking, and attacks on transgender youth. His platform is the same reward-the-wealthy, punish-the-marginalized, Trump-is-all pitch we’ve heard from state Republicans for a decade.
Call me naive, but Alabama needs something more than this. We deserve officials whose priorities are public matters and not the private goals of the state’s many wealthy cliques. A gubernatorial campaign that could be waged in its entirety from a beach house won’t provide any of that.
The end of slavery. The end of slavery. The end of slavery. The end of slavery was one of the most impactful events in the history of the United States of America. It changed so much. But we don’t celebrate the end of slavery. It’s a fateful failure. There are many reasons for this great failure. The end of slavery was monumental.
To understand the huge importance of the end of slavery, we have to understand the profound dimensions of slavery. We have deliberately blocked out such knowledge. Slavery was so terrible that we don’t want to remember it. We don’t want to talk or read or see movies or television programs about slavery. It is too painful. We act the way many respond to truly traumatic events such as brutal rapes. We often refuse to remember. Even when we don’t remember slavery, its impact is still deep and manifests itself in many ways. We cannot celebrate the end of slavery if we refuse to remember slavery.
The serious damage done to our economy, social institutions, and personal relationships by widespread cheating and dishonesty is bad enough. But widespread acceptance of such behavior as inevitable threatens to make our future a lot worse. In effect, our culture is being infected by a disease: the disease of low expectations.
A few years ago, a student in my history of public health course asked why her mother couldn’t afford insulin without insurance, despite having a full-time job. I told her what I’ve come to believe: The U.S. health care system was deliberately built this way.
People often hear that health care in America is dysfunctional – too expensive, too complex, and too inequitable. But dysfunction implies failure. What if the real problem is that the system is functioning exactly as it was designed to? Understanding this legacy is key to explaining not only why reform has failed repeatedly, but why change remains so difficult.
Hundreds of thousands of U.S. nonprofits provide vital services, such as running food banks and youth programs, supporting public health initiatives, and helping unemployed people find new jobs. Although this work helps sustain local communities, obtaining the money and staff they require is a constant struggle for many of these groups.
That’s where AmeriCorps often comes in. The independent federal agency for national service and volunteerism has facilitated the work of approximately 200,000 people a year, placing them through partnerships with thousands of nonprofits that provide tutoring, disaster relief, and many other important services.
The first time Donald Trump was president, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency developed a regulation known as the “science transparency” rule. The administration liked to call it the “secret science” rule.
“Transparency” sounds positive, but this rule instead prevented the EPA from using some of the best available science to protect human health.
A critical maxim of management is: “Suitability is as important as capability.” Capability asks, “Can they do the job?” Suitability asks, “Are they right for the job?”
If the job isn’t a good fit, it’s not a good job.
Of all the days to stay in bed, Friday the 13th is surely the best. It’s the title of a popular (if increasingly corny) horror movie series; it’s associated with bad luck, and it’s generally thought to be a good time not to take any serious risks.
Even if you try to escape it, you might fail, as happened to New Yorker Daz Baxter. On Friday 13th in 1976, he decided to just stay in bed for the day, only to be killed when the floor of his apartment block collapsed under him. There’s even a term for the terror the day evokes: Paraskevidekatriaphobia was coined by the psychotherapist Donald Dossey, a specialist in phobias, to describe an intense and irrational fear of the date.
My wife and I spent the Sunday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend hiking near Lake Martin in Dadeville.
From a stunning view of the lake, we walked through a canopied forest with all kinds of rocks, ridges, and flora. The trail took us to the lake shore, where we took in the vistas and the $1 million homes all around them.
It’s a reminder of how many natural jewels we have in Alabama. And it’s free. All you have to do is drive there and start walking. No painful real estate investment required.
Benjamin Franklin famously stated, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Who would do that? Who would be willing to give up a life of freedom in exchange for being kept “safe,” even temporarily or permanently?
What if every American citizen today were confronted directly with this question: Are you willing to sacrifice your freedom in exchange for temporary safety?
The recently completed 2025 Alabama Legislative Regular Session has concluded successfully. Any time you record solid balanced budgets, you have succeeded.
Both the Education Budget and General Fund Budget are sound, thanks to the good work of the budget chairmen. Sen. Arthur Orr (R-Decatur), Rep. Danny Garrett (R-Trussville), Sen. Greg Albritton (R-Escambia), and Rep. Rex Reynolds (R-Huntsville) have done yeoman work. Legislative leaders, like Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter (R-Rainsville) and Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger (R-Cullman), have provided outstanding leadership.
Throughout U.S. history, LGBTQ+ activists have used their First Amendment rights to advocate for their cause. These freedoms — particularly speech, press, assembly, and petition — have helped LGBTQ+ leaders push for awareness and laws to protect their communities such as the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court case protecting gay marriage; state and federal laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in workplaces and in health care; and others.
These activists have made an impact by using their rights to speak out and take action.
Over the past few years, experts have been sounding the alarm over how much time Americans spend alone.
Statistics show that we’re choosing to be solitary for more of our waking hours than ever before, tucked away at home rather than mingling in public. Increasing numbers of us are dining alone and traveling solo, and rates of living alone have nearly doubled in the past 50 years.
With the summer travel season just around the corner, American families will soon embark on long-awaited vacations to some of the world’s great travel destinations: America’s parks and public lands. Places like the Grand Canyon and Great Smoky Mountains draw millions of visitors annually from across the globe and help fuel our country’s growing outdoor recreation economy, which accounted for $1.2 trillion in economic activity in 2023. Yet a concerted effort by the Trump administration to sell off and sell out America’s public lands to the highest bidder puts these special places, local economies, and future travel plans in jeopardy.
Despite the advice of preachers and philosophers warning us of the shortcomings of money, it’s hard to argue with Gertrude Stein’s observation: “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better.”
Although money is better at reducing suffering caused by poverty and relieving anxiety caused by debt than it is at making us happy, it can buy lots of things that make us feel good and important.
Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh is a political pioneer of sorts.
In her campaigns for the Alabama Power Rubber Stamp Squad — excuse me, the Public Service Commission — Cavanaugh had one message: Being a conservative Republican is the only qualification for office.
She trumpeted her opposition to abortion rights, even snagging Mike Huckabee to back her up on that. Later on, she campaigned for re-election in part on her opposition to “socialism and liberal ‘woke’ ideas.”
One of the ways that brutal right-wing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet would terrorize the Chilean people into patriotic submission to his authority was by disappearing people. This was different from simply torturing and executing them. He and his goons certainly did that too. But disappearing people was different. With executions and bodies, families at least had certainty with respect to what had happened to their loved one. With disappearances, they never could be certain that their loved one really was dead. There was always a small part of people that retained some amount of hope that maybe — just maybe — their loved one would show up after being released from years or decades in some prison. It was a brutal way to psychologically torture the family members of the person who had been disappeared and everyone else in society.
In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, billionaire and Trump megadonor Elon Musk offered his thoughts about what motivates political progressives to support immigration. In his view, the culprit was empathy, which he called “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.”
As shocking as Musk’s views are, however, they are far from unique. On the one hand, there is the familiar and widespread conservative critique of “bleeding heart” liberals as naive or overly emotional. But there is also a broader philosophical critique that raises worries about empathy on quite different and less political grounds, including findings in social science.
Federal judges and at times Supreme Court justices have repeatedly challenged – and blocked – President Donald Trump’s attempts to reshape fundamental aspects of American government.
Many of Trump’s more than 150 executive orders, including one aimed at eliminating the Department of Education, have been blocked by injunctions and lawsuits.
When a majority of Supreme Court justices ruled on May 16, 2025 that the Trump administration could not deport a group of Venezuelan immigrants without first giving them the right to due process in court, Trump attacked the court.
The best way to teach our children to succeed is to teach them to fail.
After all, if getting everything you want on the first try is success, and everything else is failure, we all fail much more often than we succeed.
Police raids were frequent and expected among the gay bars in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s.
In every state except Illinois, simply being gay was a crime. At the time, New York City was seen as a relatively safe haven for LGBTQ+ folks across the nation. But law enforcement routinely seized on state laws authorizing the arrest of anyone for “crimes against nature” or not wearing at least three articles of gender-appropriate clothing.
