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  News Item: The House of Representatives passed a farm bill this week and, for the first time in decades, it did not include an appropriation for SNAP, the Food Stamp program. Instead, the bill dealt solely with subsidies for farmers and… more »

  (The names in the following account are omitted so as not to embarrass the guilty.) Here’s a short account of how the lack of competition- the absence of those all-powerful “free market forces” we are incessantly being told to worship- leaves even a… more »

  Last week, Thomas B. Edsall posted an intriguing article entitled “Our Broken Social Contract” to the NY Times “Opinionator” blog. He started with a basic theme: “Many Americans think that their country has lost its way. But when they try to make se… more »

The unique structure of our republican form of government, with its bicameral legislature and three checked and balanced branches, tendered carefully to posterity by the founders after great debates, has matured into a sclerosal conglomeration of… more »

I have been very impressed by a group of young people whose work gives me hope for our society's future. They are a varied group of journalists, commentators, and public intellectuals who represent a spectrum of political philosophy but share the valuab… more »

In his 1963 Pulitzer Prize-winning opus, Anti Intellectualism in American Life, historian Richard Hofstadter charted the cultural history of America’s peculiar rejection of the intellectual in America society from the colonial era through the mid-20th C… more »