Violent crime — homicides, robberies, gun assaults — has begun to edge down from pandemic-era levels. But people are scared. According to the Pew Research Center, almost 60 percent of Americans today say that violent crime is a “very big problem.” In New York State, four out of ten residents tell pollsters they’ve “never been this worried about my personal […]

By Thomas Friedman Produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd and Jillian Weinberger Despite forceful opposition, Israel’s government passed a judicial reform law that limits the ability of the country’s Supreme Court to overrule the government. In this audio short, our columnist Tom Friedman explains how the new law could destabilize the United States’ relationship with Israel and complicate American interests in […]

By Jamelle Bouie Opinion Columnist For as long as Americans have had partisan political competition, they have hated partisanship itself. By his second term in office, in the mid-1790s, President George Washington faced organized political opponents in the form of Democratic-Republican societies that had spread throughout the country. “There was the Society for the Preservation of Liberty in Virginia, the […]

Have you met anyone truly excited about Joe Biden running for re-election? And by that, I mean downright Obama-circa-2008 energized — brimming with enthusiasm about what four more years of Biden would bring to our body politic, our economy, our national mood, our culture? Let’s be more realistic. Is there a single one among us who can muster even a […]

The recession caused by the Covid-19 pandemic was the shortest on record, thanks to rapid, robust and bipartisan congressional action. It took just over two years to regain all of the jobs lost — hard to fathom given that more than six million people filed unemployment insurance claims in one week at the end of March 2020. Americans were made […]

More than a decade ago, I met a scared 15-year-old who was trying to recover her life after having been kidnapped by a pimp and sold for sex. Melanie Thompson recalled the day her life changed: She and two other girls in New York City ran into some older boys who invited them to hang out. The girls did so, […]

Roughly a century ago, when Henry Ford revolutionized modern car production, engineers from France, Japan, Germany and the Soviet Union flocked to Detroit to learn how to copy his miraculous methods. Ford’s River Rouge plant, then the world’s largest factory, ultimately inspired facilities by Renault, Volkswagen, Toyota and the Russian automaker Gaz. It also gave rise to the nightmarish wartime […]

I’ve always been skeptical of the staycation. The coinage is too cute for what feels like a consolation prize: While other people are off exploring the Blue Lagoon by camper van, you get to stay in your very own home and go to your usual supermarket for Cheerios! So I was intrigued to discover, thanks to my colleague Catherine Pearson, […]

No feat of rhetoric could disguise the flagrantly political nature of the federal court ruling on July 4 that restricted the Biden administration’s communications with social media platforms — but Judge Terry A. Doughty, who wrote the opinion, did his best to cover his tracks. The 155-page opinion, which could hinder the government’s efforts to counter false and misleading online […]

VILNIUS, Lithuania — Many Americans and Europeans flatter themselves by seeing the war in Ukraine through a false prism. Too often, we think we have sacrificed for the Ukrainians. We pat ourselves on the back for providing expensive weapons and paying higher heating bills to help Ukrainians win their freedom — and we wish they’d get on with it. In […]