One of many ways this country has managed more than two centuries of democratic elections and transitions is through transparency, with poll workers and watchers from the political parties participating in and observing the inner gears of vote-gathering and vote-counting.

Economies are not known for being simple things to untangle. Unlike in the physical sciences, where if you do enough calculations, you can shoot a projectile into an asteroid moving at an incredible speed 7 million miles away, the so-called laws of money deal with the hazier and less predictable forces of group psychology and consumption.

There are new restrictions on abortion in Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Texas. Three of those states have been competitive in recent presidential elections, and the fourth, Texas, has shown signs of shifting toward the Democrats. Yet in all four states, the Republican governors who signed those laws are cruising to re-election.

We may be entering a new chapter in the gamification of American politics: election betting.

Recent social media posts by a conservative political commentator raging about being “wedged between two obese people” on a three-hour flight from New York to Dallas were tasteless.

They say history doesn’t repeat itself, but the Biden administration is eager to prove otherwise as it pushes the United States back in time to the Jimmy Carter years.

The decades-old partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia has just been put to the test. It failed with flying colors.

NASA announced last month that its new panel to study Unidentified Aerial Phenomena — i.e. UFOs — was staffed up and ready to get working. The panel is impressive, including planetary scientists, astrophysicists, experts from the Federal Aviation Administration, data scientists and a celebrated astronaut. I have worked with a few of these scientists, and the group represents a stellar collection (pun intended) of smart, creative people with high scientific integrity.

If Democrats lose next week’s election, one reason will be soaring energy prices. The lesson that an electoral defeat should drive home is that this is the result of their own policies.

The life expectancy of Americans has dropped for two consecutive years. The first year, attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, was consistent with other countries. The second year was not.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus last week issued, then quickly withdrew, a poorly timed letter to President Joe Biden urging stepped-up efforts to negotiate a settlement to the war in Ukraine, putting their fellow Democrats in the awkward position of appearing hand-wringing and indecisive ahead of midterm elections. The letter’s wording raises the question of whose side the progressives are really on: Russia’s or the West’s?

Over the eight months since Russia invaded Ukraine, public support for U.S. military aid to Kyiv has been remarkably solid and mostly bipartisan.

Few Americans remember when polio-stricken children relied on seven-foot-long iron cylinders to breathe. At its peak in early 1950s, polio caused more than 15,000 cases of paralysis a year and over 3,000 deaths in the U.S. alone. In the decades that followed, a massive vaccination campaign nearly eradicated the disease from the globe. Now, a perfect storm of factors has made polio a threat once again. Eliminating the virus is still possible, but only if global leaders shake off their complacency.

Polls have shown that a large majority of Americans, north of 75%, are unhappy with the state of the nation.

(Editors’ note: Bloomberg Opinion columnist Ramesh Ponnuru did not actually receive the following email, but he has gotten dozens, scores, hundreds of others like it. As far as we know, he is not actually running for office.)

When you adopt a black cat, one of the things no one warns you about is that October presents a minefield of temptations. Suddenly, tributes to your beloved house panther are everywhere. No, I don’t need another T-shirt, tea light or tea towel … but how am I to resist when they feature a likeness of my Mia, perched on a pumpkin?

A federal appeals court tapped the brakes Friday on President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

Sometimes, it takes a jolt to make you see a relationship in a new light. With the always-complicated U.S.-Saudi dynamic, that moment may have arrived.

To President Joe Biden’s credit, his policies didn’t cause many of the economic problems we face today. But they did make them worse. Even more troubling, his policies might reduce growth in the future and make the economy less equal and resilient.