A mere two months ago, we had the rare privilege of visiting our family in the Gaza Strip, a place I’ve always romanticized despite the more than 16-year-long blockade, preceded by 55 years of Israeli military occupation.

It’s a rare issue that can bring 41 states together for a bipartisan fight. This week, state attorneys general across the political spectrum joined forces in suing Facebook parent company Meta for allegedly using features on Instagram and other platforms that hook young users, while denying or downplaying the risks to their mental health.

America witnessed yet another mass shooting on Wednesday, this time in the small city of Lewiston, Maine. While people were shocked by the scale and location of the shooting — with 18 people slain in a state with one the country’s lowest homicide rates— no one was shocked that it occurred. Hearing how resigned commentators and politicians have become about yet another mass shooting emphasized something I’ve been thinking for a while: We’ve started treating mass shootings like natural disasters.

The unprecedented three-week Republican search for a new House speaker ended Wednesday. Now the real chaos begins.

For most Americans, events in Israel elicit a familiar set of emotions: sadness at the loss of life, particularly innocent civilians; anger, even fury, at one side or another; and fear that the conflict may ultimately engulf the larger region. It’s hard to find a silver lining on the cloud that now hangs over the Middle East.

A new book by a Stanford neurobiologist offers a jarring proposition: that humans do not have free will and thus cannot be considered morally responsible for our actions. In “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will,” Robert Sapolsky contends that much harm comes from our belief in free will: needless anxiety and guilt, unjust and cruel penal institutions and so forth.

Security guards are often hard workers. And some shift workers prefer to do the job in 12-hour stints, three, four or even five days a week. Nothing that unusual there.

Every October, the spirit of Halloween comes alive around my charming little town. With all the pumpkins, corn stalks and skeletons, I find myself transported to a world reminiscent of Halloweentown—and I love it! Pretend spiders, among my favorite decorations, seem to crawl across everything from porch swings to mailboxes.

The phrase “mowing the grass” has been the bumper sticker version of Israeli strategy in Gaza for the last decade and a half.

During the two years I lived in Israel serving as a junior U.S. diplomat, I used many words to describe the country that I somewhat reluctantly called home. “Never boring” was my go-to, a useful euphemism when Israeli assertiveness exasperated me. “Achingly beautiful” was another, when I spent my weekends hiking through the abundance of spring wildflowers that fill the Golan and Galilee, the expanse of the Negev desert and the stark beauty of the wadis in the West Bank.

Like most Americans, we were introduced to lawyer Sidney Powell on Nov. 19, 2020, almost two weeks after it was clear that Joe Biden had decisively beaten President Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Powell showed up at a Trump campaign press conference at RNC headquarters in Washington along with Rudy Giuliani and another lawyer, Jenna Ellis.

President Joe Biden has been traveling the U.S. touting a manufacturing revival that he no doubt hopes will help his chances for re-election. Unfortunately, there is much less substance to this “Biden Boom” than the White House would have Americans believe. Even under the rosiest of projections, the administration’s signature programs will do little to increase manufacturing employment — and even less to uplift the overall economy.