A conservative’s guide to managing cognitive dissonance — Well, it’s happened again. Another domestic terrorist has killed a bunch of people and left behind a manifesto embracing ideas that are popular with you and your fellow conservatives. Now the lamestream media are out for blood, trying to paint you and your fellow patriots as racist. What to do? …

What the Right’s opposition to abortion, immigration, and contraception all have in common — When the draft of Justice Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health was leaked two weeks ago, many commentators noted that its reasoning might also support attacks on other rights. Though Alito takes pains to distinguish abortion, Roe was part of a long line of cases that interpreted the…

And what Congress should do if it doesn’t — According to a leaked draft of an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Supreme Court is about to overturn Roe v. Wade, the nearly fifty-year-old precedent granting women a constitutional right to abortion. There is still time for the Court to walk this back…

Public displays of religion are about power, not piety — On Monday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that asks whether a school board violated the First Amendment when it prohibited a high school football coach from praying at the 50-yard line after home games. The coach — Joseph A. Kennedy — said that he did nothing…

Is it possible to have both? — In his play, “Prometheus Bound,” the ancient Greek writer Aeschylus recounts the story of Prometheus, the Titan who earned the wrath of Zeus by sharing fire with mortals. As a punishment, Zeus ordered Prometheus chained to a mountaintop, where his liver would be eaten every day by an eagle, only…

How life (and free will) emerged from matter — In his seminal paper, “The Nature of the Firm,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase compared firms in a market economy to islands of consciousness surrounded by an ocean of unconscious forces. He wanted to know, if the market really is efficient, then why should these islands of directed economic activity…

Or he is willfully misrepresenting him — On Tuesday, Senator Ted Cruz gave a master class in willful ignorance. He opened his questioning of Supreme Court Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson with a quotation from Martin Luther King’s speech at the National Mall: I have a dream, that my four little children will one day live in a…

Why Biden’s critics present us with a false choice — This week, the Senate will begin hearings on the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. While most GOP Senators will have the decency not to do so to her face, you can be sure that their surrogates in the right-wing media will be…

Or would “strategic ambiguity” only have made things worse? — I’ve been thinking a lot lately about President Obama’s unfortunate “red line” bluff in Syria. Obama threatened to topple the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad if the latter used chemical or biological weapons on his own people. But when Assad did indeed gas Syrian Kurds, Obama failed to follow through on…