There is a town in western Japan named Nagi that’s famous for making babies. Its fertility rate in 2021 was 2.68 lifetime births per woman, compared with 1.3 for Japan as a whole, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal that my Opinion colleague Jessica Grose recently cited. Delegations from elsewhere in Japan […]

My first attempt to kill myself was when I was a child. I tried again as a teenager; as an adult, I’ve attempted suicide repeatedly and in a variety of ways. And yet, as a 55-year-old white man (a member of one of the groups at the highest risk for suicide in America) and the […]

U.S. moves to evacuate its embassy in Sudan The Pentagon is preparing for an evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Sudan. It would not be easy to get embassy staff out, some U.S. officials acknowledged, let alone the estimated 19,000 American citizens believed to be in Sudan. The U.S. is moving more troops to Djibouti, […]

I don’t keep up with Marjorie Taylor Greene’s tweets, having decided long ago that there were more pleasant and constructive uses of time, like lighting fire to my eyelashes. But I’m rethinking that judgment now. M.T.G. really does have something to say — or, rather, to tell us. She tweeted a doozy the other day. […]

More from our inbox: To the Editor: Re “The Highest Court Has the Government’s Lowest Ethical Standards” (editorial, April 16): Kudos to the editorial board for advocating judicial ethics reform. It’s astonishing that the highest court in the land has almost no ethics guidelines. Justice Clarence Thomas did not report his “gifts.” However, the real […]

The United Nations released data this morning confirming that India will soon surpass China as the most populous country. When that happens, it will be the first time in centuries that China does not have the world’s largest population. The milestone is focusing attention on both India’s potential to become a global power and the […]

The Dancing Itos were a lesser pop culture legacy of the O.J. Simpson case. Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” featured a ragged chorus line of black-robed hoofers meant to resemble Judge Lance Ito, who was presiding over the trial, as well as a look-alike for Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor. It was a (sort of) funny […]

More from our inbox: To the Editor: Re “There Are Promising Signs for Free Speech on Campuses,” by David French (column, April 17): I hope Mr. French’s column is correct. Freedom of speech, as provided for in the First Amendment, is a bedrock principle of our constitutional democracy. It is based on the premise of […]

“There are tranquil ages, which seem to contain that which will last forever,” the philosopher Karl Jaspers once wrote. “And there are ages of change, which see upheavals that, in extreme instances, appear to go to the roots of humanity itself.” Ours is clearly an age of upheaval. As war rages in Europe and the […]

There are good debates and bad debates. The bad ones are like the argument sketch from the old British television show “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” A man who has paid to have an argument complains that his interlocutor is simply contradicting him. “Argument is an intellectual process,” he insists. “Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying […]