It sometimes seems our parents and their parents in turn – back to the creation of the Irish State – must have been cruel people. How else do we explain the roll-call of horrors we’ve grown used to? Last week, the roll call continued. We heard about the garda who was victimised, her life turned […]

Is Canada a country divided? Premiers claim equalization is unfair to their provinces. British Columbia and Alberta fight about pipelines. English-Canadian critics denounce Québec’s treatment of minorities and its passage of a law that bans public servants from wearing religious symbols. Tensions within our country seem to be running high. And these are simply the […]

Where politicians are concerned, especially aging and garrulous ones, it may be a mistake to attribute to strategy what can be chalked up to simple fecklessness. But amid the shambolic style of Joe Biden’s front-running campaign to date, the flip-flops and apparent gaffes, it’s possible to discern a certain method, a general plan for how […]

I was an hour into my surf session when I looked at my watch. I had 15 minutes to catch a wave in, find my phone buried in a Ziploc bag on the beach and dial into a conference call to my office in New York City. As I was getting out of the warm […]

WASHINGTON — As shocking as it is to write this sentence, it must be said: Donald Trump did something right. He finally noticed the abyss once he was right on top of it, calling off a retaliatory strike on Iran after belatedly learning, he said, that 150 people could die. “I didn’t like it,” Trump […]

The two men in the Trump administration in charge of setting America’s global priorities are crisscrossing the Middle East this week, dividing up an already deeply divided region, trying desperately to separate fact from fiction and establish some sense of just where their nation’s priorities are going, how the United States might get there, and […]

Here is the list of 20 small things done by people especially to annoy me. It has to be a plot. Just has to be. Everyone is out to get me, and if you are going to accuse me of being paranoid, well then you are a co-conspirator. There I am getting on just grand, […]

For several years I had a regular lunch date with an Iranian diplomat — I suspect his real profession was otherwise — who worked out of the Islamic Republic’s mission to the United Nations. Our conversations, always on background, were exceptionally candid. He almost surely sought me out because my pro-Israel stance represented, in the […]

To the Editor: Re “Let’s Subscribe to That Sofa” (Sunday Styles, June 9): It’s true that moving from place to place feels like a fundamental pillar of millennials’ generational expectations. We can’t help chasing the better job or following the romantic partner or social circle. And the concept of renting clothes and furniture wherever we […]

To the Editor: Re “Trump Approves Strikes Against Iran but Delays Carrying Out the Attack” (front page, June 21): Per his latest tweet, President Trump now says he called off an impending strike on Iranian targets because of a last-minute concern for the kill count (an estimated 150). Really? This man with grave humanitarian concern? […]