Whether it’s annual office parties or festive gatherings with the family, the holidays often mean being in the company of others. Finding yourself in close quarters with others who don’t have the freshest breath can dull anyone’s merry mood. In this season of giving and receiving, you might want to take steps to ensure bad […]

As with September’s memorial services for John McCain, expressions of mourning for George H.W. Bush — extolling the 41st president’s humility, loyalty, temperance, decency, bravery and devotion to public service — have contained thinly veiled rebukes of the current president. The sharpest one, I thought, came in Alan Simpson’s splendid eulogy at Washington National Cathedral. […]

Recent Republican attempts to weaken the social safety net have one big thing in common: The pain they would inflict on poor children could last a lifetime. This is not only miserly but also shortsighted. Research shows that safety net programs keep children in school and out of trouble, and increase their chances of being […]

Imagine, if you will (and you should), a big American tech executive being detained over unspecified charges while on a trip to Beijing. That is exactly what a number of Silicon Valley executives told me they are concerned about after the arrest this week of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecom […]

Sharing an Amazon Prime account with loved ones is surprisingly intimate. You’re privy to one another’s impulse buys, fondness for corny ’90s comedies and preferred brands of vaginal suppositories. Like many families, mine shares a login for the ubiquitous delivery behemoth. Every time my dad or my sister orders an item, I see a cheerful […]

CAIRO — To write in Egypt and about Egypt has long meant being under the scrutiny of an authoritarian state — starting in the 1950s with President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who nationalized the press, and extending to the present. If you didn’t approve of the government’s activities, your only option, you quickly learned, was to […]

“The American people want someone to articulate their rage for them,” the manically motivated television director of programming Diane Christensen, pitched perfectly in the key of shrill by Faye Dunaway, tells her staff in “Network,” the 1976 film that took satire to a new and prophetic level in American filmmaking. Who knew it would turn […]

Are we going to have a full-blown trade war with China, and maybe the rest of the world? Nobody knows — because it all depends on the whims of one man. And Tariff Man is ignorant, volatile and delusional. Why do I say that it’s all about one man? After all, after the 2016 U.S. […]

When General Motors announced that it was idling five plants in the United States and Canada last week, there was shock in two American cities. One was Warren, Ohio, where G.M. builds the Chevrolet Cruze at its Lordstown assembly plant. Folks in the industrial heartland are no strangers to this kind of betrayal. But after […]

December is the time of year when children and teenagers will include smartphones, iPads, tablets, laptops, TVs, gaming consoles and computer games on their Christmas list. It’s also the time of year when young people spend additional time online. And while technology, digital and social media use can bestow us with remarkable benefits, it can […]