It’s debate season. So soon? I have a secret confession: I want them to go away. It’s not that I don’t like politics. I do. I am what political professionals call a “high propensity” voter, even visiting the voting booth for local elections where a handful of ballots sway the outcome. I follow current events.…

The world is changing. Politics is entering a new age. About time, too. What drove it home is a video that someone — a Web contractor who says he acted on his own — has posted on YouTube. It is a “mash-up” of the classic Ridley Scott-directed Apple “1984” commercial, in which a world of…

Let me tell you about two Americas: popular life and official life. In PopLife, people watch television shows, listen to rap, metal, rock, and country, and go to malls. They don’t have to wait until something’s been in the newspaper to know about. Most people live in PopLife. Some are rich and some are poor.…

I wanted to let you know about a new discussion guide that I have been working on for the past year or so with the National Issues Forums and the Kettering Foundation. It’s called The Energy Problem: Choices for an Uncertain Future. Like other National Issues Forums issue books, it is designed for small groups…

Also appeared (slightly altered) in The Christian Science Monitor. I almost threw out the Christmas card from my daughter’s orthodontist. I am glad I didn’t. I wish I could set up a trip for bosses to come to Rockville and visit Dr. Miller. They’d learn a lot. When I enter Dr. Miller’s office, perched unremarkably…

The well-meaning and optimistic have now stood up, as they seem to do every two years, and made their claims. Such a close majority for the Democrats in the Senate, they say, will oblige leadership to steer a centrist course. Having received such a thumping from America, they say, President Bush must needs be conciliatory…

Once in a while, usually in the fall, the iron doors of American Politics creak open and I am asked to participate in a small way. This august institution — along with any number of do-gooder organizations scattered across the land — tells me that this is a critical time. I must act. If I…

About one month into my freshman stint at a left coast school known for student activism, I spied a flyer on a phone pole. “BART Alert!” it screamed, referring to the local rail transit system. I am still not sure what such an alert really is, but this particular flyer urged me to show up…

One hesitates, in these days, to hold up professional cycling as a moral exemplar. For years, allegations of steroid use have dogged the sport. The vaunted Tour de France and its yellow jersey have taken on the odor of corruption of late and watching it has felt a little bit like watching professional bodybuilding, or…