Banned Books Week ended last week, and commentary across media and academia predictably focused on contemporary culture wars, school library challenge lists, and debates over modern content. Yet, amid the noise of this routine exercise, a far more pervasive and intellectually dishonest form of censorship is being overlooked: the ongoing …
In the cloak-and-dagger world of intelligence, the most important rule about sharing information is also the simplest: “The need to know.” Decades ago, while serving with the U.S. Army Security Agency in Germany, that rule governed every second of our lives. From the physical security surrounding our specialized intercept hardware …
I spent almost 10 years of my journalistic career covering Japan—a place long considered inscrutable by Westerners, even though today’s decidedly Westernized Japan is about as inscrutable as Iowa. During those years, I watched Japanese leaders wrestle with a foreign policy hamstrung by a constitution that essentially prohibits war as …
During my career with the Chicago Tribune, I covered my share of criminal and civil trials. One thing I learned early on was to watch the jury for telltale reactions that might indicate how jurors were processing the evidence. Did they express any emotions? Shock? Sympathy? Disgust? Anger? Sadness? Drollness? …
Where are the watchdogs? I have been asking myself that question for months. It is a story every American needs to hear, yet legacy media outlets have decided you don’t need to know. In their view, the annual loss of billions in taxpayer dollars to fraudsters is a Washington “non-story”—a …
While politicians and tech executives wring their hands over how to govern the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, a far more fundamental crisis is unfolding quietly in America’s classrooms. According to recent data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, nearly a third of high school seniors cannot read well …
Americans have short memories. Very short. It’s only been 25 years since Muslim terrorists launched the deadliest attack on American soil in 250 years, yet many Americans (especially Muslim-Americans) seem oblivious to that event and instead are eager to denigrate our nation as a toxic cauldron of white supremacy and …
When I was a college student, there was a required reading program called Western Civilization that exposed us to 3,000 years of Western thought and the writings and ideas of a broad range of individuals, from Adolf Hitler to Thomas Hobbes, from Karl Marx to Baron de Montesquieu. The idea …
I don’t know many journalists who have been so effective at uncovering government fraud that lawmakers in one state are going to extraordinary lengths to pass a new law that would essentially criminalize investigative journalism and make it illegal to investigate fraud there. In fact, as far as I know, …
Dear Reader, Welcome back to our Saturday serialization of The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles (Book #2 in the Finding Billy Battles Trilogy). Book #2 takes Billy’s story to a larger global stage. It leaves the violence of late 19th-century Kansas behind as Billy is thrust into the sweeping historical …