SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Why would an immigrant living here illegally risk jail and deportation by trying to vote? That has always puzzled me.

And why would a political pro waste time and money soliciting votes from noncitizens when there are millions of legal voters available to persuade?

The answer is that undocumented immigrants don’t. And...Read more

Arthur C. Clarke’s third law says that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In an age when war and robots are making energy increasingly scarce, a technological breakthrough that can satisfy the electricity demand of, say, Europe without using a single lump of coal or solar panel sounds magical.

But the ...Read more

Studies show what hapless college grads learn the hard way: Some of their university degrees aren’t worth the big bucks they paid for them.

That goes for graduate students as well as undergrads.

According to a study recently released by the Postsecondary Education & Economics Research Center at American University, (originally based on ...Read more

For years, coastal communities like mine in New England have been rebuilding what corporate seafood systems ruined by exploiting our marine resources. Now, some lawmakers are trying to hand our ocean commons over to the same types of industries that emptied out our fisheries in the first place.

It’s been more than 25 years since I got my ...Read more

Thanks in large part to President Donald Trump’s disastrous policies, Democrats have a decent shot at not just retaking the House, but maybe even flipping the Senate.

Here’s the thing to know: Midterms are a referendum on the incumbent president. And this is especially true when the president is Donald Trump, who dominates every news cycle....Read more

In 2023, the leaders of the world’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies — OpenAI, Google Deepmind, Anthropic — signed a letter warning of the existential risks emerging from AI. It included this declaration:

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as ...Read more

Southern California’s Salton Sea was once a resort playground, with sunny beaches, celebrities and people waterskiing on the vast inland lake in the 1950s and ’60s.

Today, those resorts are long gone, replaced by a drying and increasingly toxic landscape. As the lake shrinks, wind blowing across the exposed lakebed kicks up toxic dust left ...Read more

For many years, the U.S. foreign and security establishment has made the safety of international trade a key argument for the benefits that U.S. global primacy brings to the world, and the need to maintain that primacy. This argument has often been made with specific reference to the security of energy flows from the Persian Gulf — which was ...Read more

The White House’s struggles to negotiate an off-ramp in Iran are a reminder of how crucial skilled diplomacy can be. Yet the State Department appears intent on purging and politicizing the ranks of the nation’s top envoys. Congress has a duty to push back.

Out of 195 ambassadorial postings around the world, more than 110 sat empty as of ...Read more

Remember when our president attacked a female journalist for asking uncomfortable questions with a casual, sincere, "Quiet, piggy"?

That was five months ago, a lifetime in the chaos of the Trump administration, but it was a telling moment about how not just our president but those crafting his policy view women and their place in society. Hint:...Read more

There are two open secrets in college admissions. First, admissions is not a meritocracy based on academic achievement. Second, the factors used in “holistic” admissions (essays, teacher recommendations, etc.) do not predict a student’s success in or after college. “Holistic” admissions originated a century ago to perpetuate exclusion,...Read more

If you’ve ever expressed even a passing desire to visit Disneyland in Anaheim, California, or Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, you may have had friends who raised their eyebrows, groaned or even sneered.

The heart of their criticism isn’t just that they think Disney is for kids, or that it’s so prohibitively expensive. It’s what I...Read more

Congress is now being asked to pause data center construction. In March, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced a bill to halt the buildout of the infrastructure that makes advanced AI possible. The framing is familiar: the pace is too fast, the risks too great, the window to act too narrow. The only path forward is to preserve ...Read more

When the Trump administration launched the war in Iran a month ago, higher oil and energy prices were surely expected, yet there was a positive feeling that the U.S. economy was strong and vibrant enough to keep running smoothly. Like a family planning a long road trip in a sturdy seven-seat SUV, it believed the economic engine was serviced, ...Read more

The scariest thing I read this weekend was not about gas prices, although $4.29 a gallon for regular was nearly enough to make me do a Tiger Woods and flip my SUV.

(Too soon?)

And, no, the scariest thing I read wasn’t about the “massive” military bunker President Donald Trump was designing under what used to be the White House’s East ...Read more

President Donald Trump on Wednesday evening offered the nation a defense of America’s offensive against Iran, assuring the country the mission will end “very shortly.” Had he opted for inaction like all his predecessors, he said, the “most violent and thuggish regime on Earth would be free to carry out their campaigns of terror, coercion...Read more

It was obvious what kind of official U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi would be in the second Trump administration about 12 years before she joined it, long before Donald Trump came down the golden escalator. Bondi took thousands of dollars in Trump campaign donations in 2013 as Florida’s attorney general and then promptly shut down an ...Read more