Biographer Ron Chernow explains, “Mark Twain has long been venerated as an emblem of Americana.” In this fascinating biography, Chernow explains why. Though the book runs to 1200 pp, it never becomes tedious; on the contrary, it is an enthralling read.

Until recently, anyone who believed there was anything fishy about the U.S. organ donation system was labeled a conspiracy theorist. Yet now the old adage: “What’s the difference between conspiracy and truth? About six months,” rings true again, as so-called conspiracy theorists have been proven right by none other than the federal Health and Resources Services Administration (HRSA) itself.

“War made the state,” said the political scientist Charles Tilly, “and the state made war.” Tilly was talking about actual states, but the same could be said about metaphorical states: states of mind, or perhaps of the soul.

Charles Rangel and Gerald Ford were veterans of the Korean War and World War II, respectively. When Rangel was elected to Congress in 1971, history brought him together with then-Michigan Rep. Jerry Ford, first elected to Congress in 1948.

The decline in fertility throughout the developed world is a widely noted problem: both in the U.S. and most of the developed world, the rate of reproduction is well short of what would be required to sustain our population at existing levels.

In the past, I used to grab my morning tea and then check the news. Now, I wake up and dread the morning’s political news.

In an era of deep political polarization, a new study indicates that many members of Congress may be out of step not just with the opposition party, but with their own voters as well.

As a lifelong student of political philosophy and political science, rather than a practitioner of law, I tend to approach such ideas by turning to the great minds who discovered and articulated them over the centuries.

I’ve heard it said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I’ve also heard that people these days are pretty stressed out, and I have to wonder if that’s because we’re all being so damned vigilant.

As we mark the 249th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we reflect on its interesting use of “necessary.”

After archivists at the Library of Congress thanked me for helping locate a lost video archive about the fall of Saigon, I wrote to several government officials requesting a review of all archives in the Veterans History Project. When I received no replies, I turned to Vietnam-era journalist Marvin Kalb.

In his 1796 farewell address, George Washington famously cautioned about the dangers to liberty of the United States entering into entangling alliances.