I expect most people agree that by making too much of a thing we can easily make too little of it—and also that as far as platitudes go that’s a fairly solid one.

Nine times in our nation’s history a US vice president has ascended to the office of president.

Aristotle argued that the only just polity had to be a “mixed regime,” and that meant one that blended popular and aristocratic elements.

The current crisis of social isolation and political polarization found in the United States and to a lesser extent in other liberal democracies has led recently to an upsurge of interest in friendship as a political category.

For about a decade beginning in 1965, NBC late night weekend programming consisted of Best of Carson reruns.

The men and women of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives love their job so much they are afraid to do it; because if they do it, they may lose it.

Betty Ford wrote two autobiographies. One, The Times of My Life (1978), tells the story of a young girl from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who became—much to her surprise—the wife of the President of the United States.

One of the best presidential ranking polls is conducted from time to time by the Wall Street Journal, which strategically interviews a relatively small but ideologically balanced group of scholars.

Ernest Hemingway wrote “Hills Like White Elephants” while on his honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, a somewhat boyish looking woman (in the style of the day) and a Catholic, though not a very good one.

Today, July 13, we celebrate the 236th anniversary of the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

On this 247^th birthday celebration of our nation, we might be forgiven if we indulge the impulse to feel good about ourselves.

Many accounts of Gerald Ford’s service in Congress, where he served from 1949 until 1973, depict him as a moderate-minded lawmaker who was willing to work with members of the other party to pass legislation.

As Charles Dickens wrote about Victorian England in A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

The American founders were acutely aware that human beings desire power. Like Lord Acton, they believed that power tends to have a corrupting effect on those not only who attain it but those who reach for it.

Over the past decades, the controversy over civics education in the United States has only gotten worse.

During the bleakest days of the Covid pandemic and the shutdowns, numerous voices exhorted us to practice kindness.

We do violence to a work of art by using it for our own ends, especially for our own ideological or political ends, which are time-bound and probably transient at best.

Professional golf may be the last sport to maintain a strong sense of manners.

David French in this essay places alongside each other two contrasting thoughts of two contrasting thinkers—first friends, then enemies, then friends again—who were central figures in our nation’s early history.