Francis Wilkinson

The delicate choreography of ships, trains and trucks at the world’s ports has been badly disrupted by the pandemic, and the turmoil is not likely to end soon. If a virus can have such an adverse impact on the journey of a plastic toy or automobile from Point A to Point B, consider the potential…

Climate change is having a breakout performance this year. Throughout the US, the slow-motion calamity long described in scientific studies and news articles has been visible to the naked eye or felt on tingling flesh — here too wet, there too dry, everywhere too hot. It’s only human to wonder…

Near a rugged peninsula off San Diego, a 40-foot cabin cruiser carrying undocumented migrants capsized and splintered on Sunday, leaving at least three dead. The accident was unquestionably tragic. The question is why such tragedies are so rare — and whether they will continue to be so. For the…

American liberals often look north for a vision of what could be. Canada: land of publicly funded health care, evidence-based gun regulation and immigrant-driven multiculturalism. These virtues are not exactly myths. The population of Vancouver, where I have been for the past several weeks, is…

Two decades ago, when I was working in politics, I ran into a friend in New York after returning from my umpteenth trip to Washington. Election Day was weeks away, and I was tired in the way that political people are tired in the fall of years that end in an even number. He expressed unease with…

I don’t know what Joe Biden truly believes about bipartisanship in the year 2020. I only know that his continued insistence on working with Republicans is both a tragic fantasy and good politics. The Republican Party is not an institution that Democrats, or democrats, can do much business with…

When a man in a MAGA hat was asked to put on a mask last week at a suburban Kansas City restaurant, as state law requires, he said he had an exemption. Then he lifted his shirt to reveal a holstered firearm. A customer who refused to wear a mask at a convenience store in Michigan this week stabbed…

President Donald Trump may have surrendered in the war on the coronavirus — he is “bored” by it, according to an aide to Texas Governor Greg Abbott — but he has not relented in his war on immigration. Yet his indifference to the virus, a new poll suggests, may have undermined his assault on…