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…