With the death of James Q. Wilson earlier today, America has lost a towering intellectual figure. The mind reels in thinking about the issues Professor Wilson wrote about with such precision, intelligence, originality, and elegance: crime and human nature; drug legalization, science, and addiction; moral character; benevolence; free will; families and communities; race; business ethics

A New York Times story during the weekend begins this way: “It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.” The

Mitt Romney’s advance toward the Republican nomination has provoked a lively conversation about what it means to be a conservative in America today. TIME asked a number of right-leaning thinkers to answer one of three questions [in this instance, what does a conservative believe?] to help define both their ideology and their challenges for the

These days one can sense a palpable fear among Republicans that the 2012 presidential election is slipping through their fingers. Their constellation of concerns includes the (perceived) weaknesses of the two frontrunners, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich; the increasing ferocity of their clash; the public’s antipathy toward Congress (including the GOP-controlled House); and a slight

I have some sympathy for President Obama’s speechwriters. A State of the Union address is inherently challenging to write because there’s a laundry list quality to them. (That was not the case for President Bush’s early State of the Union speeches, as we were able to focus on the war on terror, which created a

Barack Obama ran for office promising to heal the breach that divides Americans. It was at the core of his candidacy. What we have gotten instead is, according to polling data, the most polarizing president in our lifetime. Unable to defend his record or offer a compelling vision for the future, he and his allies

For a man who is, we’re told, an incredibly weak frontrunner, Mitt Romney is doing a pretty good job disguising himself as a strong one. The former Massachusetts governor has proven to be an excellent debater. He’s assembled a first-rate team. He can raise a lot of money. And he showed last night that he

First it was Alan Colmes; now it is Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, who went on MSNBC to mock Rick Santorum for how he and his wife Karen dealt with the death of their son Gabriel. (A severe prenatal development led to his very early delivery, and Gabriel died two hours after his birth.)

For all the attention given to Christmas, it is not the most significant day for those of the Christian faith. That designation belongs to Easter, which celebrates the resurrection of Jesus. But for Christians there is a very important element embodied in Christmas, having to do with the incarnation. Almost as soon as I became