In "Why We Want You to Be Rich," published in 2006, Donald Trump explained that a master negotiator knows "what the other side wants and where they're coming from," and is never afraid to walk away from a bad deal."

Henry Kissinger, writing three months earlier about the clerical dictatorship in Tehran, suggested otherwise:

"A modern, strong, peaceful Iran could become a pillar of stability and progress in the region. This cannot happen unless Iran's leaders decide whether they are representing a cause or a nation — whether their basic motivation is crusading or international cooperation."

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Fans of Tom Clancy's bestselling thriller novels will unfortunately find little of Jack Ryan's moral clarity in the latest film inspired by the series. "Jack Ryan: Ghost War," one of the Top Five movies on Amazon Prime, follows CIA agent Jack Ryan as he tries to stop an MI6/CIA team created to fight Islamist terrorists. A pro-America version would make the team fighting the terrorists the heroes, but that isn't the case in "Ghost War." Instead, the villain appears to be the head of the post-9/11 antiterror task force, while the protagonists (led by Ryan) are people who want to shut the task force down.

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At a time when Israeli soldiers are fighting and dying to defend the country, Knesset members from Shas and United Torah Judaism recently sought to advance legislation that would have defined Torah study as a form of national service equivalent to serving in the IDF.

Following public criticism and objections from within the governing coalition, the proposal has now reportedly been revised.

While the bill's sponsors may have intended to bring honor to one of Judaism's most sacred values, the fierce public backlash demonstrates how easily efforts to legislate the status of Torah study can become entangled in political controversy.

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The Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, was an assault about 15 times as large, on a per capita basis, than the 9/11 attacks. When it was over, more Jews had been murdered than on any single day since the Holocaust.

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President Trump's trip to China brings the economic implications of America's war against Iran into sharper focus. The fact that the Taiwan Strait generated more news than the Strait of Hormuz during the recent news cycle, is a telling indicator.

Critics keep framing this as crass resource politics: oil, opening the Strait of Hormuz waterway, and keeping gas prices down for American consumers.

Granted, we all want the price at the pump to come down, and previous administrations have cried wolf about weapons of mass destruction in the Mideast before, but the naysayers are wrong on the facts about this oil and water paradigm as I call it.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday that peace between Israel and Lebanon is "imminently achievable"—if Beirut can finally confront Hezbollah. But even as Washington presses the two governments toward unprecedented security understandings, Israel and Hezbollah continue to trade fire in southern Lebanon.

The ceasefire declared by President Donald Trump on April 16, and then extended on April 23, now hangs in the balance.

For the governments of Israel and Lebanon, the uptick in violence comes at a delicate time. The ambassadors from both nations have met twice now in Washington in a bid to reach new security understandings—but Hezbollah remains powerful enough to stymie these efforts.

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A century ago, the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard and one of the founders of the NAACP, W.E.B. DuBois published The Gift of Black Folk, a book that was commissioned by the Catholic organization the Knights of Columbus, as part of a series intended to help Americans appreciate the contributions of minority groups.

DuBois was highly educated and an avid reader of great texts from Plato to Frederick Douglass. The irony of the present moment is that if DuBois were currently a student in a core philosophy class at Texas A&M University, he would be assigned only a redacted version of Plato's great work, The Republic.

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Imagine your physician walks into the exam room, recommends a prescription medication, and casually mentions she's being paid by the company that makes the drug to say so. You'd probably have questions.

You might even find a new doctor.

Now imagine that same scenario playing out on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube — except the advice is coming from a celebrity "influencer" who's very familiar to you, who has an emotional backstory, and a financial arrangement buried somewhere in a sea of hashtags. Millions of people encounter exactly this situation every day, and most of them have no idea it's happening.

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ANYONE WHO spends time with me knows me knows how much I despise litter. For as long as I can remember, I have fumed at the sight of trash on sidewalks, beer cans in the gutter, or garbage flung from passing cars. I often pick up litter when I'm walking, and when my kids were young I made them pick it up, too.

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