To hear state representative Jerry Madden describe it, his effort to shrink Texas’s sprawling, 170,000-inmate prison system was pretty simple. “I figured we could either speed people coming out, or ...

Is U.S. transportation policy beyond salvation? A quick glance at the last two years suggests redemption is unlikely. But a nuanced reading of the current political environment reveals that a ...

After years of fruitless outreach to the Islamic Republic of Iran, a troublesome question is now being discussed in Washington: What if the differences between Iran and the United States ...

Toward the end of the 1960 presidential campaign, Sen. John F. Kennedy made a stop at the University of Michigan. He got there just before 2 a.m. Obviously, Bill Clinton ...

What if the fundamental terms of our debate over Egypt’s revolution are wrong? Supposedly, the revolt that toppled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak presented American policymakers with an agonizing choice: Do ...

Patrol Base Fires, Sangin District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan – The view from this platoon outpost in southern Afghanistan is unobstructed, both visually and strategically. On all sides stretch flat, bare, ...

It does not diminish the force and elegance of Dead Aid, the 2009 polemic against Western foreign-aid practices, to acknowledge that the book’s influence was less a product of what ...

There is no more intrepid war correspondent today than Bing West. The author of two books on the Iraq War (and co-author of a third), West brings to the table ...

My favorite graffito is on the road from Alès to Nîmes, an hour from my house in France. It is inscribed on a gray metal panel of uncertain function by ...

For Franklin Roosevelt’s most famous Supreme Court appointees — Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, and Robert Jackson — just getting to law school was the hard part. Frankfurter ...

SAYING NOTHING ON WALNUT STREET For once thinking of the right Thing to say, not later on: At a Beckett play at Annenberg A Penn student snapped open A can as the second act started And ...

Against the Seventeenth Amendment In an otherwise excellent article about the U.S. Senate (“The Sense of the Senate,” February 21), William Voegeli errs in saying that “the Lincoln–Douglas debates were the ...