For three-quarters of a century in Iowa City, Iowa, the Airliner has been a popular Clinton Street haunt, full of University of Iowa flags, beer signs, photo tributes to the Hawkeyes’ famous 2005 last-second 30-25 bowl victory over LSU, and massive televisions tuned to college basketball games. The fries are fat, the meat-craver pizzas legendary. […]

A few years back, on the heels of a recent Sunday magazine profile of Glenn Beck, The New York Times published a roundtable discussion among six scholars on the issue of President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson has become a popular Beck target, and has suddenly emerged as a hot topic in our current politics. “I hate Woodrow Wilson!” shouted Beck at […]

Sixty-one years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King declared, “Today the choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence.  It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.”  Emboldened by the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott two years earlier, King saw nonviolence not only as a powerful strategy for achieving social change; he viewed it as a philosophy and way […]

It’s become a common talking point for “Never Trump” Republicans seeking to defeat President Trump in the 2020 GOP primaries: Polls have found that a substantial number, maybe 40 percent, of Republican voters say they would be open to a primary challenge to the president. Those surveys, the “Never Trumpers” argue, show that Trump is particularly weak […]

The Red Hook section of Brooklyn renamed a street “Seven in Heaven Way” to honor seven firefighters who died trying to rescue victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks at the World Trade Center. The street was given this new name because the men who died—Joseph Gullickson, Brian Cannizzaro, Salvatore Calabro, Thomas Kennedy, Patrick Byrne, […]

In the 2018 election, America’s shrinking segment of white evangelicals mobilized strongly for the Republican Party – but the rising cohort of nonreligious Americans failed to exert their full political power. As secularism grows relentlessly, white evangelicals have declined to a mere 15 percent of the U.S. population (down from 20 percent in 2012). But they’re so ardent […]

Doc hadn’t even finished loading his coffee with fake sugar before Steve piped up. “I think it’s disgusting and weird and unnatural and it should be outlawed!” the tall cowboy said, coming to rest at the philosophy counter of the Mule Barn truck stop. “Aw Steve,” said Doc, “the coffee isn’t that bad.” “Coffee? Nay, […]

Declaring a national emergency, President Trump’s way of rounding up funds for the Wall, is either a national scandal or a routine political maneuver.  Voters may get to make their choice. Whatever it is, the fault for the latest crisis is squarely owned by Congress.  By blithely passing off its constitutional powers to the president, […]