What’s behind the wage gap between men and women?

Nostalgia seems harmless enough, and then someone starts earnestly — absurdly — glamorizing the Stone Age.

Perhaps you can imagine punishments more to be feared than a lengthy prison sentence, but in a country that proscribes cruel and unusual punishment — except the death penalty — the only thing I can think of that would be worse than confinement in prison is confinement as the result of a crime that I did not commit.

At the 2016 Republican National Convention, when I told Donald Trump’s “God whisperer” Paula White that he referred to her as his pastor, she said she was his spiritual adviser — as if that were some sort of “get out of jail free” card for her. And yet White worked hard in our conversation to convince me that the foul-mouthed person on the campaign trail was godly.

Studies show that young children and social media can be a bad combination. Florida is doing something about it.

What do some Republicans have against lab-grown meat? Legislatures in Alabama, Arizona, Tennessee and Florida are all considering bans on the sale or import of so-called “cell-cultured food products.” In Florida a bill has reached Governor Ron DeSantis’s desk, and though he has not yet signed it, he has come out strongly in favor of meat.

Democrats have a tendency to elevate short-term political gain above more comprehensive strategies — sometimes with results they later regret. Harry Reid’s “nuclear option” on federal judges comes to mind as an example of a gambit that came back to backfire spectacularly on the party.

When I first came to California to apply for graduate school in the late ’80s, I drove to Santa Monica and parked my car. There were more homeless people than I’d ever seen, living here in tents on the grass by the ocean under palm trees.

Donald Trump had really lousy timing to announce Monday that he wanted to return abortion policy back to the states as it was before Roe v. Wade and promptly on Tuesday, Arizona returned back to 1864, with an ancient ban on the medical procedure. Oh, Arizona is one of the five states that Trump won in 2016 and then lost to Joe Biden in 2020. Oops.

Democrats have worked to tear down support for the U.S. Supreme Court because they abhor constitutionalist jurists who won’t bend to progressive prerogatives. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden expresses his enmity for the justices by simply proceeding in defiance of the high court as he attempts to buy votes.

America’s approach to health care is an outlier among the world’s rich countries, and not in a good way. Extraordinarily complex and hideously expensive, it still manages to leave some 26 million people without coverage. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 made notable progress, but failed to solve the pressing problems of high costs and less-than-universal access.

While the nation’s public schools in recent decades have emphasized college preparation, Mike Rowe of “Dirty Jobs” fame has been preaching the gospel of vocational education. His efforts may be paying off.