Column: Racism Helps a YouTube Video Go Viral

Charles Ramsey, the man who helped rescue three Cleveland women presumed dead after going missing a decade ago, has become an Internet meme. It’s hardly surprising — the interviews he gave last Tuesday provide plenty of fodder for a viral video, including memorable soundbites (“I was eatin’ my …

Column: Obama’s Modest Proposal to Limit Retirement Tax Benefits

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney admitted to keeping assets in the Cayman Islands, money managers for the wealthy were not surprised. When it emerged that he had paid taxes at a lower rate than millions of Americans who earn far less, money managers yawned. But when they …

Column: The Chores Are Never Done — Fortunately

Strafford A spring morning pulls me outdoors with bold sunlight and the singing of birds, and everywhere I look I see things I need to do. Under the apple trees where birdfeeders hung all winter there are sunflower husks I should rake into piles and cart away. There’s …

Column: Cities on a Hill

Almost since humankind was booted from the Garden of Eden, dreamers and visionaries have been imagining or trying to create perfect worlds, whether in Plato’s Republic or Thomas More’s Utopia, 19th-century socialist experiments or 1960s hippie enclaves. The fall of the Berlin Wall may have given grand visions …

Commentary: Poor Express Strong Values, No Self-Pity

The booming stock market is of little solace to middle-class Americans, who continue to express concern about their financial security and the overall condition of the U.S. economy. The poor are even more bearish, surveys show. In fact, after falling significantly behind in the Great Recession, less-affluent Americans …

Column: Benghazi Testimony Offered More Drama Than Ammunition

They summoned a whistle-blower to Capitol Hill, but instead they got a virtuoso storyteller. Gregory Hicks, the No. 2 U.S. diplomat in Libya the night Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed, was to be the star witness for Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the man leading …

• Letter: What Benghazi Revealed

Column: A Mother’s Day Wish for a ‘Son’ in Prison

Last year, just before Mother’s Day, I received a beautiful card from an inmate my husband and I had been writing to over the previous two years. “You are my mother in every sense of the word,” he wrote. “You have truly blessed my life. I can never …

Column: China May Lead the World in Fighting Climate Change

China is an environmental mess. Smog in Beijing is so bad it’s literally broken the air-quality index. In Shanghai, it’s at times turned the city into a scene from Blade Runner. (It almost matches the infamous Los Angeles smog of the 1970s.) Meanwhile, thousands of dead pigs — …