On a recent camping trip to Kings Canyon National Park I had the opportunity to escape the light-polluted vistas of the city and look through a pair of binoculars at the stars under a dark Sierra Nevada sky.

A message for abortion rights supporters in blue states: We red-state folks thank you for the offers on social media to open your doors to us post-Roe. You are big-hearted for thinking of us. We, however, probably aren’t coming. How do I know? Because I was once an accidentally pregnant, broke mother of two in the anti-choice state of West Virginia, where I carried and birthed my son against my will.

The war on drugs has been long, hard-fought and expensive.

Recent mass shootings in Highland Park, Illinois; Buffalo, New York; and Uvalde, Texas, have produced the same futile debates that always follow such tragedies. Conservatives blame mental illness, and liberals blame gun access.

Jill Biden is supposed to be the responsible one.

Firefighters and forest ecologists are again scrambling to save ancient giant sequoia trees from the threat posed by increasingly fast, powerful and destructive wildfires that have raged through California in recent years.

Four years after his son Joaquin was shot and killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Broward County, Manuel Oliver’s pain is still raw.

There’s an old story about Charles Darwin, which may or may not be true but seems appropriate to our current economic moment. According to the tale, two boys glued together pieces of various insects — a centipede’s body, a butterfly’s wings, a beetle’s head and so on — then, as a gag, presented their creation to the great naturalist for identification. “Did it hum when you caught it?” he asked. When they said yes, he declared that it was a humbug.

Mark Cuban’s latest business venture may be even more watchable than his appearances on the “Shark Tank” reality show.

It has been an important year for the memory and impact of Emmett Till’s life and terrible death. That alone shows how slow justice can be for people of color in America.

After his parents were cut down by a maniac in Highland Park, Illinois, Monday, 2-year-old Aiden McCarthy was found bloodied, lying under his father’s body. He was rescued and eventually delivered into the loving arms of his grandparents.

Culture wars continue to polarize U.S. politics, but Americans on both sides of the cultural divide should agree that the growing gap between the richest Americans and average folks undermines democracy. The average compensation for a CEO at the country’s largest companies hit $20 million this year, up 31% since 2020. That’s 275 to 350 times the wages of median workers.

The significance of last week’s congressional Jan. 6 committee hearings cannot be overstated.

The deadly July Fourth attack in Highland Park, Illinois, underscores how a cherished constitutional right is under attack — the First Amendment right to peacefully assemble.

Why doesn’t Sen. Lindsey Graham want to talk to investigators? Is he living by the code of the streets now? Will he soon reveal a chest tattoo that declares “Snitches Get Stitches?”

There is nothing as repulsively but thoroughly American as a deadly mass shooting with a high-powered rifle at a joyous parade celebrating the nation’s independence.

The baby formula shortage continues to frustrate parents who are still paying significantly more for the product — if they’re able to find it on grocery store shelves at all. While President Joe Biden initiated Operation Fly Formula to ship in formula from other countries more than a month ago, a factory at the center of the crisis was shut down again recently due to flooding, causing the supply of formula to plummet once again.

Every mass shooting in America is a tragedy, but the one that killed seven people near Chicago Monday was especially jolting, as it combined two singularly American phenomena: the nation’s annual celebration of its independence and the chronic scourge of gun violence at a level unheard of in the rest of the advanced world.