Narcissus was a beautiful hunter in ancient Greece. He shunned all romantic advances. None were as beautiful as he knew himself to be, so there was no reason for a relationship with anyone. Eventually, Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water by a stream. He stared s…

As his two terms as New York's mayor approach their end, and long after his presidential campaign ended with a whimper, Bill de Blasio has chimed in with one last act of destruction: a proposal to end the public schools' entry-by-exam gifted and talented program for first graders.

Here's how TV news works: What is just an annoyance becomes a concern. A concern turns into a serious worry. And a serious worry is elevated into a crisis. Stoking anxiety is how they keep the public glued.

“The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” — Albert Einstein

The likely fate of someone who plays Russian roulette repeatedly is virtually certain, because the laws of probability dictate that – given enough repetitions – what can happen eventually will happen.

We Can Stop Being the World's Suckers on Drug Prices

It appears very possible that the Supreme Court will soon overturn Roe v. Wade, thus removing “the right to an abortion” from the current Constitution. This outcome would be the result of the Republican Party’s effort over many years to create such a Supreme Court to do that.

It’s Nobel Prize season. The just-announced 2021 winners in medicine/physiology are two Americans, Dr. David Julius and Dr. Ardem Patapoutian, who’ve done groundbreaking research on the senses of touch, taste, heat and pain. Their joint discoveries may yield new, nonopioid treatments for pai…

Going back to the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, the party of first-term presidents gained seats in House midterm congressional elections only twice.

In the typhoon of congressional brinkmanship we witnessed last week, one detail caught my eye that could easily have been lost in the gales. A group of 35 Republican senators signed a letter to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden about an aspect of the Hous…

Sad to say, we keep killing each other. New FBI statistics show that, even though we practiced widespread isolation during the pandemic, the nation's murder rate grew last year at the fastest rate ever – up 29.4%. There are fewer homicides now than during the peak years of the early '90s, bu…

One of the pleasures derived from the classical detective story comes from how the detective — like Sherlock Holmes — can infer big truths from small clues.

There are hundreds of thousands of people reported missing in the United States each year. Last year there were more than 540,000 reports filed with police. Sounds like a lot, but probably due to our COVID-19 isolation that was a record low number.

In a few weeks, Virginia will hold an election, and I will have to make a decision. In the past, it would have been no contest. I’d have voted Republican. But now, though Terry McAuliffe leaves me cold, I will vote for him. I guess that makes me a single-issue voter.

My whole adult life has been spent trying to understand the forces that shape the human world.

Those pictures are traumatizing.

“Biden’s Stock Market Returns Continue to Trounce Trump’s” reads a recent Forbes headline. Sophisticated investors know this, but most of the public may not because Democrats have this self-defeating aversion to boasting about bull markets during their watch.

I’m imagining there are a lot of Republicans who have been fist-bumping and jubilant about the success of the Texas Republicans with their measure that effectively bans abortion in Texas.

Love and hate: the two most prevalent human emotions. Every human on the planet, save those afflicted with serious mental health issues, has experienced these feelings. They cannot be legislated and neither emotion is in itself considered to be a crime. It is what some people do with their h…

The heart of the American nation is this fundamental agreement: We agree to fight our battles over power – how it is obtained, and to what purposes it is put — according to the rules, and then to accept the outcome whether we win or lose.

Recent data from the Cooperative Election Study shows 20% of atheists have participated in a march or protest, compared with 6% of white evangelicals. Forty percent of atheists have contacted a public official, compared with 24% of white evangelicals. Fifty-two percent of atheists have donat…

The human world is an enormously rich and complex system. (“Human world” — defined as everything in the world we live in that’s different from how the world would be if our species had never existed.)

As a global pandemic raged and governments began locking down and sheltering citizens in place, the United States Congress allocated $46.5 billion in rental assistance. With a moratorium in place to prevent evictions, Congress was mindful landlords would need help paying the mortgages on the…

This column is not about relitigating the 2020 election. President Joe Biden is the duly certified U.S. president. Period. Now, let's talk about the mess in which we find our election system. Let's talk about voter fraud.

The developments of recent months have eroded the approval numbers for President Biden. Those developments have been in the re-rising of the pandemic and in the disorderly ending of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.

Over the past 50 years, there’s been one famous line I’ve quoted more often than any other. That’s because it captures a tendency of the world that I’ve dedicated my life to making less true.

Chris Rock described it as a kind of temper tantrum.

That question felt very important to me when I was in my early 20s. I deeply hoped the answer was “Yes!”

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

As someone who was weaned on stories of leftist intellectuals and journalists traipsing off to communist countries to pay obeisance, I can only shake my head as a parade of right-wingers are making their way to Hungary to sing the praises of authoritarian Viktor Orban. Tucker Carlson of Fox …

The Manhattan Project didn’t look like America. Undertaken today, it would be criticized for failing to meet diversity and inclusion guidelines.

That living carpet of green velvet in front of my house – is it really mine? I never thought I'd have one of those manicured suburban lawns, much less become a maniac in its defense. In fact, I used to disapprove of them.

"They" meaning K-12 students in Tennessee. Not that the Volunteer State is alone in passing laws and standards to restrict the teaching of African-American history. To the contrary, a number of states – Oklahoma, Texas, Florida and more – have lately done the same.

What is society to do with someone who has been investigated and found to have broken both federal and state laws by sexually harassing at least 11 different women?

I have long been a big fan of the detective story (starting with Sherlock Holmes when I was in my early teens). What most appeals to me about the figure of “the detective” is that he’s in the business of uncovering the truth. Especially enjoyable are when the detective infers — from a single…

About six weeks ago, I wrote a piece urging that the United States take the lead in vaccinating the world. The case for doing so is even more compelling now.

With COVID-19 receding — at least in vaccinated parts of the country — but crime hanging on, law and order looks to be a leading issue in the 2022 midterm elections. And that desire for order extends to the border. Democrats should know this: The surge in undocumented migrants at the border …

Gunther Hashida killed himself last week.

Americans are now deeper in debt than at any other time in our nation's history. Especially acute are mounting debts on past-due mortgage payments, student loans and medical bills. In fact, medical debt is one of the most often-mentioned causes of personal bankruptcies in the U.S., and the s…

It is a long-standing tradition to air the national anthem prior to kickoff at football games. Now, the NFL has decided to follow this tradition by playing "Lift Every Voice and Sing," which is known traditionally to many Black Americans as the Black national anthem.

In my early teens, I was captivated by a verse I heard from the "Rubaiyat" by the Persian poet Omar Khayyam:

This is becoming another summer that didn't quite happen. It follows the bum summer of 2020, which was canceled by COVID-19.

I wish I could be a Cheney fan. I really do. Rep. Liz Cheney has conducted herself honorably for the past nine months. Her courage in telling the truth about the election and the insurrection of Jan. 6 has been punished by the Republican conference, which booted her from leadership and repla…

Former President Donald J. Trump recently filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Miami against the Big Tech companies that have denied him a platform. He has targeted Twitter and Facebook, whose media platforms he had used with spectacular success before and during his presidency to ad…

Armstrong Williams' column is distributed by Creators Syndicate.