Clyde Haberman

When he campaigned for president in 1976, Jimmy Carter often invoked the late theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and his admonition that “the sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.” That sort of faith-inflected speech from a major national politician was new to most voters. So was the candidate himself, a former […]

Odds are that you have had moments of frustration trying to open new bottles of aspirin or other over-the-counter medications. Perhaps your fingernails are not up to the task of breaking the seal on the plastic wrap. Or maybe the pop-up cap is a challenge, seemingly designed to be not only childproof but also adultproof. […]

They sound like possible program titles for the Cartoon Network: Goofy Kicking Donald Duck, The Earmuffs, The Broken-Winged Pterodactyl, The Upside-Down Elephant, The Fat Squid, A Steamed Crab Hit by a Mallet. Actually, they were the shapes some people saw when looking at federal and state legislative districts that had been gerrymandered to within an […]

If you were in elementary school in the early 1950s, chances are that you had the fear of nuclear holocaust drummed into you with fair regularity. Children were taught “duck and cover” techniques, which typically meant hiding under their desks as if that would save them from an atomic bomb landing nearby. In big cities […]

Separated by as much as half a century, the two men’s public lives run strikingly parallel. It’s as if they drank from the same political cup: George C. Wallace, the Alabama governor who ached to become president, and Donald J. Trump, the developer and showman who made it to the top. They are bound by […]

“Evolution Mama” is a sassy song dating back many decades, probably best played on a banjo, maybe with a kazoo in the background. “Evolution mama,” it goes, “don’t you make a monkey out of me.” That certainly captures the sentiments of religious groups and like-minded politicians who believe Charles Darwin was talking through his hat […]

Though the roots of most Americans lie in other lands, there is among them a streak of xenophobia that can be broad. Chinese and Irish immigrants were the targets of nativist hostility in the 19th century, as were Eastern European Jews and Southern Italians in the early 20th. Japanese-Americans were confined to detention camps in […]

The rape itself was horrific enough. In March, half a dozen boys and young men lured a 15-year-old girl to a house in Chicago and sexually assaulted her there, brutally and repeatedly. But what made this episode singularly appalling was the attackers’ streaming their crime on Facebook Live. From a count posted with the video, […]

Most Americans, it seems safe to say, derived a healthy measure of satisfaction from the news in 2011 that a team of Navy SEALs had killed Osama bin Laden. The cheers faded soon enough, however, for one group: public health professionals. That’s because killing the archterrorist had the unintended consequence of undermining their campaign to […]

Italians have a word for it: dietrologia. Pronounced dee-EH-tro-lo-GEE-ah, it derives from the word for “behind.” It is the study of what lurks behind everything — dietro. For many Italians, truth is rarely so careless as to lie on the surface, especially in public affairs. Someone or something must be manipulating events, unseen, as if […]