I love the essay. It's my favorite genre to work in.

It may take a village to raise a child, but not every villager needs to be a mom or dad. Some of us just need to be who we are.

In a world of oversharing, we don't want to be unknown or unseen. We don't want to be left out.

Handwriting challenges aside, I love paper cards. I love the endless stewing involved in picking them out at the store. I love buying holiday stamps at the post office, and I love that 'whoosh' sound the cards make when I drop them into the mail slot.

Posting a brag, humble or otherwise, and then waiting for people to respond is the equivalent of having a conversation in which all you do is wait for your turn to speak.

Let's face it: every campus has its share of students who can't quite comprehend that extreme political correctness is often born of the same intolerance and anti-intellectualism as standard-issue bigotry.

In the world of opinion writing, there's something called the 'to be sure' paragraph. A sort of rhetorical antibiotic, it seeks to defend against critics by injecting a tiny bit of counter-argument before moving on with the main point.

For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.

The Immigration Act of 1924 closed our doors to virtually all non-European immigrants - a great wrong that was not rectified for decades.

I yearn for intellectual sustenance on vacation but want, of course, to avoid tedium or boredom. I want to read something that will entertain me but also help me appreciate what I am seeing.

Trump doesn't need his own agenda if he can terrify independent voters in swing states about what would happen if the Democratic agenda is implemented.

Analogies, in particular, can illuminate, but they can also obscure and confuse. They need to be handled carefully, like rhetorical high explosives.

Soliciting anything of value from a foreign national to help a U.S. campaign is not just illegal; it is the Founding Fathers' nightmare.

My mother and I were alike in one crucial respect: We may have been Russian by birth, but we were English in spirit. She was intensely reserved and private, and seldom showed what she was feeling.

What would I do now, at age 48, if I were deported to a country that I have not seen in more than 40 years and whose language I no longer speak? How would I work? How would I survive?

There has been an unspoken assumption among establishment Republicans that all they have to do is wait out Hurricane Trump and then return to 'normal' conservatism.

You simply can't understand the present if you don't understand the past. There is no more alarming case study of the consequences of historical ignorance than President Trump.

History education in schools is so poor that students often enter college ignorant of the past - and leave just as unenlightened.

There is little doubt that our society is changing rapidly, but one thing will never change as long as we remain a democracy: the need for voters to know the essentials of our history and government.

Only 36 percent of Americans could pass a multiple-choice civics test of the kind that is administered to immigrants seeking to become citizens.

Freedom will not prevail because of historical forces; it will only win, if it does, because of historical actors. In other words, us. Those like me who came of age around 1989 used to take democracy for granted.

Everyone from Silesians to Sicilians to Scots seems to want autonomy or independence. The British voted to leave the European Union, and hostility to the superstate is rising across the continent.

Protests are the very essence of America! It is a country founded in protest.

Political paralysis and partisanship are sabotaging American power.