Like many pedestrians, I’ve learned to treat Los Angeles streets as an obstacle course of distracted drivers. Rule No. 1: Make sure a vehicle is stopped or braking before stepping off the curb. But even that didn’t save me at a corner near my West Hollywood home.The approaching car was on my right, slowing for the stop sign ahead. I started across, but midway I realized the driver’s attention had drifted and her car was regaining speed, veering my way. It was too late to dodge it, so I threw mys

April 11, 2018

The landslide victory of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in Sunday’s election in Hungary may have disappointed European liberals -- but it drives home an important truth: The limits of the acceptable on the right flank of European politics are moving further to the right.　Orban has often been described as Europe’s black sheep, an outsider challenging European values, setting a bad example for others, and emboldening parties of the far-right fringe in Western Europe. Indeed, French nat

April 11, 2018

Fast fashion giant H&M has lost its luster. Its stock price dropped more than 40 percent in the last six months. It will close 170 stores this year, more than it has in two decades. It suffered a string of public relations missteps, including launching an ad campaign viewed as racist and getting caught incinerating tons of leftover goods. Then last week news broke that the company is sitting on a staggering $4.3 billion in unsold apparel.　The internet is flooded with schadenfreude over H&M’s woe

April 11, 2018

If the past is a prelude, we should expect a US strike sometime soon against Syrian airfields.　A little more than a year ago, Syrian forces gassed rebels. The grotesque crime earned a condemnation tweet from President Donald Trump. And on April 7, 2017, the president ordered 59 Tomahawk missiles to the Shayrat Airfield, the base from which the attack had been launched. He told his Chinese counterpart about it over chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago.　Over the weekend it looked like history repeating. T

April 10, 2018

The trade skirmish between the United States and China on steel, aluminum and other goods is a product of US President Donald Trump’s scorn for multilateral trade arrangements and the World Trade Organization.Before announcing import tariffs on more than 1,300 types of Chinese-made goods worth around $60 billion per year, in early March, Trump unveiled sweeping tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum, which he justified on the basis of national security. Trump insists that a ta

April 10, 2018

Over two decades ago, I relentlessly pursued a few score folks, who -- for reasons of forgetfulness, fear, apathy, orneriness, principle or a combination thereof -- had neglected or deliberately refused to fill in the decennial census questionnaire previously mailed to them.　It was a “temporary enumerator” summer job, paying $15.25 an hour, and, more to the point for this contracted government retiree, offering a chance to get out of my comfort zone.　Most of the people I tracked down were foreig

April 10, 2018

The Trump Era began when the future president descended into Trump Tower’s lobby on June 16, 2015, aboard an escalator. He launched his campaign there with a speech in which he promised to build a “great, great wall on our southern border.”　Trump has clung to that idea ever since. On Wednesday he vowed to send the National Guard to the southern border to patrol the area until the wall is built.　Trump also vowed in that 2015 speech that “nobody would be tougher on ISIS than Donald Trump,” referri

April 9, 2018

Should coffee come with a cancer warning?　As a matter of policy, the answer seems obvious: Of course not. As a matter of law, it’s much more complicated, at least in California. A tentative judicial ruling in Los Angeles County last week suggests that when people go to the local coffee place, their morning ritual is going to be accompanied by a jolt of fear.　It could potentially turn into a fiasco, I think, and it tells us something important about how well-intentioned laws can go badly wrong.　T

April 9, 2018

Explanations of the Donald Trump phenomenon often start with conservatives versus liberals, the rural-urban split, or perhaps race and immigration. Those all play a role, but the accumulation of evidence is validating a hypothesis from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat: A big and very fundamental split in American electoral politics today is between different understandings of sex and gender relations.　I am struck by a recent poll by the Pew Research Center. Millennial women, defined as the

April 9, 2018

Last November, students protesting sexual violence at Morehouse College in Atlanta defaced a church named after the school’s most famous graduate. The Martin Luther King Jr. Chapel was spray-painted with the words “Practice what you preach Morehouse + end rape culture,” which police officers covered up with a brown tarp.　Today, the students might protest the sexual misconduct of Martin Luther King Jr. himself. Over the past few days, during commemorations of the 50th anniversary of his murder, w

April 8, 2018

The press has been in a lather of late over reports that the Department of Homeland Security had discovered evidence that cellphone tracking tools were being used by “unauthorized” parties in and around Washington. Formally known as International Mobile Subscriber Identity catchers, and often called stingrays, these devices fool your phone’s baseband into believing it is in contact with a cell tower. IMSI catchers can use your phone’s signal to track your movements and contacts. In some cases th

April 8, 2018

Finally, and most unexpectedly, President Donald J. Trump climaxed yet another wacky, whipsawing week by doing the one thing even his handwringing, privately-panicky fellow Republicans never really believed he’d ever do.　He did precisely what he’d been insisting he was doing all along.　He just got tough with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Very tough -- financially and personally (at least by extension, since Putin, often called the world’s richest man, is believed to have links to many that t

April 8, 2018