Most Americans have never heard of Gen. Zuo Zongtang, but when they hit the local Chinese takeout and order a greasy carton of General Tso’s chicken, they’re invoking his name. By 1878, Zuo, or Tso,...

There is no doubt that millions of people will see Sacha Baron Cohen’s new satirical socio-comedy Brüno in the upcoming weeks. Many will laugh hysterically at the guerrilla tactics of Cohen’s brand...

The United States confronts not one but two economic challenges: its worst recession since the Depression and a growing imbalance between federal spending and revenues that makes its underlying fiscal...

The Iowa City City Council makes decisions that affect the lives of Iowa City’s permanent and non-permanent residents every day: The Sheraton Hotel Walkway will be closed to the public at night once...

Students now have a person in their corner fighting sexual assaults and violence on this campus. Monique DiCarlo, the former director of the Women’s Resource and Action Center, is the UI’s first sexual-misconduct-response...

Nuclear weapons came to be in a world that was vastly different from our world today. This was a world in which most were intimately familiar with all-out war, a world that saw the decline of an old empire...

If you measure the Obama administration’s campaign for health-care reform by its ability to win crucial support from major institutions, things are going swimmingly. Wal-Mart, which insures fewer than...

The worldwide total of confirmed cases of the latest strain of H1N1 influenza stands at more than 71,000, according to the World Health Organization. A pandemic now, the rapid spread of the disease has...

I hate Sudoku. I’m using the word “hate” about a logic-puzzle game, but I do hate it. More than the puzzle itself, I hate how taken people are with it, that from airplane passengers to day-to-day...

In 1961, at the start of the Kennedy administration, I went to work for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Just as FDR attracted a small army of bright young lawyers and domestic policy-makers to his New...

The recession has put a strain on all facets of Iowa government. We saw that struggle firsthand at the UI earlier this year when school officials learned from the state government that the university’s...

When we’re young, we’re frequently the targets of adages from those older, and presumably more knowledgeable, than us. You know, those old sayings (even older than Supreme Court justices, if that seems...