Jeff Jacoby :: Writings
AS SOME of you know, I am on medical leave from my job at The Boston Globe and have not been able to write my regular op-ed columns or my Arguable newsletter. For several months I have been contending with a number of worrying and seemingly unconnected...
(This column is excerpted from an essay in Arguable, my weekly newsletter. To subscribe for free, visit globe.com/arguable.) JEWS THE world over will gather around the Seder table this week to recount again the great narrative of their ancestors'...
ANYONE WHO spends time with me knows me knows how much I despise litter. For as long as I can remember, I have fumed at the sight of trash on sidewalks, beer cans in the gutter, or garbage flung from passing cars. I often pick up litter when I'm walking,...
WHEN FORMER FBI director Robert Mueller died last week at 81, President Trump marked the occasion with his customary grace. "Good, I'm glad he's dead," he posted on Truth Social. "He can no longer hurt innocent people!" You may have registered this as...
THE SUPREME Court will hear oral arguments next week in Trump v. Barbara, in what is expected to be a landmark showdown on the president's campaign to abolish birthright citizenship. The rule that virtually anyone born on US soil is automatically a US...
HOW FORTUNATE Massachusetts is to have Bill Galvin! After almost a half-century in politics, the 75-year-old secretary of state would like nothing better than to close his long career as an elected official and enjoy a comfortable and lucrative...
WHEN MY son Micah was 8, he and I listened repeatedly to "Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America," a classic 1961 send-up of American history. One sketch imagines Thomas Jefferson going door to door, gathering signatures for the Declaration...
WHEN Charles Thomson was directed by the Continental Congress in 1782 to finalize the design for the Great Seal of the United States, he approached the task with the seriousness it deserved. Each element of the seal was intended to express America's...
IN BOSTON'S federal courthouse next week, US District Judge William Young will take up Equal Means Equal v. Trump, a lawsuit challenging the Military Selective Service Act of 1967. Enacted during the Vietnam War, the law to this day requires men to...
"MUSLIMS DON'T belong in American society," Representative Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican, posted on X on Monday. "Pluralism is a lie." By Tuesday afternoon, 14.3 million people had viewed Ogles's post and more than 47,000 had clicked "like" — and...
Few New England sports fans need to be told that attending a big game has become expensive. David D'Alessandro, the former CEO of John Hancock, put words to a frustration shared by countless Boston fans when he lamented in a Globe op-ed last week that...
THE MASSACHUSETTS Constitution was amended in 1919 to give citizens the right to change their laws through the initiative and referendum process. It is a right they have availed themselves of sparingly: In the 106 years since the change took effect,...
"WITH HIS spectacles, Palestinian kaffiyeh, long robes, and silver beard, Ayatollah Khamenei cast himself as a religious scholar as well as a writer and translator of works on Islam. He affected an avuncular and magnanimous aloofness, running the country...
I first encountered Dennis Prager's ideas on ethics, religion, and current events in the late 1980s, when I subscribed to his quarterly newsletter "Ultimate Issues." In the years that followed, I read many of Prager's commentaries and listened to some...
I WAS 15 when Gerald Ford became the nation's 38th president, old enough to follow the headlines but not especially knowledgeable about politics. I'm not sure how much Saigon's fall in April 1975 registered with me at the time. But in the years since,...