For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, American liberals distinguished themselves from conservatives by what Lionel Trilling called “a spiritual orthodoxy of belief in progress.” Liberalism placed its hopes in human perfectibility. Regarding human nature as essentially both beneficent and malleable, liberals, like their socialist...

Earlier this week I was invited to join an e-mail discussion involving a variegated array of scientists and science communicators exploring a provocative question posed by one of them (I’ll leave the identities out, but will invite them to weigh in here).

The conversation encompassed the case of Marc Hauser, the Harvard specialist in...

The wind industry has achieved remarkable growth largely due to the claim that it will provide major reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. There's just one problem: It's not true. A slew of recent studies show that wind-generated electricity likely won't result in any reduction in carbon emissions—or that they'll be so small as to be almost...

The decision by congressional Democrats to not try to pass a major energy bill in this Congress, while receiving a modest amount of media attention, actually constitutes one of the sharpest rebukes to a sitting president in recent memory.

When President Barack Obama arrived at the White House with overwhelming Democratic majorities in the House...