In a June 4, 2010, Wall Street Journal column, republished in her new collection, “The Time of Our Lives,” Peggy Noonan tells the heartbreaking story of 28-year-old Detroit Tigers’ pitcher Armando Galarraga.

On April 22, University of California Berkeley law professor Sujit Choudhry filed an 11-page single-spaced grievance with the 10-member UC Berkeley Privilege and Tenure Committee. 

On college campuses, outrage over provocative speakers sometimes turns violent. It's becoming a pattern on campuses around the country. A speaker is invited, often by a conservative student group. Other students oppose the speaker, and maybe they protest. If the speech happens, the speaker is heckled. Sometimes there's violence.

When one-fifth of college students believe it's fine to use violence to silence speech, we have a huge problem.

Last week in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Supreme Court threaded the needle. Whether the thread will hold is uncertain. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s narrowly crafted majority opinion protected religious liberty without impairing gay rights.

How much does the gap between rich and poor matter? In 1979, for every dollar the poorest fifth of the American population earned, the richest fifth earned nine. By 1997, that gap had increased to fifteen to one. Is this growing income inequality a serious problem? Is the size of the gap between rich and poor less important than the poor's absolute level of income? In other words, should we focus on reducing the income gap or on fighting poverty?

Among their many aspirations for his presidency, Barack Obama’s admirers nurse a persistent hope that he might be able to end the culture wars...

Liberalism, most people would agree, stands for the state's responsibility to actively improve the social, economic, and political quality of citizens’ lives. In a more fundamental sense liberalism also denotes certain qualities of mind and character, among them tolerance, generosity, the capacity to engage civilly competing opinions, and a determination to base politics on reason rather than physical force or arbitrary authority.

The 2016 election campaign has proved a trying one for citizens who seek sobriety, integrity, and fidelity to principle in their presidential candidates. The two major party nominees’ glaring deficiencies have provoked cries of despair from many high-minded voters. But that is a luxury the nation can ill afford.