Michael Brendan Dougherty

This is baseball practice for my kids, but something else for me.

It’s not just red tape holding back government-funded exploration and innovation. It’s a new cultural pessimism about the future.

But I think France should continue to exist.

A global free market doesn’t care if America remains the preeminent nation on earth, or if it is reduced to one giant soybean farm to feed a Chinese state.

American mass culture has rapidly been replaced by giant buzzing colonies of internet influencers.

Any just settlement is going to involve a reckoning with the rights and political interests of Ukrainians who haven’t had a voice in Kyiv or the West for years.

Ireland, unlike its Anglophone peers, is largely untouched by the conservative backlash to progressive overreach.

Skepticism of American foreign adventurism is native to the American right.

We can only live vicariously through our children’s experience of these long, hot, languid days.

People fantasizing about redeeming their own and the nation’s reputations in the Iranian theater should slow down.

Remembering a way of life we’ll never get back

Trump is working within the bounds of public opinion.

Hillary Clinton inadvertently reveals a truth.

It concerns a tiny minority of Catholics, and yet, in some ways, it is symbolic of the biggest debate in the church.

Sometimes, our public figures seem aware that they are engaged in an all-sermon, no-sacrifice politics.

Lessons from modern political history on the importance of protecting an image of competence.

It may seem like a deal is ready to be made. But making it stick is another matter.

Americans, knowing in their bones that democracy and republican government can be imperiled by global affinities, are naturally pulling away in disgust.

Maybe the talks with Mexico and Canada amount to nothing. Or maybe the threat moves them onto Trump’s breakneck timetable.

Democrats will adjust as the sound-bite age fades into history. But it will be difficult.

Mourning the loss of more than just houses in California’s fires.

Brussels, meanwhile, retains the progressive faith in managing democratic outcomes by regulating what can and can’t be said.

Many Irish explain their attitude toward Israel as a commitment to international law or as the reflex of a former colony. This doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

The U.K.’s vote in favor of medically assisted suicide may force another society to confront the reality, and significance, of frailty.

I’m pretty sure that Kennedy is a crank, generally. But he’s not wrong when it comes to some basic arguments about food and nutrition in America.

Normalize Melania.

It’s time to take my own side of the argument.

A revolutionary Irishman provides inspiration for how to handle present-day suppression of views.

We will be forced to pare down our global ambitions because we simply lack the resources to back all our commitments.

Middle age would suck right now without this childhood game.