How do you know that Joe Biden is the president? You don’t know for sure, not really. I doubt you’ve met him since he became president, or personally seen him at work in the White House. For all you know, the whole “Joe Biden presidency” could be an elaborate scam, with a robot Joe Biden appearing in front of a green screen while a bunch of lizard-human hybrids run the world.

You “know” that Biden is president the same way you know that COVID has killed 600,000 Americans or Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space or that China…

Marie Antoinette probably never said the quote everyone associates with her — “let them eat cake.” The phrase, actually “let them eat brioche,” first showed up in one of Rousseau’s writings a couple of decades before the revolution, when Marie was still a child. The story stuck because, even though it wasn’t true, it felt true — Marie Antoinette and the others at Versailles were living high on the hog, during a time of starvation among the ordinary people of France.

It’s telling that the most famous sentence of the revolution centered on food. The French Revolution was about a…

During the long, dark nights of November and December 1803, a rumor spread in Hammersmith, a neighborhood in west London. Several residents reported seeing a ghost. He was tall and dressed in a white cloak, although some residents said he had horns. The ghost jumped out and scared people in the darkness; some said that he had actually attacked them. Thomas Groom, a servant, described his encounter with the apparition:

“I was going through the church yard between eight and nine o’clock, with my jacket under my arm, and my hands in my pocket, when some person came from behind…

Let’s say I was put in charge of the universe. And then let’s say my first task was to set up a test to determine the worthiest humans — those who deserve more money, more rights, better housing, the right to vote, etc. I would, of course, look for the things I think are most important. Maybe I’d engineer the test to look for people who:

• Like to write and read
• Think the study of history is important
• Care about the environment
• Like to spend time outside
• Enjoy running and cycling
• Are good at military-strategy video games
• Like to cook

…

If you had a childhood like mine, you had to stand up every morning before school started, put your hand over your heart, turn to the American flag (which hung, for some reason, in your math classroom), and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which went like this:

I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I didn’t think about it much as a kid, but the older I get, the weirder that little ritual has come to…

The Spring of 2020 was a scary and uncertain time. Everything shut down indefinitely. There were dire reports every day on the news. All of a sudden, everyone had to adjust to staying at home — first for a couple of weeks, then for much longer.

Everybody developed their own ways of coping with being stuck at home in the middle of a mass-casualty event. I walked the dog more often and tackled long-put-off home improvement projects. The thing that helped me the most was that I biked — a lot. It appears that I wasn’t alone.

As more Americans get vaccinated against COVID-19, things are, we’re told, getting back to normal. We’re ditching masks, having people over to our houses again, and venturing into restaurants. The economy, though, hasn’t quite returned to the way it was before the pandemic began.

Workers have not gone back to work as quickly as many experts predicted, having reassessed their priorities over the last year. Many employed people are balking at returning to the office full time, having enjoyed some of the flexibility of working from home. Support for unions and unionization campaigns are at their highest rate in decades…

It goes without saying that a democratic government should be transparent. After all, how can voters make informed choices if they don’t know what the government is doing? Our country has a long history of valuing transparency in government. Founders like James Madison understood that “in such a [government] as ours, where members are so far removed from the eye of their constituents, an easy and prompt circulation of public proceedings is peculiarly essential.” …