Slowing the overall birthrate to sustainable levels is desirable for the planet, but there are social costs to having small families. In China, where for a long time parents could only have one child, there are generations that have no brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles or cousins. Italy may be approaching the same…

I don’t know if Mr. Trump plays poker, but he definitely is not afraid to bluff.

The DNC lost key elections against Nixon, Reagan and Buch senior because it was perceived as too far to the left. Bill Clinton was able to win by occupying the middle. Meanwhile, the country is being torn apart by the fact that the Tea Party and alt right are pulling Republicans farther right. Moving left is a nice…

Perhaps by voting at all you cast 4 voites, but this is just sophistry. By not voiting you throw away the one vote you have for the candidate who, of the two major choices, is least likely to pull the world down into a death spiral.

Now you’re just saying stuff that’s not relevant to this election. The DNC today is demonstrably less racist than the GOP, especially in this year of white supremacist support of Trump. And even if that were not the case, Trump is ill-informed, unprepared, uncontrollable and anti-democratic. If he makes it to the…

In the novel “1984" the government changed the facts of history to suit its purpose; now anyone with access to an audience can alter the facts until the new narrative is accepted as true.

“Hillary’s worst KNIGHTMARE”

The whole 21st century is not what the founders had in mind.

I’m way late to the party, but: chastity hasn’t allowed her to live a fulfilled feminist life; feminism has allowed her to live a fulfilled chaste life.

Let’s hope we don’t have to start stripping appropriated vocabulary out of English. Teepee, mufti, junta, sushi, filet, spaghetti, vodka, booze, bok choy, schnitzel, igloo and chutzpah all gone? We’d be down to a saxon language no one even knows anymore, with an agrarian vocabularly all about men, women, children,…

And will have to run for president from outside the country.

He sounds like a horrible politician who deserves to be voted out of office, but what’s the basis for requiring him to resign? Mutual masturbation via Skype at the request of the other party is not a crime, as far as I know. He was already fined for the misuse of government property. And rather than lie about it he…

It’s the Daily Mail’s job not to make mistakes like that. But on the subject of two actors of the same race being confused for each other: Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. Also Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel. Two people at a bar and a guy working at a newsstand on a different day were convinced that I was a well-known…

“He doesn’t seem to notice when people stare at him when he flaps his hands. He doesn’t seem to notice that he doesn’t get invited to birthday parties anymore. And he doesn’t seem to mind if he eats lunch alone.”

Can we also stop singing God Bless America in Yankee Stadium at the seventh inning stretch? It made us feel strong for a few years. Now it’s holding us back.

I simmer on Flatbush Avenue.

Thanks for making this point. I was going to ask whether the Geneva Convention now required that wars be fought solely by hand-to-hand combat. Women in combat roles get to be armed with weapons that would shred the biggest rapist. Republicans should stop (1) excusing rapists and (2) using the threat of rape as a…

“Or just wait till we see them in heaven.” That would be insanely complicated. But luckily: when we’ve been there ten billion years, bright shining like the sun, we’ve no less time to discover alien cultures, than when we’d first begun. The question is not original with me but does every alien culture get its own Adam…

Assuming the signal came from the star 94 light years away, it was sent about 94 years ago. Although we don’t have the technology yet to send as strong a signal back to them, they aren’t necessarily waiting for a message from us. They could continue to get better at sending signals,* and we could get better at reading…

Joe Allen.