President Bush said last week that his thinking on the U.S. situation in Iraq was informed by an analogy: the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. The lack of a sufficient American response to that and other al-Qaeda attacks, Bush said, led to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Economists have long known there are two reasons that people cheat on their taxes. One is that they are poor and need the extra cash so badly they are willing to risk getting caught. The other is that they are rich and have lots of "non-matchable" income -- mostly investment income not directly...

Like most people in Virginia, Donald Black was horrified by Seung Hui Cho's shooting rampage last week that left 33 people dead, including the shooter.

Here is a measure of the state of the war in Iraq: The number of Iraqis dying each month now rivals the total number of people who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Accountability is in the air in Washington. At one end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Paul Wolfowitz is struggling to save his job as president of the World Bank after getting caught arranging a sweetheart deal for his, well, sweetheart. A few blocks down the road, President Bush faces endless questions...

Like lunar and solar eclipses, there are some Washington phenomena that are so common they ought to have distinct names. Here is one: A public figure comes to be hated by large numbers of people. But the person cannot be prosecuted or punished, perhaps because his behavior did not involve a crime so...

It's almost June, which means we should soon start to hear the peal of wedding bells.

The ambitious immigration overhaul package that Congress is studying has drawn criticism from conservatives who say it offers amnesty to lawbreakers, and from immigration advocates who say it will not do enough to bring millions of people out of the shadows.

In the year 65, the Roman emperor Nero discovered that a group of nobles had hatched a conspiracy to kill him. The tyrant captured the suspects one by one and threatened them with torture; most confessed and implicated others. One of the conspirators, Epicharis, was publicly tortured -- her bones...

A few days ago, Hamas fighters stormed Fatah strongholds in Gaza that were allied with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and effectively took control of one of the two pillars of the evolving Palestinian state. Fatah groups struck back in the West Bank, the other Palestinian pillar, and...

Psychologists once conducted a simple experiment with far-reaching implications: They asked people to describe an instance in their lives when they had hurt someone and another instance when they had been hurt by someone else. The incidents that people described were similar whether they saw...

There are two ways to think about the staggering amounts of money given by special interest groups to politicians -- the type of contributions that were detailed for the last quarter in reports filed yesterday by presidential candidates and members of Congress.

Exhibit A: Sometime over the next few days, a San Francisco athlete will break baseball's most treasured record. Despite his achievement of hitting more home runs than anyone else in Major League Baseball, Barry Bonds will be greeted with rage, ridicule and vast amounts of spit -- because many pe...

In the face of mounting public and political opposition to the war in Iraq, recent reports from the White House suggest that President Bush remains serenely confident.

Why would David Vitter, a U.S. senator with four young children, have gotten involved with a seedy escort service? Why would Michael Vick, a gifted NFL quarterback, get mixed up with the sordid world of dog fighting? Why would Bill Clinton, a Rhodes scholar, six-time governor and president of the...

Long before word recently broke that white referees in the National Basketball Association were calling fouls at a higher rate on black athletes than on white athletes, and long before studies found racial disparities in how black and white applicants get called for job interviews, researchers no...

As big Labor Day sales roll around, computer stores will tell you about laptops that now come with biometric fingerprint readers. Car companies will talk about "variable air suspension" features that allow you to change the ride of a car, depending on terrain. And video game manufacturers will ha...

At the core of this fall's debate over Iraq lies one simple question: Can an increased number of U.S. troops subdue the Iraqi insurgency?

John Duffy lost 67 of his colleagues at the firm of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods six years ago during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Among the dead was Duffy's son Christopher. The investment banking firm, located in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, was among the companies hit hardes...

Four years ago, during a speech in Manila, President Bush drew an analogy between the history of the Philippines and the history he was rewriting in Iraq.

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, psychologist Jennifer Lerner conducted a national field experiment: She asked a random sampling of Americans how likely it was that they would be the victim of a terrorist attack in the next 12 months.

In the courts and in Congress, Sen. Larry Craig is fighting to withdraw his guilty plea to a misdemeanor charge that may suggest he tried to solicit sex from a man in June at a Minneapolis airport bathroom. Rather than resign yesterday, as the senator had promised and Republicans had hoped, Craig...

If you were Barack Obama, you would be scratching your head, too.

Last week, a gallon of gas at an Exxon station in the tony suburb of Bethesda cost $2.99.

When Columbia University sociologist Peter Bearman dived into the world of the white-gloved workers who open the front doors of expensive New York apartment buildings, he found that most people who applied for jobs as doormen never got one. Most doormen, however, had not applied for their jobs.

With just over five minutes to play in yesterday's game against the New York Jets, the Washington Redskins found themselves on their own 23-yard line facing a fourth and one. The team, which was ahead by just three points, elected to do what teams normally do in such situations: They played it safe...

If you consult the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which is democratically created by Internet users, you will see a pattern emerge in the phrases used to describe the first female leaders of many countries.

What do the war in Iraq, your Christmas shopping and this week's Thanksgiving dinner have in common?

In the interest of promoting democracy, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, recently announced that he had to lock up most of his country's democracy activists. And because he wanted the Pakistani Supreme Court to independently rule on whether he could continue as president, Musharraf also...

Forget about buying low and selling high. If you are worried about the recent volatility in the stock market, perhaps you should let the weather be your guide.

Social psychologist William B. Swann once had a group of married people evaluate their spouses even as their spouses evaluated them. People with high self-esteem, the psychologist found, felt closer to their partners when they received positive evaluations. People with low self-esteem, however, felt...

Nearly four decades ago, psychologist Stanley Milgram had a volunteer stand stock still on a busy New York sidewalk and look up at the sky. About one in every 25 passersby stopped to look up, too. When five volunteers were recruited to sky-gaze, nearly one in five passersby stopped to look up.

Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name, Ebenezer Scrooge . . . "Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been . . . "

Two sociologists and a mathematician recently conducted an experiment that provides an intriguing window into the presidential candidate selection that begins this week. Matthew Salganik, Duncan Watts and Peter Sheridan Dodds had a large group of people rate 48 songs. Based on these ratings, the...

According to conventional wisdom, front-runners win presidential nominations. Democrats and Republicans who start the race for a presidential nomination with the largest amount of money and the best poll numbers are supposed to be the ones most likely to walk away with victory months later.

Take a step back from the Republican and Democratic presidential primary races and you will see a sharp difference between the two.

Some years ago, a political scientist conducted an interesting experiment that speaks to the fractured race for the Republican presidential nomination, which now has six candidates, five issues, and four potential front-runners.

Mitt Romney wants to round up 12 million illegal immigrants and deport them. John Edwards wants to put an end to lobbyists. All the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates rail against the ways of Washington.

What do you think is more dangerous? Terrorists getting their hands on a biological weapon that can be smuggled into the country or another hurricane like Katrina? Which is the smarter way to keep Social Security solvent? Raise the retirement age or raise taxes? How can the current economic crisi...

If you happen to stop by a Victoria's Secret store this Wednesday evening, on the eve of Valentine's Day, you will learn something fascinating about human nature that will tell you a lot about people and relationships.

Through much of the Republican presidential primary, Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney could barely restrain their contempt for each other. During one Republican debate in New Hampshire in early January, McCain landed a zinger that summed up Romney's opportunistic...

John McCain once called televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," but now the Republican senator from Arizona is currying favor with social conservatives. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) now opposes the Iraq war, although she used to support it. Sen. Barack Obama...

Sen. John McCain's quest for the Republican presidential nomination was once seen as dead, but like those robots in the "Terminator" movies that reassemble themselves after being blown to smithereens, he came back. Five years ago, Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) was a virtually unknown African American ...

Climate change. Pollution. Financial expense. Our gas-guzzling ways have long been associated with a variety of problems, but disturbing evidence now points to a new dimension of our love affair with petroleum: Oil consumption and high oil prices hurt the political, social and economic development...

In Eliot Spitzer's sex scandal and tragicomic downfall, the question that bugged many people did not have to do with ethics or politics, but whether Spitzer got a raw deal.

Imagine that you are waiting in line to be born . . . Presently, you are scheduled to be born white. However, you are offered an alternative arrangement. In exchange for a cash gift, to be deposited in a bank account for you when you are born, you can choose to instead be born black.

On Oct. 10, 2002, Hillary Rodham Clinton stood in the Senate to explain why she was authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraq: "In balancing the risks of action versus inaction, I think New Yorkers who have gone through the fires of hell may be more attuned to the risk of not acting. I...

About 25 years ago, Cass Sunstein opened a retirement account that had two portfolios. One was mostly bonds, the other mostly stocks. Like many academics who use the TIAA-CREF investment program, Sunstein divided his money equally between stocks and bonds.

If this were Britain, Russia or India, Rudy Giuliani '08 caps would not be on the clearance racks. In those countries, where bigwigs and insiders get to nominate party leaders, the former Republican front-runner and establishment favorite would have long ago been anointed the winner.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant/Success in Circuit lies/Too bright for our infirm Delight/The Truth's superb surprise . . .