With his mendacity and increasingly virulent attacks on immigrants, Muslims, women, the press, the judiciary, the intelligence services, the F.B.I. - any group or institution that he finds threatening or useful as a scapegoat - Mr. Trump is attempting the Orwellian trick of redefining American reality on his own terms.

The removal of people of Japanese descent from their homes and their incarceration in camps were executed with the same sort of political calculus of fear and bigotry that Mr. Trump is using to redefine American immigration policy.

I've always been a news junkie, and an avid reader of newspapers and magazines, and this interest only ramped up during the campaign of 2016 and in the aftermath of the election.

I was the kid in class who was afraid to get called on.

Mitt Romney has never been resigned to what someone else said was possible. He cut his own path. That's why he believes in his heart that America has a future full of opportunity and hope. And that's why when Mitt Romney looks down the road, he sees a country that's ready for a comeback.

On the death of his brothers, my dad lied about his age and joined the army in 1918. He was in the trenches long enough to be gassed and contract the early stages of tuberculosis from which he would eventually die just before my birth.

We all wonder about death, where people go and what happens. But certainly, they cross over from this dimension to another one.

We love the sight of the brown and ruddy earth; it is the color of life, while a snow-covered plain is the face of death. Yet snow is but the mask of the life-giving rain; it, too, is the friend of man, the tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow.