Opinion

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report is set to be made public on Thursday, and only a small group of people knows for sure what it will say.

As an enlightened society that values science and wants to improve humanity, it is our responsibility to try and understand human behavior, especially when that behavior has important moral and societal consequences. This means we must dedicate serious thought to understanding the political ascent and cultural allure of Donald Trump. The midterm election results confirmed that we are seeing a nationalist surge in America, inspired by the president, and it is showing no signs of slowing down.

Immediately after Attorney General William Barr's now-infamous four-page letter was released, I noted that Donald Trump's victory dance was tempered by his sour declaration of vengeance against his political enemies and those who had conducted the alleged "witch hunt."

When a group of ultra-nationalist wannabes gathered in Milan in 1919 to hear firebrand leader Benito Mussolini speak, they became part of an infamous moment in history. There, Mussolini presented the founding manifesto of an unlikely radical political start up. Its name was Fascio di Combattimento, the humble precursor of fascism that was adopted as the name of the movement two years later.

Although the term itself is not new, fake news presents a growing threat for societies across the world.

Behavioral economists have long understood that people tend to hold a strong bias toward maintaining the status quo. We prefer the familiar and resist change, even when doing so leads to poorer outcomes. For political journalists and editors in the Trump era who have spent their entire careers reporting on and analyzing American politics in a certain way—as a dramatic conflict between more or less competent partisans who may differ on every issue but nonetheless accept that we live in a pluralistic society and generally adhere to the rule of law—it manifests itself in a powerful bias toward normalcy. They want to believe that while the president may be a childish narcissist who spends much of his time trolling people on Twitter, happily steamrolls over democratic norms, regularly assaults our institutions and has repeatedly obstructed justice in plain sight, the political world is otherwise as they always knew it to be, and will ultimately weather the storm. It’s a subtle bias that leads to a lot of credulous coverage of Trump’s spin and a hesitation to use clear descriptive language when reporting on this White House.

Before the European Enlightenment, virtually all New Testament experts assumed that handed-down stories about Jesus were first recorded by eye witnesses and were largely biographical. That is no longer the case.

Of the many reasons to loathe Donald Trump — his lying, his fascist impulses, his cheating, his grifting, his lack of empathy for other human beings — perhaps the most continually startling is his emotional incontinence. Due to a steady stream of live TV appearances, grammatically unhinged tweets and anonymously sourced complaints from White House officials, we're subject to daily, often hourly reminders that Trump has lived on earth for 72 years and still has the impulse and emotional control of an especially trying toddler.

The federal Department of Agriculture program pushed by the White House to require food stamp recipients to work likely will affect nearly 50,000 New York City residents—and more than 750,000 nationwide, according to a new study by the Mayor’s office in New York.

May is Mental Health Awareness month aimed at stressing the importance of health and wellness in society and removing unwarranted stigmas associated with various psychological illnesses. Such exposure provides us with an opportunity to have meaningful dialogue about a topic many people know little about but often have much opinion. While most of us have heard about the most commonly discussed mental disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder or schizophrenia, there are a number of unusual psychological conditions that are neglected by virtue of the fact that they are rare, bizarre or simply unknown.

Fox News' Bret Baier on Tuesday was criticized by President Donald Trump for being "smiley and nice" to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) during his town hall appearance on Monday night -- and his supporters immediately started slamming him with angry messages.

On the 20th day of Brumaire during the Second Year of the revolutionary order, a spectacle was held inside the newly consecrated Temple of Reason. Upon the altar of what had once been the magnificent cathedral Notre-Dame de Paris at the very heart of the greatest city in Christendom, the religious statues were stripped away (some decapitated like the heads of the overthrown order) and the whole building was turned over to a festival for what the most-radical of Jacobins called the “Cult of Reason.” In the hopes that this atheistic faith-of-no-faith would become the state-sponsored religion of the new regime, the revolutionaries staged their own observance, with young girls in tri-colored sashes performing a type of Morris dance about a statue of the Goddess Reason.  Such was just another occurrence among the competing factions of the Revolution, and which saw the dechristianization of France, including not just the iconoclasm of smashed stain-glass and white-washed images, but the execution of perhaps 30,000 priests. Less than a decade later Mass would once again be celebrated upon Notre-Dame’s altar.

One of the most frustratingly deceptive aspects of the investigation into Donald Trump and Russia is the sheer volume of hydra-like angles to the thing. The list of moving parts continues to grow, and once Thursday rolls around and the redacted Mueller report drops, we can expect many more parts to click into place.