Columnists: George F. Will

Latest Columns

• Big Love

  SALT LAKE CITY — A specter is haunting the Congressional Black Caucus, the specter of integration. It is discomforting enough that the now 43-member CBC has included a Republican since 2011, when Florida’s Allen West...   September 23, 2012

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• We vant to be left alone

  Elaine Huguenin, who with her husband operates Elane Photography in New Mexico, asks only to be let alone. But instead of being allowed a reasonable zone of sovereignty in which to live her life in accordance with her...   September 16, 2012

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• It’s OK, we’re not doomed

  Sometimes the news is that something was not newsworthy.  The UN’s Rio+20 conference occurred in June, without consequences. A generation has passed since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which begat other conferences and...   August 21, 2012

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• Becoming presidential

  When, in his speech accepting the 1964 Republican presidential nomination, Barry Goldwater said “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” and “moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue,” a media wit at...   August 14, 2012

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• Football’s growing killer problem

  Are you ready for some football? First, are you ready for some autopsies? The opening of NFL training camps coincided with the closing of the investigation into the April suicide by gunshot of Ray Easterling, 62, an...   August 06, 2012

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• Chicago’s school war

  Chicago   The title of the nation’s largest labor union, the National Education Association, seems calculated to blur the fact that it is a teachers union. In this blunt city, however, the teachers union candidly calls...   July 05, 2012

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• Good vibrations

  Columbia, Md.  Three hours before showtime, Brian Wilson says: “There is no Rhonda.”  Sitting backstage, gathering strength for the evening’s 48-song, 150-minute concert, Wilson wasn’t asked about her, he just...   June 21, 2012

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• To keep toddler politics pristine

  Montgomery County, Md., on the District of Columbia’s northern border, is a dormitory for the nation’s government, where federal workers’ sleep is disturbed only by dreams of new ways to improve us. The county’s...   June 14, 2012

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• Childish in Wisconsin

  Wisconsin, the first to let government employees unionize, was an incubator of progressivism and gave birth (in 1932 in Madison) to its emblematic institution, the government employees union — government organized as a...   June 03, 2012

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• Testing the Chief Justice’s backbone

  In one of his characteristic conniptions about people who frustrated him, Theodore Roosevelt, progressivism’s first president, said of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “I could carve out of a banana a judge with more...   May 28, 2012

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• Bipartisan disgrace

  Bipartisanship, the supposed scarcity of which so distresses the high-minded, is disastrously prevalent.  Since 2001, it has produced No Child Left Behind, a counterproductive federal intrusion in education; the McCain...   May 19, 2012

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• American motors

  “You have a Prius. . . . You probably compost, sort all your recycling, and have a reusable shopping bag for your short drive to Whole Foods. You are the best! So, do we really need the Obama sticker?”  — The Portland...   May 13, 2012

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• An absurd attack on free speech

  Controversies can be wonderfully clarified when people follow the logic of illogical premises to perverse conclusions.  For example, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), joined by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, 26 other...   May 07, 2012

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• The gift of serenity

  When Jonathan Frederick Will was born 40 years ago — on May 4, 1972, his father’s 31st birthday — the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome was about 20 years. That is understandable. The day after Jon was born,...   May 03, 2012

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• The perils of being LBJ

  Around noon on Saturday, Nov. 23, 1963, almost exactly 24 hours after the assassination in Dallas, while the president’s casket lay in the East Room of the White House, Arthur Schlesinger, John Kennedy’s kept historian,...   April 29, 2012

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• The war on drugs: time to face facts

  Amelioration of today’s drug problem requires Americans to understand the significance of the 80/20 ratio. Twenty percent of American drinkers consume 80 percent of the alcohol sold here. The same 80-20 split obtains...   April 14, 2012

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• The drug war is futile

  The human nervous system interacts in pleasing and addictive ways with certain molecules derived from plants, which is why humans may have developed beer before they developed bread. Consciousness-altering and addictive...   April 05, 2012

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• Opening-day brain-teasers

  Think you’re ready for Opening Day? Prove it. Name the person or persons who: 1. Hit the most home runs in the 1960s. 2. In 2011 joined Hank Aaron, Brooks Robinson and Pete Rose as the only players to appear in at least...   April 02, 2012

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• Broken contract

  Tomorrow, the Supreme Court begins three days of oral arguments concerning possible — actually, probable and various — constitutional infirmities in ObamaCare. The justices have received many amicus briefs, one of which...   March 25, 2012

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• From Sinking Sears to Rue, Britannica

  In Retreat, Sears Set To Unload Stores  — The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 24 Retreat need not mean surrender. Still . . . In 1886, a shipment of $25 watches from a Chicago jeweler was rejected by the addressee in Redwood...   March 24, 2012

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• ... So let’s focus on Congress instead

  “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. The next and most urgent counsel is to take stock of reality.” — William F. Buckley Sept. 11, 1964 On that evening 48 years ago — it was still summer, early in the...   March 04, 2012

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• The not-so-great super PAC menace

  Super PAC donors acting as kingmakers in presidential contest  — The Washington Post, Feb. 22 When Communists and sympathizers made excuses for Stalin’s terror, they said, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs...   March 01, 2012

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• The unknown greatness of Ike

  Two coming developments, one dismal and one excellent, pertain to America’s memory of a great man. One of several oversight panels soon will consider a proposed memorial to Dwight Eisenhower. The proposal is an...   February 20, 2012

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• ‘Campaign reform’ means ‘shut up!’

  Fountain Hills, Ariz.  Dina Galassini doesn’t seem to pose a threat to Arizona’s civic integrity. But the government of this desert community thinks you can’t be too careful. And state law empowers local governments to...   February 04, 2012

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• Champs who couldn’t play

  CHARLESTON, SC  They are nearing 70 now, the 11 men who were 12-year-old boys in 1955 and who are remembered for the baseball games they couldn’t play. They were — actually, with their matching blue blazers and striped...   January 12, 2012

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• America’s oil boom

  Although they have become prone to apocalyptic forebodings about the fragility of the nation's institutions and traditions under the current president, conservatives should stride confidently into 2012. This is not...   January 02, 2012

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• Supreme lunacy

  When discussing his amazingness, Newt Gingrich sometimes exaggerates somewhat — as when, discussing Bosnia and Washington, DC, street violence, he said, “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz” (The...   December 26, 2011

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• ... and ObamaCare kills jobs, too

  In 1941, Carl Karcher was a 24-year-old truck driver for a bakery. Impressed by the large numbers of buns he was delivering, he scrounged up $326 to buy a hot dog cart across from a Goodyear plant. And the war came.  So...   December 04, 2011

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• Thanks for the absurd-but-true

  “People who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.” — Randall Jarrell,  “A Sad Heart at the Supermarket” This is not a Golden Age, which distinguishes it from no other age....   November 26, 2011

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• It’s come to this?

  The Republican presidential dynamic -- various candidates rise and recede; Mitt Romney remains at about 25% support -- is peculiar because conservatives correctly believe it is important to defeat Barack Obama but...   October 30, 2011

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