"I would prefer not to." That was the invariable reply of the title character of Herman Melville's 1853 story "Bartleby, the Scrivener," when asked by his employer to perform a task.    

"If you're ... pathetically weak, the country is going to be overrun with millions of people, and if you're strong, then you don't have any heart, that's a tough dilemma. ... I'd rather be strong."

If he does, the former coal magnate will be just the latest in a long line of Senate primary losers to run in a general election.

Confirmation bias damages reputations. It ruins credibility. It destroys lives.

Upset because Facebook and Google invade your privacy? Be glad you don't live in China.

Facebook and other Western apps are banned there. The government views their openness as a threat. So the Chinese use platforms like WeChat and Alibaba.

All of a sudden, everyone on the left wants "free markets in energy policy." As someone who's advocated for that for, oh, about three decades, this riff should be music to my ears. But is laissez faire energy policy really what liberals are seeking?

"It is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart," says former first lady Laura Bush of the Trump administration policy of "zero tolerance," under which the children of illegal migrants are being detained apart from their parents.    

It has been a week full of wins for President Donald Trump -- at least for those who share Trump's view of the way the world works, and perhaps even for some who don't.

Exhibit A is Trump's summit meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore. In their self-congratulatory joint statement, they said that North Korea committed to "work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula" and the United States agreed to "provide security guarantees" to North Korea.

President Donald Trump appears to belong to what might be called the Benjamin Disraeli school of diplomacy.

The British prime minister once counseled, "Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel."

"I also have a dream."