For those of us who like to believe that human beings are rational, trying to explain what happens in politics can be a real challenge.

Books about the history of Harlem have long fascinated me -- my favorite being "When Harlem Was in Vogue" by David Levering Lewis.

Having taught economics at a number of colleges for a number of years, I especially welcomed a feature article in the June 22 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, on how economics courses with the same name can be very different at different colleges.

Since this is an election year, we can expect to hear a lot of words -- and the meaning of those words is not always clear. So it may be helpful to have a glossary of political terms.

President Obama's latest political ploy -- granting new "rights" out of thin air, by executive order, to illegal immigrants who claim that they were brought into the country when they were children -- is all too typical of his short-run approach to the country's long-run problems.

The "Occupy" movement, which the Obama administration and much of the media have embraced, has implications that reach far beyond the passing sensation it has created.

Labor unions, like the United Nations, are all too often judged by what they are envisioned as being -- not by what they actually are or what they actually do.

WASHINGTON -- As the space shuttle Discovery flew three times around Washington, a final salute before landing at Dulles airport for retirement in a museum, thousands on the ground gazed upward with marvel and pride.

A longstanding legal charade was played out again recently, when Federal Express paid $3 million to settle an employment discrimination case brought by the U.S. Department of Labor.

There have been many frauds of historic proportions -- for example, the financial pyramid scheme for which Charles Ponzi was sent to prison in the 1920s, and for which Franklin D. Roosevelt was praised in the 1930s, when he called it Social Security. In our own times, Bernie Madoff's hoax has made headlines.