Last year I decided to fix our deck. It’s big, about 600 square feet, nine feet off the ground, and it was falling apart. Joists were rotting, and the whole thing was resting on one beam, when there should’ve been three. My foot went through the floor a couple of times.

Until recently, anyone who believed there was anything fishy about the U.S. organ donation system was labeled a conspiracy theorist. Yet now the old adage: “What’s the difference between conspiracy and truth? About six months,” rings true again, as so-called conspiracy theorists have been proven right by none other than the federal Health and Resources Services Administration (HRSA) itself.

“War made the state,” said the political scientist Charles Tilly, “and the state made war.” Tilly was talking about actual states, but the same could be said about metaphorical states: states of mind, or perhaps of the soul.

As we mark the 249th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we reflect on its interesting use of “necessary.”

In his 1796 farewell address, George Washington famously cautioned about the dangers to liberty of the United States entering into entangling alliances.