This is the year the first baby boomers—those born in 1946—turn 80, and that cohort includes Donald Trump. (His big day is June 14.) We have all recently lived through what it means to have an 80-year-old commander in chief, but at a political moment that’s simultaneously more horrific, e...

In my writing, and in my idle thoughts, I often return to Arjuna’s lament upon surveying the battlefield of Kurukshetra and finding that he must kill his friends and family. What is his duty in that extraordinary moment? What is my duty, then, in far more ordinary and less harrowing circumsta...