Adam Cohen

One way to reduce the need for layoffs would be to cut back on hours, spreading the available work among more employees.

Congress needs to toughen the laws protecting elections and make clear that anyone interfering with democracy will pay a stiff price.

As long as there have been elections, there have been attempts to keep eligible people from voting.

Even a single Justice can have a profound impact on the country.

When the gun lobby fights gun-control legislation, its logic is clear: it does not like laws that prevent people from owning or using guns.

Gun violence in the U.S. is an epidemic.

For technology companies, information about what people do online is extremely valuable - it can be used to sell targeted advertising or sold to data clearinghouses.

If the courts regarded tweets and other social media information as private, it would not prevent the law enforcement from getting information it really needs. But the government would have to get a search warrant, which requires it to show that it has probable cause connecting what is being searched to a crime.

DMs are a lot like email - and should have the same privacy protections as a mailed letter.

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets have a great deal of information about all of us - and the government wants to be able to see it.

There is no actual need to tighten voter ID rules: there have been extraordinarily few instances of people committing fraud at the polls.

The press should not get special privileges - if they drive recklessly or put people in danger, they should be subject to every reckless driving and endangerment law on the books - but they should also not be singled out for special punishment.

'Hard Times' does not romanticize the Depression, but at least a few of Mr. Terkel's subjects managed to find silver linings.

The Senate should refuse to confirm nominees who do not take Congressional power seriously.

Mass layoffs produce big winners and losers. Most workers who remain are financially unscathed, even though their employer is struggling.

The civil rights and antiwar movements taught Americans to question authority.

The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.'s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs.

Anti-New Deal rhetoric has never disappeared from American political life.

Vampires are sleek demons for good times. They suavely leech off society - like investment bankers who plunder outsize shares of deals for themselves or rapacious fund managers.

Regency romances end in marriage; zombie stories end in the zombies being vanquished. 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies' delivers both.

In zombie horror, the juxtaposition of the calm world of the living and the menace of the undead inspires terror. In zombie comedy, like 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,' it is played for laughs.

There is a lot of talk in conservative circles about judicial modesty and deferring to the political branches. That view of judging often overlooks the important role that courts have in protecting people's rights. But if there was ever a time to defer, it is when Congress is protecting voting rights in the exact way the Constitution directs it to.

It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s that Congress got serious about the assignment laid out in the post-Civil War amendments.

It is hard to imagine an area in which Congress has more express constitutional authority to act than in protecting the right of minorities to vote.

Liberal judges tend to be expansive about things like equal protection, while conservatives read more into ones like 'the right to bear arms.'

Lawsuits prod companies to make their products safer.

The United States may be a religious nation. But it is also a nation with a strong commitment to separation of church and state.

A federal Voters' Bill of Rights could press the states to put non-partisan managers in charge of elections.

A key reason that elections are run so badly is that in most states, political partisans are in charge.

If we are going to have self-driving cars, the technical specifications should be quite precise.

It is one thing to say that there is a constitutional right to keep a gun at home for protection. It is quite another to say there is a constitutional right to bring a hidden gun into a daycare center.

There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens' every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.

Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal.

Ballot formats should be standardized nationally rather than left to the often bad judgment of local officials.

Federal law should hold organizations like the League of Women Voters harmless if they make good-faith mistakes while registering people.

If apes are given the right to humane treatment, it just might become harder to deny that same right to their human cousins.

Too often, animal-rights supporters seem to care about animals to the exclusion of people.

An election in which people have to wait 10 hours to vote, or in which black voters wait in the rain for hours, while white voters zip through polling places, is unworthy of the world's leading democracy.

Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more, while judges like Ms. Sotomayor are activists. But there is no magic right way to interpret terms like 'free speech' or 'due process' - or potato chip.

If a company knows it may have to pay a large amount of money if it poses an unreasonable threat to others, it will have a strong incentive to act better.

Civil lawsuits do two important things: they compensate people who are injured by the bad acts of others, and they penalize people and companies for bad behavior.

A smart phone essentially creates a dossier of your travels, and consumers have no control over who will eventually see that information.

Our movements reveal a great deal about who we are. A record of our locations over time can reveal whether we go to tent revivals or radical political meetings, abortion clinics or AIDS doctors.

It is not hard to see why the FBI wants wiretapping backdoors. It would certainly make its job easier. But rejiggering the Internet so government can conveniently monitor everything we say and do online is too high a price to pay for making law enforcement more efficient.

If the FBI gets the 'back doors' it wants, Internet services would be required to create a massive online infrastructure for law enforcement to spy on members of the public.

The gap between being a bad person and being a criminal is often wide.

If the Supreme Court rules that rent control is an unconstitutional taking of property, it would put all sorts of zoning rules in danger.

The Supreme Court's most conservative Justices have presented themselves as great respecters of precedent and opponents of 'judicial activism' - of judges using the Constitution to strike down laws passed by the elected branches of government. If they are true to those principles, they should uphold rent control.

Conservative Justices have a history of not standing by their professed commitment to judicial restraint.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is the major achievement of President Obama's first term.