Free speech is under assault on America's campuses, as cancel culture and the woke mob strive to stifle any points of disagreement. Yet free speech issues on campuses, while always worrisome, are not necessarily new.

More than a generation ago, the great Irving Kristol observed that American campuses are islands of intolerance in the sea of diversity. If Kristol were around today, though, he would probably have to amend his observation along the lines that campuses are now continents of intolerance in a shrinking sea of freedom.

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One of the U.S. presidency's ironclad rules is that you can never really trust anyone you meet post-election. Although all politicians ought to know that apparent friends often have their own agendas, for the president of the United States this is a special challenge. As a result, friends who predate a president's service in office can potentially have an outsized influence and importance. In his engaging new book, First Friends, Gary Ginsberg, a lawyer, corporate executive, and former government official, takes a look at nine different friendships and their impact on ten different presidencies. (The reason the book looks at more presidencies than friendships is that one of the friendships—that of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—was itself between two presidents.)

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Twenty years ago, the physician Sally Satel argued in her book PC M.D. that political correctness had taken over medicine. PC M.D. described a lowering of standards to increase doctor diversity, the blithe use of dubious "recovered memories" in sexual-abuse allegations, and the endorsement for political reasons of questionable techniques such as "therapeutic touch." Some of these concerns no longer have much purchase in our common cultural conversation. But Satel's larger point continues to resonate: Politics, and especially leftist political theories emanating from the universities, can interfere with the practice of medicine in a deleterious way.

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Soldier, statesman, and skilled bureaucratic infighter Colin Powell has died at 84.

Born in Harlem in 1937 and raised in the Bronx, Powell grew up in an ethnically diverse neighborhood that included Italians, Jews, and African-Americans. In his youth, he picked up enough Yiddish that in 1993, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he greeted Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir with the words, "Men kent reden Yiddish" (we can speak Yiddish). Shamir was fluent in the language but unprepared for the words coming from a gentile American military man. Powell took advantage, saying, again in Yiddish, "Don't you understand?"

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First-term mistakes are common for presidents. For some, those mistakes define their legacy, while others' errors cling to the historical record as a footnote. President Joe Biden and his advisers reportedly believe their Afghanistan mess will fade from public memory, but that is a gamble.

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