With the U.S. Senate now the world's most prominent crusader against highly questionable American intelligence practices, Wikileaks, the site that once released whistleblower bombshells about U.S. military operations abroad and torture in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, has been reduced to...

A lot has happened in America this year. But economics columnists might well dub this “The Year of the Minimum Wage.”

• Will Chicago's minimum wage increase do more harm than good?

This is the time when we make lists: The best movies of 2014. The best books. The funniest cartoons. The greatest photos. The most amazing sports performances. The 10 best botched athlete celebrations.

The new year is almost upon us.

• Chicago's New Year's Eve party guide

At the beginning of 2001, with considerable fanfare, I launched the "Someday is Now" society, a group of 188 readers who had responded to a call for volunteers willing to devote half an hour a day, six days a week for one year, pursuing a personal goal.

It was an "awesome" year. In my annual search for a word that pretty much describes the past year, I have found that almost everything, everywhere, was "awesome."

Dad,

Grant,

The following dialogue between a father and his son began over Thanksgiving dinner. What does one generation owe another? What have the retiring baby boomers achieved and what challenges do the rising millennials face to make their lives, our nation and our world better than what they have...

It used to hold some appeal, being born on Dec. 26. It was cool to open presents two days in a row and to explain why my middle name is Noel.

If I were a cartoonist, a phrase cartoonists are loath to hear, I'd sketch a chubby imp donned in a diaper, sporting a chia mohawk and munching the last Big Mac on Earth, while straddling a nuclear-armed missile that bears a striking resemblance to Dennis Rodman.

Within a minute of the final out in Game 7 of the World Series, I had left my neighborhood bar and was moseying along the 500-foot walk to my Lincoln Park apartment.

Not long after some grumpy administrative Grinch at the University of Maine warned employees against the placement of "religious-themed" decorations on campus — including candy canes — NASA announced that Christmas lights have become so bright that they are visible from outer space....

This holiday season could have gone very differently for two cats who found themselves far from home just before Christmas.

We all have tasks we try to get done before the end of the year, and Kim Jong Un's is amping up the crazy. Last December, the North Korean despot approved the execution of his uncle for allegedly plotting against him. This December, his agents hacked Sony Pictures computers over a comedy...

Human Rights Watch: "Pakistan's government has chosen to indulge in vengeful bloodlust."

Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York has always been relentless in defending the middle class (or at least in presenting himself that way), but his latest cause doesn't make much sense.

For all the children who should be loved always, but especially on this wondrous night, with our arms around them and a long good-night kiss on the temple, a kiss more precious than anything wrapped in a box.

In 2014, it is Demario Bailey.

This was the year that NFL cheerleaders finally started rooting for themselves.

It was a warm, fragrant May day when I signed the lease for our 47th-floor apartment in a Lakeshore East high-rise. Paperwork done, I strolled through the secret garden of Lake Shore East Park, down a corridor of pink rosebushes and through a little tunnel of tamarack trees. The knee-high...

'A salute to George W. Bush — along with hope that, when he leaves office, Obama will follow the example.'

President Barack Obama's announcement that the U.S. would step toward normalizing relations with Cuba is pretty much a win for everyone involved — including baseball fans.

On Saturday, Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot a former girlfriend in Baltimore. Hours later, in Brooklyn, N.Y., he ambushed and killed two police officers in their car and then killed himself. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio described the murders as "execution-style." Police don't have a motive for the...

Come January, the U.S. House and Senate will have 104 women members.

Sr. Barack Obama, President of the U.S.:

My cousin Linda was having a bad day.

Have you ever wondered if American foreign policy is just a bit player in a Seth Rogen/James Franco movie?

When Mayor Rahm Emanuel last week pronounced the proposed Wanda Vista tower by architect Jeanne Gang “a great building,” he didn’t just misjudge a promising but problematic preliminary design for what would be one of Chicago’s tallest skyscrapers — he gave away the...

Hey, you in the ugly Christmas sweater. Read this:

For a long time, the U.S. ostracism of Cuba has been like the vintage American cars on the streets of Havana: obsolete but imperishable. It didn't topple the Castro government, didn't force human rights progress and didn't unite the world behind us. Yet failure was no enemy of longevity.

Although President Barack Obama is taking the credit for the historic deal to reverse decades of U.S. policy toward Cuba, when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, she was the main architect of the new policy and pushed far harder for a deal than the Obama White House.

Christians don't seem to mind that so many beloved Christmas songs were written by Jews, and Jews tend to reel off the list with pride.

Every year, fellow Tribune columnist Mary Schmich and I conduct a reader contest related to our "Songs of Good Cheer" Christmas-themed singalong programs at the Old Town School of Folk Music — stories, parodies, trivia, something related to the season.

Burger King Chief Executive Officer Daniel Schwartz swears that the company's plan to renounce its U.S. "citizenship" and become a Canadian corporation "is really not about taxes." But a new report by my group, Americans for Tax Fairness, finds that it really is about taxes after all.

As The Washington Post's Cairo bureau chief, I live and work with the risk of sexual violence all around me. I've covered war and political turmoil in the Middle East for the past seven years, spending five of those in Cairo, where sexual harassment is an almost daily experience. When I was...

Excerpted from "Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America," by Linda Tirado:

I walk a tightrope with Cuba.

The lone wolf is the new national nightmare, dramatized and amplified this week by the hostage-taking attack in Sydney. But there are two kinds of lone wolves — the crazy and the evil — and the distinction is important.

If I call you a "scrooge," that's not a good thing. We all know that a scrooge is a miser, a misanthrope, a bitter wasted soul. "Bah, humbug!"

BERLIN — As Russia's economic crisis deepens, hurting trading partners from Germany to Tajikistan, many will say Westerns sanctions have succeeded. It's a classic stone soup — or, in the Russian tradition, axe cereal — story.

Jeb Bush announced last weekend that he is releasing 250,000 emails from his two terms as Florida's governor. North Korean hackers may be dismayed that he beat them to it, but Bush 2016 boosters are happy. This move, along with a planned e-book incorporating the emails, was taken as the...

Jayne and Jon Cornwill, an Australian couple, recently came to America with a bit of trouble.

It was drizzling on Tuesday morning, and the sky was that uniquely bleak color that on a paint chip might be called "Chicago gray," when I ran into a friend.

Due to the failure of the justice system in the recent killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, we have witnessed an outpouring across this nation by mostly young people, but people of all ages, races and backgrounds.

It wasn't going to be long before Rolling Stone's botched story about sexual assault at the University of Virginia was cited to try to discredit other rape allegations. And so it's no surprise, though perhaps a bit of a disappointment, that the inevitable moment has arrived. Monday, Bill...

Another dispatch from Somebody Nobody Asked™, America's pre-eminent unsolicited advice columnist.

In the traditional holiday story, a man in a red velvet suit sneaks into our houses in the middle of the night. We'd call 911 if that actually happened. But as we buy presents for Christmas and Hanukkah, we are unwittingly letting strangers into our homes through our computers rather than our...

A funny thing happened on the way to Vladimir Putin running strategic laps around the West. Russia's economy imploded.

Sony Pictures Entertainment wants news outlets to stop publishing stories based on material stolen by hackers, who recently ransacked the company's computer network to devastating effect. From one perspective, that might be the right thing to do. Though it was found on corporate servers, some...

The latest Hunger Games film, "Mockingjay — Part 1″, is topping the international box office. Although it's a Hollywood blockbuster aimed at young adults, it presents potentially quite subversive ideas of mass revolution, economic sabotage and the populist fight against oligarchy.

Illinois needs a comptroller, and the opportunity to appoint one is an opportunity to consolidate two state offices. With the sudden death last week of Illinois Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka, I recommend that Gov. Pat Quinn and Gov.-elect Bruce Rauner agree to appoint Treasurer-elect Mike...

The quest for justice for Michael Brown and Eric Garner did not end with the decisions of grand juries not to indict the police officers whose actions led to those men's deaths. Those frustrated by the grand juries' dispositions can take comfort in knowing that victims of police violence, as...

How often will President Barack Obama come to the rescue of House Speaker John Boehner even when Republican leaders aren't willing to give much in return? And does the president want to preside over a split in his party?

The reaction to the Senate report on the Central Intelligence Agency's torture program has been almost as depressing as the report itself — which is saying something. There's been impotent outrage from people you'd expect to be outraged; lame excuses from people you'd expect to make...

All across America, zombies are filing into legislatures to pass laws, approve appointments and release reports.

At this awkward stage in its young life, the new Maggie Daley Park brings to mind a gangly teenager. Energetic? Absolutely. Graceful? Not yet.

It was bound to happen, so I was glad to get it over with.

A friend told me about this amazing new trend in Christmas giving, and I just have to share it with you.

Plenty of people who go on wild drinking binges end up with sound reasons to avoid repeating the experience: painful hangovers, lasting embarrassment, ruined relationships, encounters with police. But that doesn't stop some of them from doing it again. Maybe these are the same people running...

JERUSALEM At the conclusion of synagogue services on a recent Friday night, there was a special announcement: "In light of the security situation, everyone who has a valid gun license and a weapon should please come to services armed. Unfortunately, not enough people have done so. So we are...

It is clear that our efforts to defeat the Islamic State have been inadequate. Half-measures will not work against a growing threat from radical Islamists who are uniting fractured terrorist groups around the world under one banner.

The tragic death of beloved Illinois Comptroller Judy Baar Topinka has been followed, predictably, by much speculation about who should replace her and how that person will be chosen. But I believe it's more important for us to focus on what Comptroller Topinka was trying to accomplish...

No one hearing the news today can doubt that our country is suffering from great division on racial issues. How can we as a nation heal from these divisions and work toward greater justice and peace?

For 10 years, Kathy Poehlmann has been dispensing advice about breast-feeding and baby-wearing from her store, Be By Baby, in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood.

The trombone band refused to yield. It would not march behind horses.