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."

I am using the A-word in the sense that I have heard my son's generation use it since he was in grade school in the 1990s.

To the new generation, I detected, the world boils down to two extremes: Everything is either "awesome" or "sucks." No longer is "awesome" reserved for those people or things that actually inspire awe. "Awesome" has grown like a grade-B movie monster into a universal sign of praise ("That's an awesome necktie"), delight ("You live near here? Awesome!") and gratitude ("You brought me a cup of coffee? Awesome!").

But nothing marked 2014 as The Year of Awesome as profoundly as an early December tirade by Fox News co-host Andrea Tantaros against a Senate committee's report on CIA torture.

"The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome," she insisted. "We've closed the book on (torture), and we've...

In an ideal world, there should be no contradiction between support for police and opposition to bad policing. But after the coldblooded murder of two police officers in New York, it has become too easy for some to confuse one with the other.

In social media, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, a mentally disturbed career criminal, claimed to commit the senseless killings out of some sense of revenge for the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York. Pursued by police, Brinsley later shot and killed himself on a subway platform.

With no more of a link to the Brown and Garner killings than his disjointed messages, Brinsley nevertheless gave critics of the protests a new excuse to blame the tragedy on politicians and the protests and their sympathizers — and ignore the issues that the protests were about.

Patrick Lynch, president of the city's largest police union, angrily attacked Mayor Bill de Blasio a day after the killings, saying that "there's blood on many hands tonight"...

During my decades of journalism, I have been alternatively amused and appalled by the sarcastic newsroom slogan: "A story too good to check out."

I've been amused by the battlefield sarcasm that comes from having a hot story lead fall apart under the bright lights of closer scrutiny. I've been appalled by journalists — real or alleged — who don't let the possibility of contrary facts get in the way of their narrative.

That's why I was bitterly disappointed by the failure of Rolling Stone, a magazine that I usually respect, to do what I have been told to do since my own student newspaper days: Get the other side of the story.

The magazine dug itself into a scandalous credibility gap by reporting only the alleged victim's side of a rape that allegedly occurred in a fraternity house at the University of Virginia.

The story kicked up enough of an uproar to compel the university to suspend all of its fraternities until the end of the year — before the magazine retracted the story with a...

Big city mayors have to stay as neutral as possible when asked about disputes between their citizens and the police. But New York Mayor Bill de Blasio found his voice in a profoundly moving way when he responded not as a mayor but as a parent.

His sentiments came out in a news conference and an ABC-TV interview after a grand jury decided not to indict a white police officer in the video-recorded choking death of Eric Garner, a black suspect in Staten Island.

The mayor, who is married to an African-American woman, described his own warnings to his biracial son, Dante, about making any sudden or otherwise suspicious movements in an encounter with police.

"What parents have done for decades who have children of color, especially young men of color, is train them to be very careful when they have ... an encounter with a police officer," de Blasio said on ABC's "This Week."

Asked if he felt his son was at risk from his city's own police department, de Blasio responded, "It's different for a...

As the tragic chokehold case of Eric Garner illustrates, police body cameras are not the solution to all police brutality complaints. But they can bring a much-needed clarity to what we're arguing about.

Unlike the recent death by police shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the police assault on the unarmed Garner, an asthmatic and diabetic, had a single narrative provided by the video.

"The grand jury kept interviewing witnesses, but you didn't need witnesses," Garner's widow said of the video to the New York Daily News. "You can be a witness for yourself."

But when a Staten Island grand jury on Wednesday declined to indict police officer Daniel Pantaleo in Garner's death, the strength of that video sparked national outrage that crossed racial and political lines.

You don't have to be a liberal to be outraged by the sight of a half-dozen of New York's finest holding a large, handcuffed man down on pavement while he gasps "I can't breathe" over and over again...

When asked about recent allegations against Bill Cosby, Chris Rock fell into what for him is an unusual position. He was at a loss for words.

"I don't know what to say," he told New York magazine. "What do you say? I hope it's not true. That's all you can say. I really do. I grew up on Cosby. I love Cosby, and I just hope it's not true."

A lot of us longtime Cosby fans have been at a loss for words ever since long-simmering rumors boiled over in recent weeks that Cosby allegedly drugged and sexually assaulted women over many years.

Then Rock mused: "It's a weird year for comedy. We lost Robin, we lost Joan and we kind of lost Cosby."

Yes, we have. Unlike the losses of Robin Williams and Joan Rivers, Cosby is still alive, but that's more than we can say for his comedy career or his stature as a civic role model.

The bad news for "Cos" keeps on coming.

Monday, he resigned from his alma mater Temple University's board of trustees under pressure from an online petition campaign.

Other...