To walk the path to success, nothing beats punching your ticket at an elite school, so access to them is a key to America’s future. And the elites often write templates for other colleges.

To avoid an unlikely harm — unvaccinated kids getting a serious case of COVID — the schools wanted to impose an almost-guaranteed harm by excluding thousands of students from the classroom, kneecapping their education. At best, this is playing chicken with the well-being of children; at worst, it is thoughtless and cruel policy in stubborn pursuit of the goal of substituting the judgment of public school mandarins for parents.

What killed Hong Kong’s democracy? The blunt truth is the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship callously broke an international treaty.

In his years of greatest impact — the late ’50s through the 1960s — Poitier required the movie-going world to see Black people. In those years, the Miami-born Bahamian actor was a doctor, a teacher and a soldier, a cop, a convict and a warmhearted handyman. In other words, he embodied blackness in all its shades of humanity and did so with an unyielding insistence upon his own — and therefore, upon our — dignity and worth.

For the third straight day last week, the Chicago Teachers Union canceled classes, choosing to return to virtual learning and citing dangers from the Omicron variant as their excuse.

Overestimates of the incidental COVID rate will make the current wave seem milder than it really is. At the same time, undercounting incidental cases will lead to overstatements of COVID’s current severity. Both kinds of errors will cloud our vision at a time when we need a clear-eyed view of the pandemic.

Capitol Police Officer Marcus Moore “is haunted by the memory of being attacked, and of the sensory impacts — most particularly the explosions of flashbangs and other devices, as well as the sights, sounds, smells, and even tastes of the attack remain close to the surface.” Most of the officers who survived had to suit up and head right back out for work the next day. And again. And again.

Democrats are entertaining ideas — whether blowing up the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, adding new states for partisan advantage — that violate the kind of norms they always cited in opposing Trump.

For generations, the answer was a given. We were a nation of laws. A nation of democratic principles. A nation that knew its greatness sprang from its goodness. And most of all, a nation that aspired. Meaning that, even when — as frequently happened — America failed its lofty ideals, it at least had ideals to fail.