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I am a 68-year-old farmer from Athens, Ohio, and I got into online dating late in life. It is a whole different world from when I was young. You match with someone, have a nice conversation, and then — nothing. They stop replying mid-sentence or after your last message. No explanation, no goodbye, just silence. Now in my day if you were interested you called back. If you were not, you had the decency to say so. But the little glass brick makes it easy to disappear. I have been ghosted three times now. Each time I wondered: should I send one more message? Something light, just to check if they are still there? Or do I accept the silence as the answer it is? My gut says sending another message makes me look desperate. But my heart says maybe they got busy, maybe their notification did not ping, maybe they are waiting for me to show I am still interested. The community told me to let it go because silence is an answer. I trust that now. But the question is bigger than just me: what is the right etiquette when a conversation on a dating app goes quiet? Does one follow-up message show confidence, or does it cross a line into chasing someone who already decided?

I am a high school guidance counselor in Hamilton, Ontario. Every semester I sit across from students who are about to graduate and have no idea how compound interest works, what a TFSA is, or why carrying a credit card balance at 19.99% APR means they will pay nearly double for every item they put on that card. They can solve for x but they cannot read a pay stub. They can analyze a Shakespeare sonnet but they cannot spot a predatory loan. I see the direct line from financial illiteracy to the crises my own parents lived through: payday loans, maxed-out credit cards, and the kind of debt that takes a decade to escape. The research is settled that financial education delivered before people take on their first financial products significantly reduces default rates and increases retirement savings. Several US states and at least one Canadian province now mandate a standalone personal finance course for graduation. Other jurisdictions keep it as an elective or embed it in math or social studies. The question is straightforward: should a dedicated personal finance course — covering budgeting, credit, debt, taxes, investing, and consumer rights — be a mandatory requirement for every high school diploma? Or does that mandate overreach into what should be a family responsibility, and risk crowding out other valuable coursework? And if it should be mandatory, who designs the curriculum and ensures it is consistent across districts?

I am a paralegal in Budapest who has spent forty years reviewing contracts and family estate plans. I see the same pattern repeat every wedding season: a couple announces their engagement, the parents offer to pay for part or all of the wedding, and somewhere between the venue deposit and the seating chart, a dispute erupts over who gets to decide. The parents say: we are paying, so we choose the guest list. The couple says: it is our wedding, not yours. Neither side has a written agreement about what the money buys beyond the catering invoice. This is not about ingratitude. It is about the absence of a contract. When a parent contributes financially to a wedding, they are making an investment the couple would not otherwise have. The parent naturally expects a voice in how the money is spent. The couple naturally expects autonomy over their ceremony. Both positions are reasonable, and that is precisely why the disagreement is predictable without a pre-arranged framework. The question this trial asks: when parents contribute financially to a wedding, should the size of their contribution entitle them to proportional decision-making authority over the wedding arrangements? Or does a gift, by its nature, transfer without strings attached?

In 1995 former NFL star O.J. Simpson was tried in Los Angeles for the June 1994 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. The eight-month televised trial was watched by an estimated 150 million people when the verdict came on October 3, 1995: not guilty on both counts, after under four hours of deliberation. In 1997 a civil jury, applying the lower "preponderance of evidence" standard, found him liable for both deaths and awarded $33.5 million. Simpson died in April 2024. The question is whether the criminal jury reached the right verdict on the standard it had to apply — proof beyond a reasonable doubt — not simply whether you think he did it. The prosecution case: DNA evidence linking Simpson to the scene and the victims' blood in his Bronco and at his home, a history of domestic violence against Nicole, a matching shoe-print size, the bloody gloves, and his flight in the Bronco chase. The defence case: lead detective Mark Fuhrman was shown to have used racial slurs and later invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked if he planted evidence; the LAPD crime lab's handling of samples was sloppy; a criminalist carried a vial of Simpson's blood around for hours; and the bloody glove appeared not to fit ("If it doesn't fit, you must acquit"). Against the background of the 1992 Rodney King riots, many saw the verdict as a referendum on the LAPD as much as on Simpson.

In Roe v. Wade (1973) the US Supreme Court ruled 7–2 that the Constitution's guarantee of liberty under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment includes a right to privacy broad enough to cover a woman's decision to have an abortion. It set a trimester framework, later replaced in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) by a viability line and an "undue burden" test. For nearly 50 years it was among the most debated rulings in American law. On June 24, 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Court overruled Roe and Casey 6–3, holding that the Constitution confers no right to abortion and returning the question to the states. This case asks a legal question, not a policy one: was Roe sound constitutional law? You can think abortion should be legal and still believe Roe was poorly reasoned (as some liberal scholars, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, argued about its breadth), or oppose abortion and still accept a privacy-based right as doctrine. Arguments that Roe was right: it built on a line of privacy and bodily-autonomy precedents (Griswold v. Connecticut, Eisenstadt v. Baird); the Fourteenth Amendment protects liberties not explicitly listed; and 50 years of reliance mattered. Arguments that it was wrong: abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution and was not a recognised right when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified; the trimester scheme read like legislation; and on a contested moral question the Court should leave decisions to elected legislatures.

After a police raid on Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, Johannesburg, in July 1963, leaders of the African National Congress and its armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) were tried in Pretoria for sabotage and conspiring to overthrow the apartheid state. Nelson Mandela, already serving five years for leaving the country illegally and inciting a strike, was Accused No. 1. Instead of testifying, Mandela gave a four-hour statement from the dock on April 20, 1964, explaining that the ANC had pursued non-violent protest for decades, that peaceful options were banned and met with force (Sharpeville, 1960), and that MK turned to sabotage of infrastructure — deliberately planned to avoid loss of life — as the remaining alternative. He ended by saying democracy and equality were an ideal for which he was prepared to die. On June 12, 1964, eight accused — Mandela, Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Denis Goldberg, Ahmed Kathrada, Andrew Mlangeni and Elias Motsoaledi — were sentenced to life; Mandela served 27 years before release in 1990 and became president in 1994. The legal question was never in much doubt — the accused admitted much of the sabotage. The enduring question is moral: when a state denies all lawful means of change, is armed resistance legitimate, and where is the line? Mandela remained on the US terrorism watch list until 2008, and the debate about violence in liberation movements continues.

Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS officer who organised the logistics of deporting millions of Jews to death camps, escaped after the war and lived in Argentina under a false name. In May 1960 Mossad agents seized him outside his home in Buenos Aires and secretly flew him to Israel. He was tried in Jerusalem in 1961 — a televised trial that brought survivor testimony to a world audience — convicted of crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity, and hanged in 1962. Argentina protested to the UN Security Council, which in Resolution 138 (June 1960) declared that such violations of a member state's sovereignty could endanger international peace and asked Israel to make reparation — while explicitly saying it did not condone Eichmann's crimes. The two countries settled the dispute by joint statement that August. Arguments for the abduction: Argentina had sheltered Nazi fugitives and extradition was unlikely; the crimes were of a scale that justified extraordinary measures; the trial itself was conducted openly, with defence counsel. Arguments against: kidnapping across borders undermines the international legal order and sets a precedent any state can invoke; Israel did not exist when the crimes were committed, raising jurisdiction questions; an international tribunal would have been more legitimate. Hannah Arendt's reporting on the trial ("the banality of evil") added another layer of controversy.

In 1951 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted in New York of conspiracy to commit espionage — passing atomic and military secrets to the Soviet Union. Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced both to death, and they were executed at Sing Sing on June 19, 1953, the only US civilians executed for espionage during the Cold War. The key witnesses were Ethel's brother David Greenglass, a Manhattan Project machinist, and his wife Ruth; David received 15 years and Ruth was never charged. What we know now: - The Venona decrypts, released by the NSA in 1995, and later statements by Soviet handler Alexander Feklisov leave little doubt that Julius ran a Soviet spy ring (code names "Antenna" and "Liberal"). - Ethel had no code name. In 1996 and 2001, David Greenglass said he had lied at trial when he testified that Ethel typed up his notes, to protect his wife. Prosecutors had privately described evidence against Ethel as thin and saw her arrest partly as leverage on Julius. - Venona does suggest Ethel knew of the espionage and helped recruit Ruth. - Greenglass's atomic information was of limited value next to what Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall provided, which bears on whether the death penalty was proportionate. Judge each conviction and the sentence.

From November 1945 to October 1946, the International Military Tribunal — one judge and one prosecution team each from the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and France — tried leading figures of Nazi Germany for conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and the newly defined crimes against humanity. Of the 22 defendants who stood trial, 12 were sentenced to death, 7 received prison terms from 10 years to life, and 3 were acquitted. Göring killed himself before his execution. The case for the trials as justice: the defendants had counsel of their choice, saw the evidence (much of it the regime's own documents), and three were acquitted — not the outcome of a show trial. The alternative many leaders favoured was summary execution. Nuremberg established that heads of state and officials are personally accountable and that "following orders" is no defence, laying the groundwork for the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals and the International Criminal Court. The case for "victors' justice": only the losers were tried; Allied acts such as the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima were never examined; the Soviet judges sat in judgment over aggression while the USSR had itself invaded Poland in 1939 and carried out the Katyn massacre (which the Soviets tried to pin on the Germans at Nuremberg). Critics also argue crimes against peace were applied retroactively, breaching the principle of no punishment without prior law.

In 1925 Tennessee's Butler Act made it a crime to teach in public schools "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible." Substitute teacher John Scopes agreed to be the test case, backed by the ACLU. The trial in Dayton pitted Clarence Darrow for the defence against three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, and became a national spectacle — climaxing when Darrow called Bryan himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible. The judge confined the case to one question: did Scopes teach evolution? He admitted it. The jury convicted in about nine minutes and Scopes was fined $100. In 1927 the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the law but voided the conviction on a technicality (the judge, not the jury, had set the fine). The law stayed on the books until 1967; in Epperson v. Arkansas (1968) the US Supreme Court struck down a similar ban. One view: the verdict was legally correct — the law was clear, he broke it, and the remedy for a bad law is repeal. Another: the law itself violated freedom of speech and the separation of church and state, so no conviction under it was valid. A third: the whole thing was a staged publicity contest, and the conviction mattered less than the debate.