Commentary PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania—When Drew Maggi stepped into the batter’s box in the eighth inning as a pinch hitter, fans at PNC Park knew they were about to witness something extraordinary. Maggi, a 33-year-old infielder who had played over 1,100 games for over 13 seasons in the minor leagues, was about to take his first pitch…

“Each person’s life is a kind of battle,” the philosopher Epictetus wrote more than 2,000 years ago. What was true then is true now. After all, what is life if not a series of challenges, even small ones? The baby has colic, Joe’s late for work, traffic on I-95 is backed up for miles, and…

Commentary In early August Economic Information Daily, a communist Chinese government mouthpiece, accused the multibillion-dollar online video game industry of peddling “spiritual opium” to Chinese teenagers. Comparing video game playing to opium addiction has explicit historical and national security connections. Opium addiction, spurred by Great Britain, undermined China’s social and political cohesion and physically harmed…

NASA’s Mars science rover Perseverance has collected and stashed away the first of numerous mineral samples that the U.S. space agency hopes to retrieve from the surface of the Red Planet for analysis on Earth, NASA said on Friday. Tools attached to Perseverance and operated by mission specialists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near…