Fifty-four years ago today John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas. In his inaugural address fewer than three years earlier, he had inspired many of my generation with the words, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
Read MoreThis week Team TRUMP sent me the following email:
Friend, CNN is at it again. Their latest phony poll claims that 64% of Americans have less confidence in President Trump than they did one year ago. Yet of more than 1,000 people interviewed, just 24% were Republicans.
Read MoreGuess which of yesterday’s headlines are false.
Read MoreLast week White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, "the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.”
Read MoreWhen Sam Clovis, President Trump’s nominee to be the Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist, was asked to list his academic credentials in science or agriculture, he answered, “None.”
Read MoreAt his memorial service on Saturday, my old friend and distant cousin Bayard Storey was eulogized for both his scientific accomplishments and his political activism.
Read More“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Joseph N. Welch to Senator Joe McCarthy, June 9th, 1954
Read MoreChris Long will be working for nothing this year. The 6’3” 270-pound defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles said this week that he’s donating his next 10 weeks’ salary to increasing educational opportunities for underserved kids in the three cities where he has played professional football. Earlier he had given his first six weeks’ pay for scholarships in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia. That’s 16 weeks, the entire NFL season, for which he is paid $1 million.
Read More“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Robert Frost, The Death of the Hired Man
Not if you’re a Rohingya.
Read More"If Bob Corker had any honor or decency,” Steve Bannon told Sean Hannity, “he should resign immediately.”
Read MoreThree movements marked my coming of age five decades ago: civil rights, environmental protection and peace. They share a simple theme: respect for the earth, for each other, and for other nations and cultures.
Read MoreI didn’t think too much about the news because, like most people, I knew the Olympic bomber was an overweight guy with a mustache. Then I remembered – the fat guy, Richard Jewell, had been the victim of a rush to judgment by both police and the press. The real bomber was Eric Rudolph.
Read MoreTwo or three decades ago some free local newspapers instituted something called “voluntary pay,” in which they asked their readers to put money in an envelope enclosed in the paper – and assured them they would continue to receive the paper whether they ponied up or not. This was an interesting strategy, one which made no sense to me and whose results were so sufficiently modest that the idea never caught on with the industry.
Read MoreRereading A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson’s riotous account of hiking the Appalachian Trail with the delightfully curmudgeonly Katz, made me think of two things.
Read More“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) .
Read MoreA new trail begins just west of Little Long Pond on the Mt. Desert Land & Garden Preserve, which consists of 1,165 acres abutting Acadia National Park. The Richard Trail is named for Richard Rockefeller, a doctor who for years chaired the advisory board of Doctors Without Borders and died when the plane he was piloting crashed in fog and heavy rain three years ago.
Read MoreSeventy-seven years ago yesterday, at four in the afternoon, the first wave of German bombers, 348 in all, flew without warning across the English Channel to bomb London and other cities in England. This was the beginning of the Blitz, which went on nightly for eight months and left 43,000 British civilians dead. Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle . . . this fortress built by Nature for herself” turned out to be little protection “against infection and the hand of war.”
Read MoreThis is a simple story about people who do their jobs well.
I’m judging a statewide newspaper contest, which consists of entries from six local daily papers, all of them multi-issue series of interest and importance to their communities. Contrary to the constant barrage of reports about fake news, sensationalism, and bias, these submissions bespeak a profession that is, well, professional. They are not large, metropolitan newspapers, but small, one-time family-owned operations, who charge their few reporters to dig deep into issues that affect their readers and the communities they serve.
Read MoreNot really, of course, as it’s still summer on the Gregorian calendar. But the light has changed, as has the angle of the sun, and the color of the sea.
Read MoreTo combat a vision as malevolent as that currently hovering over America, it’s not enough to counter it with a series of bland policy bullet points aimed at attracting disparate groups of people by offering each something that won’t drive the others away – the way the Democrats keep trying to expand their coalition by appealing to just one more identity group.
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