Let’s talk geopolitics. Now that three female senators — Kamala Harris of California, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — have used deft debate performances to rock the septuagenarian male front-runners off their pedantic pedestals, geography rather than gender is coming into play. The United States may have a national culture — and television (and then […]

“These aren’t people. These are animals.” These words alone set off the alarm — the fascism alarm, you might say. Donald Trump is by no means the sole source of America’s democracy nosedive, but he’s its current, deeply troubling manifestation.  Should I write this week about the wars he wants to wage or the refugee border […]

Purely as a sporting proposition, I would love to watch Donald Trump debate Sen. Kamala Harris. The combination of her race, her beauty and her lacerating wit would scare him half to death. I’m guessing he’d concoct an excuse not to show up. Not his type, you see. Definitely not his type at all. That […]

Recent reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that suicide rates among American farmers are higher than any other occupational group, and five times higher than that of the population as a whole. One is tempted to argue that this reflects the decline of community life in rural America. Farmers historically received […]

The 448-page Mueller report has been public for two months, so it might seem strange that the Justice Department’s original instructions to special counsel Robert Mueller, outlining what he was assigned to investigate, are still a secret. But they are. And now, it turns out those instructions were more extensive than previously known. Until now, […]

My favorite vacation spot is any place with an ocean and a beach—God’s natural playground created for fun in the sun. And during summer beach vacation families can educate themselves about ocean clean-up and conservation. Oceans cover 71 percent of the planet and are home to important species and ecosystems that humans rely on for […]

My house looks like the set of “Antiques Roadshow” — if the show was about useless, outdated junk instead of precious heirlooms. Duck lamps, VHS tapes, CDs, computers that use floppy discs, a box of dot-matrix printer paper, books that I will never read again, shoeboxes full of photographs. I have clothes that look like […]