A heartbreaking result, a lost nation

On the day the United States of America went to the polls to elect its next president, 93,000 new cases of the coronavirus were added to what was already the highest total in the world, and 1,200 more Americans lost their lives. That alone was reason enough for any president to be ridden out of …

Want to make America great? How about we get back to basic decency and tolerance…

It was late October, 1956. A cold rain was falling and the playground at William Cullen Bryant school (named after the 19th century poet and editor of the New York Evening Post) was a labyrinth of mud puddles. We were perhaps a week away from the presidential election that pitted the eminently decent Adlai Stevenson …

Why, Bobby? On the intense reaction to Orr’s bad call

When I first heard that Bobby Orr had taken out an ad in the New Hampshire Union-Leader supporting Donald Trump in Tuesday’s election, I was furious. It felt like a betrayal. A profound act of faithlessness that called into question everything we thought Orr to be. I wrote a blog and posted it, expecting the …

California is our future – and it’s burning

I think of California as a peek into our collective future. From the headlong greed of the Gold Rush in 1849 through Hollywood in the early part of the 20th century, Haight-Ashbury and the hippies, urban sprawl and smog, and the vast military spending that has fueled the state’s gigantic economic engine since the Cold …