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No love for Valentine’s Day

I decided to rerun this column from Feb. 13, 2020, for three reasons. It echoes sentiment I continue to hear from young people, the peer educator response was honest, and it is especially poignant to me since it ran about a month before the pandemic. Q. I hate Valentine’s Day. I once loved ...

Democracy’s future not assured

By the time the writer Thomas Mann left Germany in 1933, democracy in that country was a bygone thing. When he reached the United States in 1938, after years of exile in Europe, the world was on the brink of World War II, pushed there by German nationalism gone crazy under the direction of its ...

OP-ED: Attending to Linden Hall

When tourists visit the estate known as Linden Hall at St. James Park, they typically focus on the visible things like its amazing stonework and Tudor-style architecture. They see the sense of permanence rising from the hills a few miles from Dawson. What often is left unobserved is how that ...

Snow days, middle school pose challenges

Responses to my Jan. 29 column on snow days: Q. As a parent, I reacted to your column about remote snow days much like the teen who wrote to you. When I was a teen, we did have days off for snow, but they weren’t like today. My brother and I would wake up to listen to the radio and then go ...

ICE’s purposeful, cruel blunders

Many of the searing political moments of our time prompt stick-in-the-mind photographs, like the image from the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, of Black residents of Birmingham, Ala., being sprayed by powerful fire hoses. Or the image of the young girl kneeling next to the body of one ...

Human stagnation

I grew up in the 1950s on a hill overlooking a railroad yard in western Pennsylvania, where my grandfather, two uncles, and my father all worked first as firemen, and then as engineers. In our town, the railroad wasn’t just an employer, it was the economy, the daily sounds, and the clock that ...