Mary Ebert of Brookings offers her thoughts on working parents and their paid time off needs.
“Year of Wonders” is a novel by Geraldine Brooks. Although fiction, it is based on the experience of the small village of Eyam, in Derbyshire, England. The year is 1666 and the subject is a plague, carried to this small village on a bolt of cloth from London.
It was half-past second coffee and darn near to French toast time and it had been very quiet at the round table, that general headquarters of the World Dilemma Think Tank.
In an interview with the Financial Times, the longtime Washington political analyst Charlie Cook noted that President Joe Biden’s job approval rating has been stuck below 50% for a long time — 2 1/2 years — and shows no signs of rising above 50% anytime soon. “There seems to be virtually no elasticity there,” Cook told the paper. “I wonder whether people have just changed the channel — they’ve just written him off.”
It should come as no surprise that the international climate conference COP 28 supported the tripling of renewable energy, the doubling of energy efficiency, and the need to capture methane emissions. What was unexpected was the call to triple global nuclear energy by 2050.
Read what your neighbors are thinking — and writing — about.
The year slouched to an end, no one mourned its passing, none among us hesitated to turn the calendar page. What lies ahead is more misery in the Middle East, a dispiriting presidential campaign between two old men the country would rather not see compete again, and more debate about what constitutes hate in a country that once liked to use the phrase “good neighbor.”
Read what your neighbors are thinking — and writing — about.
Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is fundamentalist at its core — with fundamentalism being understood as a psychological rather than a religious concept.
The story of the 2024 campaign so far is the effort by Democrats and their appointees to use criminal charges and lawsuits to force former President Donald Trump out of the race for a second term in the White House.
It depends on what the definition of “is” is. Right now, former Gov. Nikki Haley is considered Donald Trump’s biggest threat to winning his third consecutive Republican presidential nomination.
The Hamas surprise attack on Israeli citizens was selected as the year’s most important international story by religion-beat journalists, in part because it led to “spikes in Islamophobia and antisemitism” when Israel launched its massive counterattack on Gaza.
Try as I may, I simply cannot comprehend the thinking of Texas Republican officials who forced a 31-year-old mother of two to flee the state to secure a legal abortion in order to spare the doomed fetus in her womb from terrible suffering, preserve her ability to bear a third child, and possibly save her life.
Now before you can sneak away, here comes that pharaoh of the feed-store, that baron of the bunkhouse, that titan of the tack room … Windy Wilson.
Like all the Republican candidates for president, Nikki Haley is trying to find the secret formula for running against Donald Trump. The most recent Fox News national poll — in which the former president is leading Ron DeSantis by 57 points and Haley by 60 — shows that no one has discovered the formula yet.
Read what your neighbors are thinking — and writing — about.
Early in the premiere episode of Norman Lear’s sitcom “Sunday Dinner,” the beautiful environmentalist T.T. Fagori raised her eyes to heaven and, with a sigh, entered a spiritual minefield. “Chief?” she asked God. “You got a minute?”
Watching coverage of The Three Equivocating Presidents on TV — that is, the recent House Committee on Education hearing that featured testimony from three lofty academics — I found myself marveling that such a trio of seeming nonentities had been put in charge of prestige universities in the first place. Never mind the Ivy League, I told a friend. The athletic director at the University of Arkansas would have explained himself far better. Of course, that fellow faces hostile public inquisitions all the time.
Rummage through a used-book store and you might encounter two forbidding volumes with the anodyne title “North America.” In his autobiography, the author of those books, Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), said that this work was not worth the time needed to peruse them. “I can recommend no one to read it now in order that he may be instructed or amused,” he said.
The mind is a strange and fascinating instrument. It can be compared to an old and trusted friend or a rowdy and troublesome teenager. It can seem to be deep in sleep or wide eyed awake. Perhaps because it is so unruly and hard to understand, we have invented all kinds of alternatives to help us cope.
