Archive
A Tax Cut for Tax Cheats
If the most frequently dialed federal agency in America can't even answer two-thirds of the millions of phone calls it gets, should the government cut its budget? Congress thinks so. That agency is the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). And lawmakers have hacked at its...
Use Your Words
On the last day of January, I lost a friend. Cancer took her in the prime of life, at age 45. Just seven days before she succumbed, I sat at her side, trying to tell her what she meant to me. Cedwyn was the life of the party. Wherever she went instantly became the...
A Bailed-Out Banker Lectures about Fairness
Jamie Dimon is annoyed. He’s fed up with the populist attitude that’s sweeping the country. He’s not going to take it anymore. That’s why he recently bleated to reporters that "banks are under assault." Well, not every bank. He was talking about JPMorgan Chase —...
A Sweet Spot
I don’t have any cute photos of my daughter’s chubby face smeared with frosting from her first birthday party. Already pregnant with my son, I’d become a child nutrition zealot in response to my double dose of motherhood. Instead of wrecking a big sugary cake, my bald...
Wooing the Latino Vote
Old McPontiff Had a Farm
Old songs occasionally need to be refreshed with updated verses. Here's one: "Old McPope, he had a farm /E-I-E-I-O/ and on that farm he had a cow…a donkey… chickens…ostriches…and rabbits…/E-I-E-I-O!" Who knew that the Pope had a farm? Well, he does. Fifteen miles...
In OtherWords: January 28, 2015
This week in OtherWords, Jill Richardson explains why you should be your own valentine and Joel Kendrick tackles the sports world's cheating habit. Do you want to make sure you don’t miss the latest from OtherWords? Please subscribe to our free weekly newsletter or...
Say It Ain’t So
What should sports fans do when our heroes turn out to be frauds? Maybe you grew up watching Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire breaking home run records, as I did, only to find out that they (and just about everyone else in professional baseball) had been using...
A Window into Leelah’s World
When I decided to write a column about Leelah Alcorn, I initially tried to do it without using singular pronouns. The Cincinnati teen killed herself by jumping in front of a tractor trailer late last year. "I feel like a girl trapped in a boy’s body," she wrote in a...
Enhanced Misinformation Techniques
When the Senate released its shocking report on CIA torture late last year, it renewed a debate from the Bush years about the merits of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques." Polls released afterward suggested that most Americans thought that torture was...
