Archive
Austerity Will Leave Us Crying ’96 Tears’
Aging baby boomers may remember a 1960s rock band that sported an all-time great name. That band — Question Mark and the Mysterians — may now have a worthy rival on the name front. Make way for Reinhart-Rogoff and the Austerians. Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and...
A Parenting Priority
Any kid can easily rattle off a list of their parents' biggest sins. When I was younger, my gripes included my mom and dad stealing my Halloween candy and not letting me watch R-rated movies. Later on, I was ticked that my parents made me go to school on Senior Ditch...
Narco-State Building
After 11 years of war, $664 billion spent, 2,210 Americans dead, more than 35,000 of our troops maimed and shattered, and our good reputation spent — what have we built in Afghanistan? According to a top international law enforcement official, you and I are building...
The War on Sex
Abortion, condoms, Things that vex, Those who would Prohibit sex. Fewer American teens are getting pregnant and the national abortion rate is falling. Time to break out the champagne and the bananas flambé, right? But many religious zealots aren't celebrating these...
Whitewashing 8 Awful Years
Gosh, it seems like only yesterday that we saw George W. Bush on TV reading The Pet Goat to some second graders. Now he's all grown up and has an entire , super-duper, king-sized library filled with big books and other neat stuff — all dedicated to him. Bush's...
Useless Baggage
They've hit a new low. Citing significant concerns about long lines at airports and flight delays caused by the furlough of air-traffic controllers, Congress let the Federal Aviation Administration override strict sequestration rules and redirect funds within its...
This Week in OtherWords: April 24, 2013
This week in OtherWords, Jill Richardson looks at the Texas factory explosion in the context of whether we should be using so much nitrogen fertilizer in the first place and William A. Collins and I review recent progress toward ending the prohibition on pot. Here's a...
A Reasonable Food Fight
President Barack Obama wants to revamp Washington's global food aid system. His 2014 budget request would transfer much of the program from the Department of Agriculture to the Agency for International Development and make other changes that the White House predicts...
Our Biggest Terrorist Threat
Acts of terror like the ones committed at the Boston Marathon are reprehensible and lack moral or logical explanation. They rock us to our core. They also unite us in common purpose. Victims and their families seem to become our own loved ones. We want to ease their...
Shameless Bipartisanship
A quick Google search of "politicians are" returns the following four suggestions: like diapers, sociopaths, the lowest form of life, and liars. A recent Public Policy Polling study found politicians to be less popular than the conqueror Genghis Khan or cockroaches....
