Have you ever wondered how an everyday object becomes a museum artifact? Or why a museum will collect some things but not others?
Going for gold has taken on a different connotation since the Supreme Court ruled college athletes can be paid by parties not directly affiliated with their schools. Now, another ideal this nation once embraced – the scholar-athlete – appears headed to the dustbin.
Consider current county commissioners
Have you been looking forward to summer? It’s finally here!
Do the right thing, Karen Lowe
Sometimes good news comes with a cloudy lining. That’s the case with the recent announcement that Social Security and Medicare are financially stronger than it was feared during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
It’s just a few days past Father’s Day. And, in fact, I am writing this article on Father’s Day – so my mind is on fathers.
BLP's financial waste
The Michigan Senate has passed a bipartisan measure to pause the gas tax and sales and use taxes on fuel between now through Sept. 15.
I’m a big advocate for recycling and sustainability, but not necessarily in every way, shape or form. Like, can no one out there think of a new idea for TV shows and movies? They’re all remakes of or sequels to something from years ago, and typically they’re not nearly as good.
Once again, we find ourselves here. The timeline is all too familiar: a horrific shooting, shock, thoughts and prayers, distractions from the real issues, distortions about what gun reform truly is, then bids to get something passed by Congress, and fears of shootings happening again.
Fifty years ago this month, burglars broke into the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., the first chapter of a story that would transform American politics. The anniversary comes as Congress investigates the greatest constitutional crisis since then.
What is the difference between writing and texting? If you were to pose that question to youths from Generation Alpha — born starting in 2010 — many of them may be hard-pressed to answer. Members of younger generations, including Gen Z, have grown up with cellphones as part of their everyday…
Like many states in the U.S., Michigan has had a long, complicated relationship with regard to the land we live on today.
Have the courage to lead
Michigan officials are cautioning drivers to slow down and pay attention while on the roads after seeing crashes and serious injuries rise in the state and nationally in 2021.
Old age. Trauma. Cancer. During these seasons of suffering, we speak of the victims as if they’ve done us all a great service by reminding us “what matters most.” I suppose, in a sense, they have. People speak of family and faith during times of trial and heartache. One can almost never spen…
Salute takes a village
Lake Michigan has the dubious honor of being the deadliest Great Lake, with more than half of the drowning fatalities occurring there in any given year.
This is it? This is all?
My dad, William Smith, better known to his friends and family as Bill, was born at the end of World War II, the very day of the Potsdam Conference, where Japan agreed to unconditional surrender and President Harry Truman ordered an end to atomic bombing.
A new report by the advocacy group Education Trust-Midwest omits important recent information that fails to support its thesis about Michigan’s highly “regressive” school funding system.
Columns are strange lately
Today is my 59th birthday. I am two days late on my column and normally this would throw me into a tizzy. But once you’ve been diagnosed with the big C, not much can rattle your cage.
For the United States to have any hope of restoring itself as a global beacon of democracy, the Biden administration must take a firm and consistent stand when dealing with dictators. If other nations’ leaders can’t embrace the fundamentals of democracy, they don’t deserve to be welcomed on …
The back-to-back massacres at a Buffalo grocery store and a Texas elementary school have brought into sharp focus the disparity in federal gun law that forbids people younger than 18 from buying handguns but allows them to purchase semiautomatic rifles. That someone too young to buy alcohol …
Americans maintain a bargain with their police: Officers will run toward danger while the rest of us seek shelter, and in exchange we cede to police enormous discretion, abundant resources and the benefit of the doubt regarding their actions. That bargain is too rarely examined absent a shoc…
As a little kid in grade school, I learned that oil discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859 changed the world. Why Titusville sticks in my mind, I have no idea.
Second Amendment rights
The recent mass shootings have terrified the nation. It’s not just the ferocity of the attacks. It’s the randomness of the victims, whether elementary school children or elderly women shopping at the neighborhood supermarket. People doing normal things, the things all of us do, find themselv…
In a little less than a month, our nation will recognize Independence Day. But this year, it is harder to recognize some of the core aspects of that independence our forebears declared so long ago.
Saving us from crocodiles
The war in Ukraine, now in its fourth month, has caused many of us to challenge key beliefs previously taken for granted. Europe, it turns out, isn’t some special region of the world immune to the depravities and brutalities of armed conflict. The European Union, an organization often referr…
What will you do this summer? Now that the warmer weather is with us, do you have any plans?
2024 presidential candidate?
To see the smiling faces of the children murdered at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, is unbearable. The killing of 19 pupils and two teachers is not, as it should be, unthinkable. It comes a decade after 20 children and six staff members were shot dead at Sandy Hook Elementary Schoo…
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg likely didn’t drive on Michigan’s “damn roads” to get to the Detroit Regional Chamber’s policy conference last week, hosted at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. If he had, he would notice the reality here doesn’t always match the ambitious rhetoric.
The most important recent long-term election result may have been Brad Raffensperger’s resounding victory in Georgia’s Republican primary for secretary of state.
About what happened in Uvalde, Texas
The slaughter at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, has stunned a country tragically accustomed to mass shootings. Coming just days after the atrocity at Buffalo, New York, this latest outrage has strengthened calls for tighter gun laws. This time, perhaps, something might actually be done.
In the aftermath of our almost daily mass shootings in America, you hear a lot of discussion about their causes on TV, or in print media and on the internet. The discussions usually focus on the availability of guns, our violent social media, the failures of our mental health system, the fac…
‘To raise a child who is comfortable enough to leave you means you’ve done your job. They are not ours to keep, but to teach them to soar on their own.” – Unknown
The 50th anniversary of the Watergate arrests is approaching: The first break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters was on May 28, 1972, but the botched return on June 17 produced arrests and eventually brought Richard Nixon’s presidency to a premature end on Aug. 8, 1974.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s name has been uttered many times since another school shooting rocked the nation.
Last week I cried longer and harder than I have in a very, very long time. For three days, I dropped my kids off at school with visions of picking them up at the close of the afternoon in body bags. I could not shift that image from my mind as the hours of the morning ticked by.
The Michigan Bureau of Elections last week cut the field of Republican candidates running for governor in half over failure to garner enough legitimate signatures, raising questions about responsibility and the role these signatures should play.
I cannot recall
We’ve all had around a week to process it, but I know many of you are still reeling from the horror of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Two dead teachers, 19 dead elementary schoolchildren. As I read of how the gunman locked himself in a classroom with those kids and that this was how t…
Another Mother for Peace
It’s that time of year again, when road crews are out in force and construction projects are often encountered on local, state and federal roadways.
There are no adjectives that can accurately describe the gruesome act committed by 18-year-old Salvador Ramos at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. He killed 19 children and two teachers. “Evil” is about as close as it gets.
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