Slain WDBJ reporter Alison Parker's father, Andy Parker, has become the latest grieving parent calling for gun control. We are all seduced by the notion that simply understanding the impact on real people of the failure to create meaningful universal background checks will somehow lead to a rational response by Congress. We were certain this …
Category: Culture
Summer reading: there’s still time, pt. 2 – fiction
Summer reading 2015 would not be complete without Go Set a Watchman, the book that Harper Lee reportedly wrote before she published To Kill a Mockingbird. It is told from the perspective of Atticus Finch's daughter Scout (now Jean Louise) some 20 years after the time frame of To Kill a Mockingbird. The Guardian and other critics …
Continue reading Summer reading: there’s still time, pt. 2 – fiction
Summer reading: there’s still time, pt. 1 – non-fiction
A late Labor Day and temporary physical disability have extended my usual orgy of summer reading, with both non-fiction and fiction offerings to share with you. Because time is running out, I'll keep the list short. In the first category, the book Frank seeks to answer the question of "how did a disheveled, intellectually combative gay …
Continue reading Summer reading: there’s still time, pt. 1 – non-fiction
The Holocaust through a child’s eyes
In 1990, my husband and I visited Prague, including the old Jewish section - the synagogue, the cemetery, and the tiny adjacent museum displaying drawings done by Prague children during their imprisonment in Terezin, the Nazi concentration camp outside the Czech capital. The children signed the drawings, and scribbled their ages - nine or 10 years …
What kind of animal would kill this lion for sport?
Walter Palmer's pleasure in life is apparently hunting and killing large animals, legally or illegally. In the last few days, millions of people around the world have come to know that the American "sportsman" has slain Zimbabwe national treasure Cecil, a magnificent 13-year-old black-maned lion, whom tourists came from far and wide to see. Palmer's guides illegally strapped …
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S.C. mass murder prompts forgiveness?
Thirty-six hours after Dylann Storm Roof slaughtered their loved ones in a Charleston, S.C AME Church, family members of the victims grieved their loss but urged the mass murderer be treated with grace, dignity and forgiveness. Like Nadine Collier, who lost her mother, they echoed her despair but also her goodness. “I will never talk to …
Tom Brady’s punishment – Oh, nooooo
I long ago gave up my belief in the Easter bunny. (The rabbits who regularly destroy my garden took care of that.) Santa Claus is a relic of a decades-past childhood. But now, harsh reality demands that I can no longer cling to the idea of Tom Brady, man god. Mr. Perfect. The National Football …
Time to rewind the state film tax credit
New catering services. Sound engineering. Construction of sets. New sound stages. Trailers for sets. Porta-potties. All side businesses that claim to have prospered in Massachusetts ever since the state implemented a 25 percent tax credit on production costs and salaries plus a break on certain sales taxes to entice production companies to set up shop …
Normalizing U.S./Cuban relations a mix of nitty-gritty and key principles
I just returned from State Department briefings for editorialists from across the country and posted the following to the website of the Association of Opinion Journalists, just one of several key issues covered in Monday's day-long sessions. The announcement of a changed relationship between Cuba and the United States is not a kumbaya moment. There’s much …
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Cuban impressions, pt. 4 – health care and religion, how much is spin?
As I process my brief experience in Cuba, I am left with many questions, especially about the Cuban health care system and the status of religion. Mostly, I can convey what we were told by guides and academics. I pass this along without the benefit of direct experience. Health care: Periodically the international media have covered the …
Continue reading Cuban impressions, pt. 4 – health care and religion, how much is spin?
Marjorie Arons-Barron 