Getty Image A week into Operation Epic Fury, the administration’s stated objectives have shifted by the hour and by the speaker: eliminate the nuclear program, roll back ballistic missiles, defang the proxies, respond to Israeli pressure, achieve regime change. The timeline is “four weeks or more,” with hints of ground troops “if necessary.” What constitutes …
Continue reading Trump’s Endgame: It’s Not What He Thinks It Is
Call me a masochist. I watched all of Trump’s State-of-the-Union speech. The President painted a picture of the nation as he wanted to see it. It was a swirling mix of fantasy, twisted rhetoric and outright lies. We’ve heard his shameless exaggerations about how many wars he has ended, how he has lowered drug prices …
Continue reading SOTUS: More Spin from the Bloviator-in-Chief
King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild was first published in 1998, but its 2020 relaunch, with a forward by noted author Barbara Kingsolver and the author’s own afterword, attests to its relevance today. A dogged historical researcher, Hochschild documents the shameful capture of Africa’s Congo river and territory by the rapacious megalomaniac King Leopold II …
Paper Girl: a Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by journalist Beth Macy is a perfect complement to my just-reviewed Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. Think of Paper Girl as small-town Ohio, part 2, the contemporary, non-fiction version. Macy grew up in Urbana, Ohio, graduating from high school in 1982. Though four generations …
For a populist President who campaigned against the foreign entanglements of his predecessors and raged against nation building, it’s stunning that he would launch a military action against Venezuela that the vast majority of Americans oppose, at least without authorization by his reflexively compliant Congress. Trump traditionally says his critics suffer from Trump derangement syndrome. …
Continue reading Trump says the U.S. will run Venezuela. What’s next?
Incumbency combined with voter inertia are a mighty force in keeping officials in office, be they high-performing or flawed. Nowhere is this truer than in down-ballot races, when all the excitement is at the top (e.g., the 2026 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, the race for Massachusetts governor and controversial referenda (e.g., statewide rent control …
Continue reading Race for Middlesex District Attorney : more than just another generational contest?
The Granddaughter is a pretty straightforward novel by German writer Bernhard Schlink, translated by Charlotte Collins. The time is contemporary Germany, and Berlin book store owner Kaspar comes home to find wife Birgit dead in the bathtub, apparently by drowning. They had met in the early 60’s, in a divided country. They had fallen in …
During my tenure at WCVB-TV, Channel 5, I would write an annual Thanksgiving week editorial railing at all the turkeys in our lives. Favorite targets were members of the legislature who......., drivers who........, people in lines at the store who........., teenagers who............, television advertisers who............ The presentation was dramatically enhanced by the station's super-talented Creative …
A post-election newsletter from a member of Congress proclaimed “Blue Wave.” Other commentators had similar expressions of euphoria. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Yes, the world felt a lot better on Wednesday. Robust turnouts in a variety of races across the country and double-digit margins for Democrats of different ideological stripes were the …
An Education: How I changed My mind about Schools and Almost Everything Else is an eye-opening and deeply personal memoir, intricately wound up with the story of how our nation has been swept up with and jerked around by changing approaches to education. It's not often that a highly visible scholar or public official admits …
Marjorie Arons-Barron 