"All politics is loco," Senator Ed Markey told a gathering of the New England Council on Monday, paraphrasing a favorite saying of House Speaker Tip O'Neill of Cambridge. Just part of the craziness this week is the President's unilateral decision to activate the California national guard and use active duty Marines to control crowd protests …
Continue reading Markey fights Trump assault on Massachusetts – and beyond
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi is the remarkable memoir of an Albanian girl, told in the first person starting when she was just seven years old. Ypi sees the world and her homeland through the perspective of her very complicated family. Her grandmother, Nini, who lives with them, …
Continue reading Authoritarianism versus liberalism: a political memoir
This time the pollsters were right. They had held all along that the election outcome was within the margin of error. It could go either way. And so it did. But in the wrong direction. Donald J. Trump won on a campaign of lies and grievances, fear and loathing. We’re a deeply divided nation, preferring …
Continue reading Margin of error won. We lost. A first look.
American Mother by Collum McCann is an as-told-to account by Diane Foley of the 2014 death of her son, freelance American journalist James W. Foley. McCann, the author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin, is a master storyteller, tells the first and last chapters of this riveting book in the third person, but …
Continue reading Fanatics and vigilantes: two books with red flags
Our phone has been ringing off the hook; our electronic mailboxes flooded. Friends, even staunch supporters of Joe Biden, have come to accept the idea that he is not well enough to serve another term. Worse, that he didn't have the stamina even to win a second term. The stakes could not be higher. Now, …
Remember when we scoffed at Richard Nixon telling David Frost that the President couldn’t be prosecuted for Watergate because “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.” We thought that our Constitution established “a government of laws, and not of men” and that no person, even the President of United States, was above …
Continue reading Remind me, why did we fight our Revolution?
It wasn't long ago that I wrote that I thought there was nothing to be gained by a Trump-Biden debate. Knowing that presidential debates are usually more about style than substance, I said that, if there were to be a debate, there should be real-time fact checking. Without it, I feared that Trump's repeated falsehoods …
You all know the cliche - "if it bleeds, it leads." Local news, and increasingly national networks, promote stories off the police scanner. As a result, for decades, the perception of crime has exceeded the reality of crime across society. Naturally, if you've been mugged or a neighbor's house broken into, crime is indeed a …
So, now he's said it. President Biden told Howard Stern recently that he'd be willing to debate Donald Trump. With all due respect, I disagree. I just don't think there's anything to be gained. I have always embraced the high-minded goals of candidate debate: well-reasoned,fact-based discussion; values-driven argumentation; clarification, prioritization of positions. Dignified dialogue serves …
Continue reading To debate or not debate: new rules are the question
How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion by David McRaney offers what could be an eye-opening look at how to talk to “the other.” It’s about much more than when every day becomes Thanksgiving Day and seemingly reasonable people turn out to be crazy Uncle Harry. McRaney shares what he has …
Marjorie Arons-Barron 