It was raining heavily the morning I drove into Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which gave me pause as I drove down the steep gorge where, 128 years ago, 20 million tons of water breached the South Fork dam, gathered force as it surged 14 miles down Little Conemaugh Creek, and hit the city at 40 miles per hour. Ten minutes later, Johnstown was gone.
Although it’s a traditionally Democratic region, with a strong labor history and an 8.5% edge in Democratic voter registration, this is Trump country. Donald Trump crushed Hillary Clinton by 25 points in the county, and he remains hugely popular here.
As the son of a man who died by suicide, the father of a daughter working to destigmatize mental illness, and an old newspaperman devoted to the First Amendment, the sorrowful story of Conrad Roy, III, and Michelle Carter has haunted me.
Here, in this divergence of great minds, is a clue to understanding the chasm in America over climate change. Scientists, who see themselves as seekers of true knowledge, are united on the reality of climate change and the role humans play in it.
Yesterday the United States joined the only other countries that have not signed the Paris climate accord: Syria and Nicaragua.
When Harvard president Drew Faust recently told the 50th reunion class of 1967 that “this fall’s freshman class will be the first majority minority class in the college’s history,” the audience applauded. The incoming freshmen will look very different from those who arrived in the fall of 1963, when black students – both African American and African – were only one percent of their number, and men outnumbered women by 4-1. In effect, the audience, which was composed preponderantly of old white men, was applauding its own passing.
I should take a trip, I thought to myself, as I perused some interesting destinations in the news.
I’m a nonbeliever who loves to visit churches – all kinds of churches: massive Gothic cathedrals, plain Quaker meetinghouses, Buddhist pagodas. I go, not just to see the architecture but to experience the spirit of a place, as I went on Sunday to Riverside Church, which rises above the Hudson River on Harlem’s Morningside Heights.
“The simple truth is this: America is the only major democracy in the world that allows politicians to pick their own voters” (David Daley, Ratf**ked).
“I have heard this with Boston hockey fans too, being pretty racist towards PK Subban when he played for the Canadiens,” my son Daniel wrote me reflecting on the racist slurs recently shouted at Baltimore Outfielder Adam Jones at Fenway Park. “Dad, is the city really this notoriously racist?”
In David Daley’s eyes Chris Jankowski is a genius. Jankowski is both the hero and anti-hero, of Ratf**ked, of Daley’s “story of how Republicans turned looming demographic disaster into legislative majorities so unbreakable, so impregnable, that none of the outcomes are in doubt until after the 2020 census.”
Recently, an old friend, a retired doctor who volunteers at the free clinic in Providence, Rhode Island, described the anger of many of the patients he sees.
Early in 2001, Alan Greenspan,the 20-year chairman of the Federal Reserve, worried publicly about future federal surpluses so large they would wipe out the national debt, pour billions into the economy, and strangle private markets. So he proposed a tax cut as “a pre-emptive smoothing of the glide path to zero federal debt.”
Watching Venezuela disintegrate, I remember a man who many years ago predicted the demise of his country.
Tomorrow my grandson, Jamie Webb, turns two years old. It’s also Earth Day’s 47th birthday and, not coincidentally, the first anniversary of the signing of the Paris Agreement on global climate change.
President Rutherford B. Hayes introduced the Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn in 1878.
The most controversial work in the biennial show at the Whitney Museum in New York is “Open Casket,” an oil painting by Dana Schutz.
Saturday, I went to the spot where the Swedish terrorist attack took place
