Category Archives: Uncategorized

For decades, my dad complained that people didn’t understand how little of the food dollar goes to the farmers who grow the food. Every time the farmer’s price went up — for milk or corn or pigs — the grocery store price went up by even more. When the farmer’s price went down, the grocery store price usually didn’t follow in that direction. Continue reading →

Does helping high school students learn have to mean making life and learning more difficult for first-graders? That’s the question many St. Paul parents are asking, as St. Paul Public Schools (SPPS) makes plans for later high school start times, beginning in 2015/16. Continue reading →

Think that the number of students in school is declining? Think again — according to the report of the National Center for Educational Statistics, the total number of U.S. public school students has risen slowly but steadily, from 44,840,000 in 1995 to an estimated 49, 751,000 this September. Continue reading →

Andy Griffith, the television sheriff of the fictional town of Mayberry, grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in the real town of Mount Airy, North Carolina. Last week, just after I visited Mayberry/Mount Airy, I listened to a PRI program about Baltimore’s new curfew, described as “one of the toughest in the country.” As I drove across the country, the radio also brought stories about the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the protests, and then the police killing of Kajieme Powell.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about the differences between Mayberry’s sheriff and today’s far less community-oriented law enforcement. Continue reading →

Do most white people want to just stop talking about race? That’s what this week’s Pew Research poll seems to show. While 80 percent of African Americans “say the shooting in Ferguson raises important issues about race that merit discussion, whites disagree, with 47 percent saying “the issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves.” Continue reading →

Mothman of Point Pleasant

The Lowe Hotel brought me to Point Pleasant, West Virginia, “where history and rivers meet,” according to the town website. The Lowe Hotel is a grand old riverboat hotel, built in 1901 and originally named the Spencer Hotel. Owned by only three families during its 113 years, the grand old riverboat hotel is a lovely place to spend a night. Continue reading →

During the first weekend in August, about 400,000 people in and around Toledo couldn’t drink the water — or even wash in it. They normally get water from Lake Erie. This summer, Lake Erie was so polluted that the water was unfit for human use. Continue reading →

Tens of thousands of children from Honduras and El Salvador and Guatemala are fleeing violence in their home countries. Some have sought safe haven in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. More than 57,000 have entered the United States since October. Kevin, one of the 57,000, describes why he left his home in Honduras: Continue reading →

Though thinking and writing and worrying about the awful news takes up a lot of time and emotional space, I’m also enjoying summer’s simple pleasures, with a little more time this year than in the past several years. So here are three of my favorites: Continue reading →

Adel Daoud was the teenage son of immigrants, attending a neighborhood Islamic high school when the FBI started talking to him online. According to his mother,

“Daoud required extra assistance in school, and was heavily dependent on her: ‘He’s not the person with a complete mind. He didn’t talk until five. He was the last one of my kids to talk. He doesn’t even talk Arabic….like the rest of our family, because he’s slow.’” Illusion of Justice, p. 28

Continue reading →