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Facing A New Normal

This morning, the first email that caught my eye had this in its subject line: World Class Hater. “Miss Schultz,” it began. Oh, good. An angry man who refuses to use Ms. How I’ve missed them in this pandemic. As we enter week 72, or maybe it’s week four, of the stay-at-home order here in Ohio, even our dogs are starting to act weird. There’s a plastic bag flapping from the top branch of an elm tree out front that has inspired them, for eight days now, to bark out the front window like coonhounds at a feral pig. When they’re not defending the homefront, they’re ...

Benefits Vs. Costs And COVID-19

One of the first lessons in an economics class is everything has a cost. That’s in stark contrast to lessons in the political arena where politicians talk about free stuff. In our personal lives, decision-making involves weighing costs against benefits. Businessmen make the same calculation if they want to stay in business. It’s an entirely different story for politicians running the government where any benefit, however minuscule, is often deemed to be worth any cost, however large. Related to decision-making is the issue of being overly safe versus not safe enough. Sometimes, ...

Words For The Class Of 2020

There will be no graduation festivities this spring at dozens of American colleges and universities, including Ohio State, Brigham Young, Howard, Swarthmore, Notre Dame, Duke, UCLA and Yale. That means this year’s graduates and their closest relatives and friends will not have the benefit of sitting on hard chairs and listening to the commencement speaker. As someone who has, on 15 different occasions, tested the patience as well as the attention span of graduation audiences, I semimodestly offer the proud but uncelebrated grads of 2020 the generic commencement speech they will not ...

An America Worse Off Than Today

The Brooklyn Hospital Center, now treating a flood of COVID-19 patients, has performed in national crises for over 150 years. During the Civil War, poet Walt Whitman spent time there, tending to rows of wounded and dying Union soldiers. Whitman left Brooklyn for Washington, where he nursed “the shattered, traumatized, and suffering men dragged back from the battlefields,” writes Edward Achorn in “Every Drop of Blood.” The book portrays America around the time of President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, on March 4, 1865, with rich social and intellectual detail. ...

Will Virus Retire World’s Policeman?

For declaring in March that the U.S. economy might be reopened by Easter, President Donald Trump was roundly mocked. Yet, it appears his political instincts were correct. He was more in tune with his country than were his critics. By early Easter week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the governors of six states in the New York-New Jersey region had formed a consortium to synchronize the opening of their economies. California’s Gavin Newsom and the governors of Washington and Oregon had done the same. The governors may disagree on the timing, May 1 or May 15, but most agree with Trump. ...

Vote By Mail, Just This Once

Who among us, knowing what we know now about COVID-19, doesn’t wish we could roll back the clock to Jan. 1, 2020 and make very different decisions about testing, contact tracing, PPE and social distancing? Well, we are staring at another possible disaster bearing down on us. I refer to the Nov. 3 election. There is still time to act wisely, but not much time. In the midst of coronavirus, we simply cannot conduct elections in the usual way. In-person voting represents a threat to the health of poll volunteers (most of whom are over age 60), and to voters themselves. We cannot ask ...