If you live in Maine, yeah. But if you lived in North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan or New Jersey, not so much. Those states face efforts to rob citizens of their most precious civic possession, their vote. And just after Maine turned back a similar effort. Our right to vote has been under threat for a […]

The United States has been a world leader for more than a century because we are a country of ideas. Much of what is now the world’s commonplace began as an idea in the head of some American. We have had just the right combination of individualism and cooperation to come up with ideas (individuals) […]

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That statement by Lord Acton in 1877 has become a staple in political science classrooms. He would have been dead-on if he had said money instead of power, too. Students in those political science classes can see the corruption firsthand. Just walk over to the practice […]

No other country has a holiday for giving thanks, the radio announcer said. While most NPR people are well informed, I was sure the guy didn’t know what he was talking about. I had lived in Canada, which observes Thanksgiving on the second Monday in October. So, I looked it up. Turns out seven other […]

One thing was certain, the school superintendent told us. Whoever we chose to succeed him would be strong in the areas in which we believed he was weak. That is the nature of regime change, he said. We were the search committee for School Administrative District 9 (Mount Blue), and our first task was to […]

On any other day, the scene would have shocked me. But this time, not so much. An armed police officer was standing at the door of a house of worship. I was driving past the Beth Israel Synagogue in Waterville. Dozens of cars were parked outside. A Waterville city police officer stood by the door. […]

Harvey Weinstein. Bill Cosby. Roy Moore. The list of men disgraced (finally) by their assumption of male privilege over the bodies of women grew for months. So much so that it was hardly news when another man harassed his way onto the list. After Cosby, whom many of us had thought of as “America’s dad,” […]

“Honey,” the telephone operator in Nashville told my wife, “y’all dahllin’ too fayast.” That was Marilyn’s welcome to the South. On her first day at work at the Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, her calls didn’t go through. So she called the operator, who said to slow down her dialing finger. Remember rotary […]