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Columns/Opinion

Respecting life at the end of it

“God be good to him — we sure weren’t,” was the prayer that came to mind when I saw the news that Vincent Lambert had died. He died nine days after being taken off food and water following a long legal battle. Lambert, from France, had been in a traffic accident in that country in 2008. He was in what most media reports called a “vegetative state” since the accident. The debate over whether he should be kept alive or allowed to die escalated from a family dispute to a pitched legal battle, eventually roping in the French president and even the United Nations. In the days ...

A Woodstock wedding, a dream fulfilled

My son Ben and his fiancée Lindsey are planning a wedding in a reclaimed Catskills barn in Woodstock, shot through with light from a galaxy of knotholes. The celebration in August will resound with live covers of songs by The Band, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead; Crosby, Stills & Nash, and other musicians who were part of a cultural revolution that peaked long before they were born. It was only natural that a family road trip to tour the barn and find a wedding-welcome party spot would include a visit to the nearby Woodstock Museum at Bethel Woods. There, we discovered that the ...

Trump’s right: Citizenship a big deal

In backing down from his plan to include a question about U.S. citizenship on next year’s census form, President Donald Trump on Thursday gave credence to the claims of critics that his administration had an ulterior — and partisan — motive in pressing for inclusion of the question. During rambling remarks in the Rose Garden, the president let a very big cat out of the bag by suggesting that data about how many citizens and noncitizens there are — which he ordered his administration to collect “by other means” — could help states that “may want to draw state and local ...

Trump has a pet currency; it’s not bitcoin

When Donald Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon, praised Bitcoin last year as “disruptive populism” and revealed he was working on his own cryptocurrency, it was evidence of something many people had long suspected: The forces driving the growth of anarchic, get-rich-quick digital tokens are very similar to those buoying Trump and his imitators. Both are born out of a resentment of establishment politics and a hatred of central authorities such as the Federal Reserve. Last week, though, the U.S. president turned his back on alt-right cryptonomics with a series of tweets that ...

More than mere exercise in nostalgia: Apollo 11 at 50

You had to be there 50 years ago, and I was. As a young reporter for a local TV station in Houston, I frequently visited NASA (“the space base,” we dubbed it), met many of the astronauts and reported on their exploits. Along with people from around the world, I watched the lunar landing on television, July 20, 1969, fulfilling President Kennedy’s goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of that decade. A new, three-part PBS documentary, “Chasing the Moon,” recalls the American space program, which followed the Russian launch of the first satellite in 1957. It is a ...

Her skills not tied to ‘male traits’

BY RON BOONE The Baltimore Sun The inspiring victory of our Women’s World Cup soccer team took me back to my days coaching girls’ 13-16 softball in the late 1970s. I coached some tremendous athletes. However, the opportunity to maximize their talents was restricted by attitudes about females in sports and by limited resources. My players got only T-shirts and caps for uniforms. They received less time during off hours for practices on mediocre fields. There were no paid umpires; we had to pry untrained parents or high school kids out of the stands to ump. Girls got limited, tiny ...