Featured Commentary category, Page 44

Voters are, to understate their mood, disenchanted with Congress. Yet paradoxically, voters reelect, over and over, the same representatives they hold in dismally low esteem, consider ineffectual and out-of-touch. On average for 2022, about 80% of polling respondents disapproved of how congressional representatives handled their jobs. Many critics had previously...

Simmering tension in American politics came to a head two years ago, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election. The failed insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, resulted in several deaths and injuries to almost 150 police...

Our local system for providing counsel to poor people facing criminal charges violates people’s constitutional rights. The most pressing problem is chronic underfunding. Attorney compensation in particular hasn’t increased in 17 years. Predictably, unfair pay leads to underperformance. This should matter to all of us. When defense attorneys fail to...

The new slim Republican majority in the House of Representatives lacks something besides its slim majority and the battle over leadership positions. It lacks intellectual depth. The Reagan administration may have been the last one to challenge Americans to think for themselves and for that matter, just to think. Perhaps...

It seems the whole country is praying for a football player this week. In the midst of Damar Hamlin’s terrifying medical emergency Monday night in Cincinnati, players and coaches gathered to pray on the field. By the time he was taken off the field by ambulance, prayers for Damar were...

Holiday parties were tough for economists. People asked: Is a recession coming? How bad will it be? The impolite reminded us of what we got wrong last year. The soothsayers at the Federal Reserve may be getting smarter. Having been burned by terrible forecasts when inflation was too low during...

This past midterm, Pennsylvania state Senate Republicans managed to meet electoral expectations while the remainder of the commonwealth’s GOP suffered stunning losses — many of them unanticipated. Why? The story begins 99 weeks before Election Day, when state Senate Republicans elected Kim Ward as the legislative chamber’s majority leader. Much...

Benedict XVI leaves behind a complex legacy as a pope and theologian. To many observers, Benedict, who died Dec. 31 at 95, was known for criticizing what he saw as the modern world’s rejection of God and Christianity’s timeless truths. But as a scholar of the diversity of global Catholicism,...

Earlier this month, Grace Stanke, a 23-year-old nuclear engineering student from Wausau, Wis., was crowned Miss America 2023. Stanke is a beautiful, blond-haired woman who is obviously gifted in math and science. She was crowned by her predecessor, Emma Broyles, Miss Alaska, who became the first woman from her state...

Decades ago, Holocaust scholar Hannah Arendt warned: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, i.e., the reality of experience and the distinction between true and false, i.e., the standards of thought, no...

People speak of a new year as turning the page, or starting out fresh, or forgetting the past. At the start of a new year, I like to look back a century ago to see what has changed and what hasn’t. In 1923, America had finally recovered from the Spanish...

Rivers are critical corridors that connect cities and ecosystems alike. When drought develops, water levels fall, making river navigation harder and more expensive. In 2022, water levels in some of the world’s largest rivers, including the Rhine in Europe and the Yangtze in China, fell to historically low levels. The...

We don’t fight our wars to win anymore. We fight them to get to a stalemate. We’ve risked untold lives and wasted trillions of dollars to poorly fight wars for decades in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and Vietnam. Then we negotiate and leave. And then the countries where we...

The year 2022 was a tough one for the growing number of people living in food insecurity and energy poverty around the world, and the beginning of 2023 is looking bleak. Russia’s war on Ukraine, one of the world’s largest grain and fertilizer feedstock suppliers, tightened global food and energy...

On Sept. 30, 1972, Roberto Clemente in his last at bat as a Pittsburgh Pirate stroked his 3,000th hit, an accomplishment achieved by only 33 players in baseball history. Sadly, three months later, Roberto Clemente, the greatest Pirate of them all, would be dead at age 38. On New Year’s...

I won’t hazard a guess as to whether it achieves immortality like “grassy knoll” or “hanging chads,” but surely the phrase “bomb cyclone storm” will remain in the public consciousness of those who endured its cruelties. We’ll laugh about this someday, but right now an awful lot of Americans have...

Last year’s column successfully predicted Democratic Senate gains and a smaller-than-­expected Republican House takeover. Here is our not-totally-­serious forecast for 2023: JANUARY: Rep. Kevin McCarthy falls six votes short of 218 in House speaker election as 10 Freedom Caucus members vote for challenger Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs. As deadlock persists,...

As the demise of the FTX crypto empire unfolds — on Twitter, in bankruptcy proceedings, in congressional hearings and potentially in criminal court — lawmakers and regulators are grappling with a question: What, if anything, should they do to civilise a market so rife with abuse? A few simple fixes...

”Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.” — Herbert Hoover “Rather go to bed without dinner than to rise in debt.” — Benjamin Franklin Eighteen Republican senators voted for the monstrosity known as the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill, thus forever relinquishing their claim to belong...

If you’re looking for a resolution to make for the new year, here’s a suggestion. We’d all like to find a way to bring in some extra cash, right? So check to see if you have unclaimed property in your name. The Pennsylvania Treasury is holding more than $4 billion...

Climate change, pandemics, Putin’s madness and China’s ambitions threaten humanity with droughts and floods of biblical proportions, nonnavigable rivers and disappearing island nations, fractured global supply chains and shortages of vital resources like commercial fertilizer, and famine and mass migrations. Much of this has been enabled or exacerbated by industrialization...

This was supposed to be the year of returning to the office. The same could be said for 2021, and even the second half of 2020. The office seems to have become a place where we’re always “returning” but never quite “arriving.” Although office occupancy rates have risen meaningfully, they...

The U.S. remains in the midst of an ever-worsening drug overdose crisis. Because prescription opioids drove its earlier phases, the nation responded by drastically reducing access to those drugs — with prescriptions dropping by nearly 50% over the last decade. But it’s now clear that approach was ineffective at combating...

I grew up in Aliquippa, the son of a steelworker and a Steelers fan as long as I can remember. Franco Harris transformed an entire city in nine seconds — the “Immaculate Reception” gave an entire city hope, hope that we could be more than a dirty, smoky mill town...

It is that time of year when a little voice in our head reminds us that it is time to start thinking about giving to charitable nonprofits doing good work in our community and world. Sometimes there is another voice in the background asking, “How do I know they are...