For all the talk about Brown v. Board of Education’s 50th anniversary, there’s little discussion of the biggest injustice in education today. It is this: America systematically assigns its least-qualified teachers to the poorest children in the country – the children who need great teachers the most.Unlike poverty-related problems that involve complex questions of family […]

The problems with Maine’s budget go deeper than structural problems within the state’s tax code. Many of our problems didn’t start here and won’t be fixed here.They are rolling down from Capitol Hill. Of course, state and local lawmakers do plenty to make the damage even worse.While Maine has worked to constrain the size of […]

June 1, 2004, will mark the 44th anniversary of Margaret Chase Smith’s maiden – and most important – speech to the United States Senate. She was the first woman ever directly elected to that body in her own right without having filled a previous term of a senator husband.Much has been written about Margaret Chase […]

I have not looked forward to this column. To be perfectly candid, I’m only writing it because I feel obligated.May 17 marked the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that ended the doctrine of “separate but equal” and helped shatter American apartheid. What else is a black columnist […]

The Brown v. Board of Education decision, celebrating its 50th anniversary this week, was by no means the end of the civil-rights struggle. In one sense, it was even a false dawn. The legal meliorism that underpinned the decision – i.e., the idea that things will get steadily better over time, one court ruling at […]

Maybe the beheading of Nicholas Berg will shut them up.Meaning the people who keep asking why Americans should care about the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners. I’ve received e-mails from a dozen of them, read their letters in newspapers.Perhaps you’ve run into them too. Sure, they say, what our soldiers did was terrible, but the Iraqis […]

If we insist on having an orgy of self-flagellation about the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib, we might as well gain something from it. That something shouldn’t be a change in our interrogation tactics in the war on terror – they don’t seem at fault for the perverse acts of a few MPs – but […]

The following editorial appeared in the Dallas Morning News on Thursday, May 13: Before 9-11, President Bush told national security adviser Condoleezza Rice that he was tired of swatting flies when it came to counterterrorism. So why is Bush swatting Cuba’s Fidel Castro? There’s no bigger fly in the world.Last week, Bush announced a plan […]

Culture and society allow discrimination, not the teachings of Islam. For five brutal years, Afghanistan’s fanatic Taliban rulers made life miserable for most citizens of the country, but especially for women.The Taliban’s version of Islam, on which it relied to justify its actions, was radical, twisted and misogynist. Not long after American and allied troops […]

“Spider-Man 2” opens June 30th.I know this because I am a big Spider fan and have been waiting for this sequel ever since the closing credits on the original. I also know it because Major League Baseball entered into an agreement to place the movie’s logo on the bases in its ballparks. Also, the pitcher’s […]