ArcaMax

A big part of my job is community engagement. The opinion section of any newspaper cannot happen without the people of the community. In order to lift up the voices of our neighbors, I must reach out and be willing to talk to people, not just sit at the computer and wait for my inbox to fill up. Email is still a digital space, and it lacks the ...Read more

Movie scene: A car pulls to the curb on a downtown street. Four men wait inside the vehicle. They're white. All of them have slicked-back hair, pinkie rings, shiny suits and shirts with long collars that almost cover the knots in their ties.

A man walks down the street, not seeing the guys in the car.

(Because the director of the movie is ...Read more

Not a month goes by, it seems, when the country doesn't have some minor cultural trend to spar over. These "debates" can be fun or not. But in almost every case, fights over these passing fixations are futile.

OK. Let's get specific. There's that recent skirmish over something called "bookshelf wealth."

Never heard of it? Well, Architectural...Read more

"Now, if I don't get elected," Donald Trump said at a rally last weekend in Ohio, "it's going to be a bloodbath for the whole -- that's going to be the least of it. It's going to be a bloodbath for the country."

Who talks like that?

The once and possibly future president of the United States. Warning of a bloodbath for the country.

His ...Read more

Real life froze four Marches ago. Clocks stood still. Memory turned into before and after.

The Covid pandemic claimed more than a million American lives.

We don't speak of it much, but we carry a deep sense of loss for all we missed. The trips we didn't take. The friends or lovers we never met. The school or college experience. The parties, ...Read more

Poor Katie Britt, the Republican senator from Alabama. She was set up by her party's operatives to do the GOP's televised response to Joe Biden's State of the Union speech.

Sadly, her moment in the national limelight was widely panned, even by Republicans, for her presentation was overwrought and -- well, cringey. But the visuals pale to ...Read more

"In order to serve with dignity, you've got to be organized," says Mary Ann Ponti, director of outreach programs and community engagement at St. Anthony's Shrine in downtown Boston. And on a recent morning at the Shrine, dignity and organization are much on display, as several hundred Bostonians line up for food -- no questions asked -- ...Read more

South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace was in Washington telling a story about how her "fiance" wanted more action in bed earlier that day. "And I was like, 'No baby, we don't got time for that this morning.'" To which she added, "He can wait. I'll see him later tonight."

The occasion was a Christian prayer breakfast attended by evangelicals.

...Read more

A 2023 Texas law allowing public schools to hire chaplains, or accept them as volunteers, to provide student support services has inspired more states to consider copycat legislation. In March 2024, the Florida Legislature passed a school chaplain bill, which now awaits the governor's signature. Similar bills have been introduced in 13 other ...Read more

The essay was published by Guernica, which until this week I would have described as a highly regarded literary journal. (It can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20240305095742/https:/www.guernicamag.com/from-the-edges-of-a-broken-world/.) This week, they retracted the essay, saying they regretted publishing it. Why? Because it ...Read more

Liberals believe a compromise that gets us closer to a goal is better than no progress at all. But compromise can lead to the dead end of dilution and a false sense of resolution.

The early 20th-century progressive and presidential candidate Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette argued that politics played into different a psychological dynamic. "...Read more

When a neophyte named Edward Moore Kennedy first ran for the Senate in 1962 at barely 30 years old, his primary opponent delivered a debate quip that still echoes.

"If your name were Edward Moore," cracked Ed McCormack, then Massachusetts attorney general, "your candidacy would be a joke." Ted Kennedy won that primary, ascended to the Senate,...Read more

I still have dry flower stalks and leaf litter across my yard. The weather is warming with the start of spring and it has me itching to get out in the garden. I've watched as some of my neighbors raked and bagged leftover leaves, but I'm resisting. I might be ready, but the Earth is not.

If I started cleaning up now, I'd disturb the ecosystem ...Read more

Sure, and it's a little St. Paddy's Day story from my grandmother.

She was Irish American herself, and in her childhood, there were a great many people in her life who had come from Ireland.

"If you said Ireland was a bad country, they'd fight you in the street," she said of the Irish immigrants. "But if you got a bunch of them together, no ...Read more

YIMBY sounds nice. YIMBY stands for "Yes in My Backyard." It's a positive-sounding rejoinder to NIMBY, "Not in My Backyard." The NIMBY label is being used to stigmatize defenders of zoning laws, with the goal of bulldozing the rules.

Needless to say, real estate developers are all for YIMBY -- though not necessarily where they themselves live...Read more