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To colleges, students are adults

Across the nation, parents are in the process of either welcoming their college kids home for the summer or making preparations to send them off to college in the fall. Some will be letting go of their children for the first time, excited and anxious about the next chapter of life. Let this be a wake-up call for those parents who believe the school will keep them informed if anything goes wrong with their kids. It probably won’t. Thanks to a federal law called the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, colleges and universities are under no legal obligation to tell ...

Reaching out can reduce loneliness

Global health service company Cigna (NYSE: CI) released results from a national survey earlier last month exploring the impact of loneliness in the United States. The survey, conducted in partnership with market research firm, Ipsos, revealed that most American adults are considered lonely. Nearly half of Americans report sometimes or always feeling alone (46 percent) or left out (47 percent). From the Cigna report we learn the following: - One in four Americans (27 percent) rarely or never feel as though there are people who really understand them. - Two in five Americans sometimes ...

May the American flag forever wave

Sorrow so deep that it can be seen but not said. “Strong men grasped each other’s hand, none able to express their sympathy to the bereft except by look.” A tide of sorrow swept over the small village, a silence of sadness breached only by the occasional “outburst of anguish from some broken-hearted mother, wife or friend.” This gripping account of the emotional impact of losing a loved one in battle was written about a small village in Pennsylvania when word reached them of their grievous losses at Gettysburg. The same scenario played out 81 years later when word ...

Kick-starting an economic revolution

PIKEVILLE, Ky. — On Election Day 2016, Jonathan Webb found himself on a lavish cruise liner with America’s elite, gliding along the Atlantic outside of Miami. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, was there, and so were Quentin Tarantino, Erin Brockovich, TV legend Norman Lear and singer will.i.am. Celebrity chefs were stationed at different eateries; yoga gurus offered spiritual talks and meditations. Webb, who was working with the Obama White House at the time, was used to being in rarefied company. But still, he found the experience surreal — and it was about to get ...

Conspiracy theorists see no gray

The Trump presidency is often a kind of political “Rashomon,” with partisans on either side looking at the same facts and coming to wildly different conclusions. So it’s all the more remarkable that the central controversy of our time isn’t a fight over one story with different interpretations of shared facts, but a fight over two different stories altogether. For devotees of prime-time Fox News, the only story that matters is how the Deep State — i.e., partisans in nonpartisan disguise at the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Justice — worked to either ...

Bill would improve state redistricting

Anyone who has observed the political slime that has been Pennsylvania’s redistricting map changes of recent months should be heartened that even some members of the sitting Legislature are embarrassed enough to change the process. The Senate’s State Government Committee this past week approved an overhaul of how Pennsylvania draws districts for the Legislature and Congress. The goal of Lisa Boscula, a Northampton Democrat, the prime sponsor, is a more fair, less political process for redistricting. The composition of the proposed redistricting commission and the manner in which ...