Coronavirus
It seems like even the virus has joined our lightning-fast news cycle, with some flattening reported at scattered sites around the country. This is the good news, reported simultaneously with the bad news of the death toll rising, rising, rising. More than 23,000 yesterday afternoon. As a journalist, I
Coronavirus
Talking to a Center City neighbor — from a safe distance of course — about the threat of death that envelops us, I tell her I can’t recall a time of similar peril. “I can,” says Bella Lewensohn Schafer. “Really?” I say. “When was that?” “When I was in the underground
Coronavirus
Because this is an alternative, middlest, nonpartisan news and opinion source, I try to find angles before the MSM gets to them, or to present them in a different way. Surveying the economic lockdown on March 30, I wrote: “Next year, when ‘normal’ returns, brace yourself: Every jurisdiction that depends
Coronavirus
They keep saying coronavirus “doesn’t discriminate,” but it does. It kills more men than women, it kills more elderly than young, more northerners than southerners, more people with medical issues than healthy people — and disproportionately more nonwhites than whites. So you could say COVID-19 is racist. Instead, during the
Coronavirus
You ever walk into a room and forget why you went in there? OK, probably not the bathroom. I started today’s column about the moves, some life changing, one makes during life because in my mind I had a connection to the Great Isolation, the pandemic we are now
Coronavirus
“Do you feel lucky, punk?” That’s not actually what Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry asked an injured perp, but it’s close enough. If I were asked, in regard to the coronavirus pandemic, I would have said, “Yes, I do,” until recently. I didn’t believe I would catch
Coronavirus
Let's take a look at an offshoot of the coronavirus pandemic, one that disrupted relations between President Donald J. Trump and 3M, which was political, and between the U.S. and Canada, which was unconscionable. Trump keelhauled 3M for not immediately heeding his call to divert their manufacture
Coronavirus
Thankfully, I personally know no one who has died of the coronavirus. I do know a couple of people who were struck, and survived. As I write this British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has just been moved to ICU. Wow — and he has the best medical attention possible. In an
Coronavirus
When someone references the psychologically shocking terms “Pearl Harbor” and “9/11” to describe what is hurtling down the mountain toward us, our ears prick up like Doberman guard dogs. Even more so when the speaker is the U.S. Surgeon General, the movie-star handsome Vice Admiral Jerome Adams, on
China
Mexican-American comic Paul Rodriguez had a memorable joke. Foreign wars, he said, is how Americans learn geography. If it hadn’t been for the coronavirus plague, I wouldn’t have known that a majority of U.S. pharmaceuticals are made in China. How sick is that? I knew a lot
Cartoon
I’ve been writing just about daily for two weeks and need a breather, but I wanted to leave you with something to think about. This cartoon by my friend says a lot, more than it seems to, I think. Here’s what I see: Democrats determined to defeat Donald
Coronavirus
Passover begins Wednesday evening and I can’t imagine why this didn’t occur to me earlier. There are a couple of startling points of contact between the Jewish holiday and the current pandemic. Passover, also known as Pesach, reaches back to the time of Moses, when the Israelites were