by Leo Morris For a free society to function properly, its citizens must have an ongoing conversation about the important issues of the day. And that conversation must be rational and fact-based if citizens are to continue giving their informed consent to be governed. That is the vital role of the press. Its duty is to identify public challenges and opportunities and supply all the facts that can be mustered to serve the necessary debates…

by Mark Franke Now that we are finally past the hyperbole, embarrassment and downright nastiness of the Kavanaugh confirmation in what used to be the venerable U. S. Senate, perhaps we can step back and take a dispassionate review of why this was so important. First, let’s look at the results of several opinion polls that came out during the debate. Most showed that Brett Kavanaugh had the lowest positive numbers in history, well below…

IT WAS the briefest of things. The viewer thought about pinching himself to see whether it had been a dream, a particularly sweet one. The referees had stopped play during the Monday Night game, and it wasn’t to penalize one or another of the teams for a violation of an inscrutable pass-interference rule. Nor was it for one of the commercial breaks that stretches 11 minutes of actual play action into more than three hours of…

by Leo Morris No matter how old I get, I seem to keep finding opportunities to appreciate all the challenges my parents faced in their lives. A few years ago, for example, I learned from my sister that the family trip to the Fort Wayne airport to put me on the plane to Vietnam was not entirely the sedate, ordinary occasion I remember. After I departed, the car stayed in the parking lot for several…

by Mark Franke I suffer from nostalgia, a psychosis for which there is no known cure. My specter is the 1950s, the decade of my childhood. Other than my rose-colored memories, growing dimmer by the year, I see today only the remnants of that best of all times. Fairs are one of them. I grew up in southern Allen County at a time when the Bluffton Street Fair in Wells County was one of the…

by Norman Van Cott, Ph.D. Suppose you live and work in Indianapolis. Your employer informs you that it wants to transfer you to San Francisco. One of your first concerns is likely to be: “Hey, what about my salary? The cost of living is really high out there, isn’t it?” Anticipating such a reaction, your boss assures you that your salary will be bumped up based on the difference in your cost of living for…

by Leo Morris I write these columns a week ahead of time. There is a selfish reason for that practice – always having a column in the bank means I don’t have deadline panic every time I sit down at the keyboard. But there is also a beneficial effect, I think. The delay forces me to look beyond the unfolding updates of developing stories and at least try to find something more meaningful to say.…

“I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm-in-arm with Balzac and Dumas; I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come graciously with no scorn nor condescension.” — W.E. B. DuBois IF YOU SEE NO DIFFERENCE between equality of results and equality of opportunity, this essay will make no sense. It’s about the idiocy of diversity for diversity’s sake. In 1977, some of us…

by Leo Morris In their campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas engaged in seven debates, each lasting an astonishing (by today’s standards) three hours. The first speaker (which alternated), expounded for an hour. The second candidate responded for 90 minutes. Then, the first speaker was allowed a 30-minute “rejoinder.” All seven debates were heavily attended, since their subject, slavery, was of profound interest to citizens in the rapidly disintegrating…

‘An Evening with Tom Huston’ You hadn’t known Donald Trump had a good chance to win the presidency? That may be because you hadn’t read Tom Huston’s Feb. 13, 2016, essay, “Trumpism and the Invisible Man.” That and almost a hundred other articles from the pen of Mr. Huston, Indianapolis developer and formerly associate counsel to President Richard Nixon, have for a decade now pierced the fog of policy and culture for readers of our quarterly…