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…

THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE NAILS IT — You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to have figured out that the last-minute ambush of Judge Brett Kavanaugh was organized by the Washington Post and Sen. Diane Feinstein in coordination with the “victim” and her publicist lawyer. Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii insists that men should just shut up about the credibility of accuser Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, presumably because they are: a) sexist; b) incompetent to fairly weigh evidence; and c) too dumb to understand…

by Leo Morris It has been several weeks now, and I still can’t fathom the Indiana Chamber of Commerce’s decision to endorse Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly in the U.S. Senate race. The Chamber has always endorsed the Republican in Senate races, and all the candidates it is endorsing in this year’s U.S. House races are Republicans, so the Donnelly pick goes against everything in the group’s history. In the absence of a reasonable explanation from…

Please note that Monday is national Constitution Day. (For immediate release; click on mug shot for high-resolution image.) by Mark Franke James Madison is generally known as the Father of the Constitution, and rightfully so. His record of the debates at the Constitutional Convention are a historical treasure. His partnership with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in authoring the Federalist Papers may be the most effective one in our history. Where we would we be…

by Mark Franke This column is about immigration. And about the American War for Independence. And about Indiana counties. What do these three topics have to do with each other? Quite a bit, in fact, and it isn’t a stretch to see the linkages. Leo Morris, my colleague at the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, recently wrote on op-ed piece on how the idea of legal immigration is lost in in all the excessive rhetoric in…