Voices

When I was almost 15, in 1961, I took a 50 mile hike for JFK’s fitness promotion. It wasn’t the plan, but I ended up walking by myself. All my friends, who were also going to go “for the President, and for our country”, found some good reason at the last minute to drop out. I was a good athlete, and this was a challenge, so I went anyway. My dad helped plan the route for us, and I think I didn’t even tell my parents when I learned no one else was going. They might have tried to stop me. MORE »

The idea of a Peace Island conference came to me, whole, in the middle of a meal. Shortly after the announcement of Saint Paul as the location of the Republican National Convention (RNC), September 1-4, I wrote “peace island” on a napkin scrap, and lost it. But the idea festered—an undeclared recession, war without end, and 15,000 media people coming to town looking for a story. MORE »

When a busy interstate highway bridge falls down, the public is entitled to a straightforward explanation of what went wrong, untainted by political considerations. Unfortunately, the clearly partisan wrangling over the federal investigation of the deadly collapse of the I-35W span indicates that may not be the case this time. MORE »

What’s a quick way to take the pulse of a town or neighborhood? Travelers from John Steinbeck (“Travels with Charley”) to William Least Heat Moon (“Blue Highways”), along with a host of candidates for public office, have found that there are few better places to get a feel for an area than a local café. MORE »