Opinion

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving/Friendsgiving/Tofurkeyday or what have you. I hope you shopped small on Saturday (if you shopped at all) and/or gave to your favorite charity on Giving Tuesday; perhaps you danced with your mother on Pretend It’s Your Wedding Wednesday (I made up the last…

So you’ve survived another Thanksgiving with your crazy family. Hopefully, your level of traumatization was at a minimum on Turkey Day and none of your fam announced their allegiance to the Proud Boys or ISIS. No one wants to find out Based Stickman is their Uncle Kyle or that the…

Recently, we’ve learned that President Trump likes to flex his orange-stained, American flag-covered muscles to get our allies to do his dark bidding. Amongst many other things, Trump demanded that Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of the Ukraine, investigate Joe Biden and his son’s involvement in a supposedly corrupt Ukrainian gas…

I want to dedicate this column to the people of Iowa. I spent a night in Iowa once, 18 years ago, in Iowa City. I was traveling cross-country. I don’t remember much about it, honestly, but it made enough of an impression on me that I purchased an Iowa University…

They say you catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar. While this idiom used to be understood as a statement on kindness, it’s now morphed into a whole new meaning at the heavy hands of Big Sweets, the lobbying arm for the sugar industry. According to a…

Before you read the title of this column and think I’m being facetious, I should point out that I think Beto O’Rourke is a pretty cool dude. I contributed to his campaign for the U.S. Senate, more because I—like many people in America (including his colleagues from his own party)—think…

I usually start out my writing process for this space by doing a quick perusal of Google News. Lately, “a quick perusal” has turned into a lightning-fast peek. As you may or may not have noticed, there’s been no shortage of headlines lately to get me riled up enough to…

I’m really hesitant to write anything about the official (was it always official?) impeachment inquiry into the president (what exactly is an official inquiry?) and the ever-developing “whistleblower”/Ukraine phone call scandal, because everything seems to be unfolding so quickly. Just before I started writing this, I found out that the…

Ah, ‘tis the season for cardigans, crispy fall leaves, frosty windshields and pumpkin spice everything. Hello, October! I greet you with a cautious high five, because, you know, climate change. It’s still going to be in the 80s and 90s for a minute. But I won’t complain—in my home state…

My wife and I are having a great night in. I bought us a bottle of our favorite chianti, and she cooked an amazing dinner (chickpea spaghetti in a tomato, basil and mushroom sauce that was seriously out of this world). For some reason, we’re commemorating this wonderful night of…