Business Casual

So State Rep. Bobby Franklin from Marietta introduced yet another version this year of his annual attempt to criminalize abortion. What else is new? Well, HB 1 would not only prohibit abortion, but would require any woman who suffers a…

I read Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s wise and generous speech sitting home alone at my computer, snowbound, rather than hearing it in Athens. But her words were powerful enough to transcend the mundane setting in which I absorbed them. I had tears…

Psssst. Listen up, Georgia lawmakers and budget experts. Here’s a hot investment tip for you. Two words: Higher education. That’s where you need to put your money – and mine and other taxpayers’. I understand that it’s a tough budget…

Remember the drill sergeant-inspired grade-school teacher who would come charging into an unruly classroom and punish everybody? She – more often she than he in my experience – didn’t have time to sort out the instigators from the unwilling participants…

It’s hard to say why one story out of all the hundreds we read about or hear about reaches out and grabs us. But the story of the young man, the student at Rutgers, who killed himself after two classmates…

Even though we know better, I suspect a lot of us are secretly hoping to wake up one morning and learn that the recession is not just “officially” over but that everything is back to normal. Our houses have re-appreciated…

So has anybody in Atlanta or DeKalb checked on the children lately? You know, those young people that public school districts and their board members and administrators exist to serve, educate and nurture? The ones who populate the classrooms and…

One of the first political speeches I remember watching was President John Kennedy’s inaugural address, in which he inspired a nation with his famous, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your…

Those of us who, in our youth, occasionally wished there was no such thing as school – that great interrupter of play time, that perennial cause of early-to-bed – may be feeling a bit childish in our response to the…