If You Ask Me

As the baseball postseason was providing some unexpected joy for us Red Sox fans, it suddenly occurred to me that this 2021 season  marked a milestone in my baseball watching.

Joe Biden came to the presidency with visions of transforming American society — another Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson. But so far, he’s looking more like another Jimmy Carter.

In June, the Sunday New York Times Book Review featured an essay on John Gunther’s “Inside USA,” a remarkable look at each of the nation’s then-48 states right after World War II. Published in 1947, the book is about to mark its 75th anniversary.

Those of us who came of age around the middle of the last century remember with sorrow and horror the annual polio plagues and the fear of getting polio, also known as infantile paralysis, a crippling disease that impacted our growing up summers.

On Tuesday, July 6, the Hartford Courant did not have an editorial/opinion page. This is something I had never seen in reading the newspaper nearly every day as a customer, employee, competitor, contributor, critic and admirer since coming to Connecticut 63 years ago.

How often have you heard people say how proud they are that their ancestors who migrated to this country long ago came here “legally,” unlike those terrible illegals today.

When a 17-year-old driving a stolen Audi was arrested in New Britain after he killed a jogger in a hit-and-run late last month, we learned the teenager had been arrested 13 times in the past three years but had never been tried or otherwise disciplined for crimes ranging from reckless driving to assault with a knife.

After sending American troops into Afghanistan right after 9/11 to destroy the perpetrator Osama bin Laden, his terrorist group, al Qaeda, and their Afghan ally, the Taliban, the United States has ended the 20-year war after reaching just two of those three goals.