Columnist.
If you are a college student, professor, or bookstore employee, you know how jarringly expensive college textbooks are. It isn't unusual for college students to have to spend over $1,000 per year on books. In an attempt to reduce those costs, on March 23 President Trump signed a $1.3 trillion appropriations bill that included $5 million for a pilot program to help to fund "open textbooks" — i.e, free books that authors post online.
In 1976, Grove City College, a Christian college of arts, letters, and sciences situated in the rolling hills of western Pennsylvania, received what seemed to be a misdirected notification.
Last Saturday was a poignant day for me. Not only was much-loved First Lady Barbara Bush laid to rest, but I received word of the passing of a dear friend, Gerald Hath (always Gerry to me). The parallels between the Haths and the Bushes were striking.
"The art of war is divided between force and stratagem. What cannot be done by force must be done by stratagem." —Frederick the Great
The news that President Donald Trump authorized the U.S. military to strike a Syrian chemical manufacturing facility is hardly surprising. Even without the potential incentive to distract the news media from Robert Mueller's investigation and the next phase of James Comey's "Buy My Book!" tour, almost any president would want to strike at Bashar al-Assad after his repeated uses of chemical weapons on his own people — especially his country's children.
Alabama football Coach Paul Bryant's career ended with the 1982 season, his 25th season at Alabama. Reportedly he told close friends, "If ever I quit coaching, I'll croak in a week." Coach Bryant died on Jan. 26, 1983, one month after a hard-won Liberty Bowl victory over the University of Illinois. He was nine months short of his 70th birthday.
The 1990s and early 2000s saw the rise of a new form of online-only marketplace. Companies like Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist became household words by providing familiar services from the convenience of a computer monitor. In 2004, Backpage.com joined the online advertising market; as of 2011, it trailed only Craigslist in connecting sellers with interested buyers.
Fifty years ago, on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed when he stepped from his second-floor hotel room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, to speak to Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) colleagues standing in the parking lot below.
Should schools be focused on providing children with a good education in a safe environment or should they be laboratories of partisan political agitation? The answer, of course, should be obvious.
On the night of Sunday, March 31, 1968, Lyndon Baines Johnson began one of the most famous addresses of his long career.
Why do individuals on a weight-loss campaign often loudly announce this fact to social media friends, and how does this curious phenomenon shed light on Columbus, Indiana's, world-class architecture collection?
When President Barack Obama wanted to curtail carbon dioxide emissions, he instructed his economic advisors to construct a way to calculate the emissions' effect on society. The metric thus adopted by the EPA is called the "social cost of carbon" (SCC).
President Donald Trump's announcement that he plans to impose tariffs of 25% on steel imports and 10% on imported aluminum is the first major economic policy error of his presidency.
It didn't take long after Mitt Romney announced his U.S. Senate bid for new digs at his personality to surface.
As a child growing up in Maine during the 1950s, I was put to bed by my parents every Sunday evening after services at my dad's small Baptist church. I can recall lying in bed with the radio tuned into "The Hour of Decision" and listening to the voice of Billy Graham. Every Sunday at the end of the program before falling asleep, I would once again ask Jesus to be my savior.
"Hallelujah, Thine the glory. Hallelujah, amen." —William P. Mackay, 1863
Overstating the significance of Billy Graham is difficult. Arguably the most important religious leader of the 20th century, Graham presented the gospel to an estimated 215 million people through his many evangelistic campaigns around the world and to hundreds of millions more through radio, television, satellite broadcasts, print, and the Internet.
Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Jamie Dimon versus the entire United States Congress? My money is on Buffett, Bezos, and Dimon. These men, three of the wealthiest, most influential, and powerful business leaders in the world, recently announced an alliance that will attempt to address the tangled knot that is the U.S. health care system.
"War is the realm of the unexpected." —B. H. Liddell Hart (1950)
Donald Trump's presidency has raised anew the question: How much does the character of the president matter?
