Pew Research does an excellent job of objectively exploring questions that few of us think to ask. They’ve released a study showing how much urbanism (and to a lesser extent, sub-urbanism) increasingly characterizes our nation. The country’s 100 most populous counties now have a solid majority of all citizens.  Read More 

My goodness, they choose a chief executive and just 48 hours later, she moves into the equivalent of the White House. Prime Minister David Cameron loses the national referendum on Britain remaining in the European Union (a fact that seems to have eluded some of my leftist friends, who blindly blamed him for whatever), and even though the loss was only by a few percentage points, he dutifully resigns. His Conservative Party, which holds the majority in Parliament, caucuses and decides on a new leader, and Theresa May walks in as prime minister without most of us ever hearing of her. Over here, we’d still be re-counting ballots and calling for investigations.  Read More 

I’m so sad about my old friend Congresswoman Corrine Brown of Jacksonville – and even sadder because I’m convinced that she’s guilty of at least some of the two-dozen counts of fraud that federal prosecutors have charged. And, yes, the ultimate boss of those federal prosecutors is another African-American Democratic woman, Attorney General Loretta Lynch. That just shows that individuals have to be judged as individuals, not by race or gender or political party.  Read More 

If you read this column last week, you probably can guess that I spent most of July 4th weekend at my computer, doing a rewrite for my New York publishing associates that means cutting words. Last week, I asked you to pick up scraps of American women’s history from colonial times to the Civil War, and this week, I’m going to do the same – but skipping forward to the 1920s. It’s a particularly interesting decade because there was great social liberation, at the same time that political activism diminished. I’ve rewritten this a bit to highlight Florida. Here goes:  Read More