Columns

You might have read the story about the white women in Tennessee who recently sauntered around a mall in their hoodies to prove a point. They went to the same mall that had recently handcuffed several black men for breaking the no hoodie policy, and found they were able to walk around dressed however they […]

I’m a columnist, not a communist. I believe it’s a good idea to divide a sheet of paper by a vertical line, creating two columns, a device making honest comparisons possible. By this simple means, one can tally shared characteristics as well as identify where differences lie. The tally can be rough or finely calibrated, […]

This morning, I’m flaming over the president’s callous, clueless, cruel tweet: “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or […]

Next month, December of 2018, marks the 10-year anniversary of the demise of The Valley Journal commercial weekly newspaper, after more than four decades of serving Carbondale and the middle region of the Roaring Fork Valley. Rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the VJ (as it was known), The Sopris Sun was conceived […]

As a young person unable to vote, heightening polarization, demagogic leadership, and lack of civic engagement within the U.S. is deeply concerning to me. The negative effects of malignant partisanship have been warned against since the creation of the United States, and Alexander Hamilton’s contributions to The Federalist papers of 1788 exemplify this concern. Hamilton […]

The older I get, the more I realize life is like the train ride I took from Nogales to Mazatlán during Spring Break, 1991. Everyone starts out with high hopes and expectations, clean clothes, and dreams of the amazing adventure ahead. There are new people to meet sitting right across the aisle, and people selling […]

I definitely agree with Nicole Toussaint’s column in the Sept. 20-26 Sopris Sun in which she lamented the fact that large numbers of Americans “are deeply uninformed” when it comes to understanding the issues we are called to vote on. However, at the same time, I don’t know how anyone — even an accountant — […]

Even though it’s home to Jaywalker Lodge, I suspect it isn’t easy to get or to stay sober in Carbondale. Although I have been darn-near dry for 30-plus years, it’s rare for me to go to a First Friday, an art opening or a fundraiser without feeling like a fifth wheel. No sooner do I […]

I’m a bad soccer mom. I don’t know all the rules of the game. I get the game schedule conflicted with my work schedule or previous family commitments. And, yes, there are times I dread spending a large chunk of my day — or worse, a whole weekend — watching soccer games. I don’t always […]

Fall is a wonderful season. That nearly-dead-but-not-yet feeling of: warm days and cool nights, beautiful tapestries on the mountainside, and the pumpkin spiced deluge whenever we leave the house. Americans are extremely busy this fall; there’s barely time to stop and smell the rotting rose garden on the south lawn. Every day we get up […]