Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York, has announced that he will, by executive order, restore the voting rights to felons on parole or probation in New York state — a bloc that numbers about 35,000. He’ll pull off this unusual…
The Muse has descended on the curriculum developers at Columbia University: they have designed a class entitled Pop and Social Justice Songwriting 101. Which implies that there will be a 102. But it seems unlikely that Columbia students will be…
The Muse has descended on the curriculum developers at Columbia University: they have designed a class entitled Pop and Social Justice Songwriting 101. Which implies that there will be a 102. But it seems unlikely that Columbia students will be…
Time was when the largest concentrations of Catholics in the country were in the big cities — New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles. It’s said that in Boston, for example, if the cardinal spoke out against a particular issue…
There was a period in my younger days when I became fascinated with epics disasters, and read about them almost to the exclusion of anything else. Pompeii. Chicago Fire. San Francisco Earthquake. Krakatoa. Most of the books were okay-ly written….
On December 1, 2017, Los Angeles welcomed an exhibit taken from the collection of the Museum of Failure in Helsingborg, Sweden. The exhibit showcases examples of innovations that didn’t just flop, but have become classic examples of “what were they…
On September 11, 2001, when a terrorist attack brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center and took the lives of more than 3000 innocents, St. Joseph’s Chapel, just across the street, in Battery Park City, was spared….
You probably recall hearing about the 24-year-old North Korean border guard who put down his weapon and sprinted across No Man’s Land in a desperate attempt to reach freedom and security in South Korea. His former comrades opened fire on…
Mecca and Medina, Islam’s two holiest cities, are both located in Saudi Arabia. As guardians of these sacred sites, the Saudi royal family has decreed that no non-Muslim house of worship may be erected in the kingdom. Of course, not…
Nearly a century after the cornerstone was laid in 1920, the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., is complete. On December 8, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the final portion of the church — the largest…