Opinion

Somehow we learned that Caesar wrote “Gaul is divided into three parts.” So too the United States is divided by the federal Office of Management and Budget (OMB) into three classes of counties.

Under pressure of successive self-imposed deadlines, with a befuddled country looking on, Democrats in Congress continue to wrestle with a supposedly transformative spending plan and the means to pay for it. On Thursday, President Joe Biden announced yet another version of what this might involve. The eventual outcome is still anybody’s guess.

Now we know.

So often these days I find myself wishing we could find a way to make our politics and our public life reflect who we Americans really are.

I never know what to order when I go into one of those trendy new soup and sandwich places. The list of uncommon offerings is endless. The people standing behind me have obviously downloaded a menu at home and given this some previous thought.

One of my favorite classes in middle school was geography. I enjoyed reading about countries with exotic names, learning about their histories, languages, exports, types of government and especially religions.

Some adults don’t like to see teens trick-or-treating on Halloween. I’m not one of them.

During and after the recession of 2007 through 2009, college enrollment grew rapidly. That was partly just millennial-generation demographics: there were 3.5 million more 18- through 24-year-olds in the U.S. in 2010 than a decade earlier (and about 750,000 more than there are now). But the percentage of young Americans attending college and graduate school also hit an all-time high in 2011.

Since I could hold a pen in my hand, I loved to write.

When Facebook first began its meteoric rise, some of my students said they wanted to do a story on it for the student newspaper.