Columns

Consumers, do we really need all those choices?

Dear pandemic-battered readers, As you try adapting to the New Normal, just hope no diehards are waiting to confuse you with a plethora of ADDITIONAL configurations.

Stop setting victims of discrimination against each other

On Twitter the other day someone did what a lot of people have been doing lately: Comparing levels of oppression.

Defund police movements miss the big picture

In case you missed it, 106 people were shot in Chicago last weekend. That’s not a typo — 106. If mainstream news organizations still covered the news, instead of only the news that serves or refutes an agenda, we might have heard more.

Spewing oil caught everyone’s eye

Oil fever struck the Louisiana prairies with a vengeance in the summer of 1902, when the Southern Number Four well showed, in the words of the Jennings Daily Record, that it “now appears that a gusher can be secured … just as often as a hole is put into the ground at the proper depth.”

A reason opinions on Confederate statues changed so quickly

What you think about removing Confederate statues has less to do with your opinions about race and more with how you perceive the motivation behind removing them in the first place.

Where does your state rank on the patriotism scale?

The personal finance website WalletHub recently released its ranking of the “patriotism” of all 50 states.

Beware the digital KGB roaming the streets

Social media has given everyone with an opinion the power of both anonymity and number. In the past, you could clutch your pearls in one hand and write a scathingly brilliant Letter to the Editor in another.

Kids, pedal those pandemic blues away

Here’s one good thing about the COVID-19 pandemic: Bike sales are booming. I hope that means kids will begin riding in big numbers again. There was a big bike-sales boom in the early 1970s, too — the result of millions of baby boom kids, like me, riding our bikes from dawn until dusk.

Rewriting Louisiana’s history

It looks like it’s time to get out the soap powder in Louisiana and the rest of the nation. In protests all over the country, there is a growing call for the banishment of whatever tattered remnants are left from the aftermath of the Civil War.

Do you treasure prom memories?

My wife and I experienced some vicarious living when our son Gideon (finishing up his junior year of high school) attended the senior prom. (Yes, VICARIOUS living. It’s not like we got him out of the house, jumped with glee and yelled, “Date night!”