Love Stays - The one thing you can’t make when you get old is old friends. Pam Fleischaker was one of my oldest friends. We met more than 40 years ago as two young political activists. She commuted from Oklahoma City to help run the Democratic Platform Committee for Geraldine Ferraro. She was a charter member of the […]
News From Around the South, 10/5 to 10/12 - VIRGINIA: UVA Press cancels book critical of leading Southern food figures In early 2025, University of Virginia Press announced the forthcoming release of “The Strange Career of Cornbread Nationalism.” The book “debunking the mythologized South of the food writing world” would hit shelves in October, nearly a full decade after the project first provoked chatter […]
The Prosecutor’s Dilemma - “That it is better 100 guilty persons should escape, than that one innocent person should suffer.” — Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) The hardest decision a government prosecutor may ever face is also one of the most important tests of the rule of law: What do you do when you believe a crime occurred, and you believe […]
Tenn. legislature to investigate other execution methods after failed lethal injections - Republican leaders in Tennessee’s legislature say they will investigate the reliability of lethal injection as an execution method after the state failed to execute two death row inmates in the span of five months. Gov. Bill Lee stopped the May execution of Tony Carruthers after a physician unsuccessfully attempted to insert intravenous lines to begin […]
Predicting Breast Cancer - Imagine there were a simple test, using AI, that could accurately predict a man’s chance of developing prostate cancer in the next five years. Would insurance pay the $249 for the test? You bet they would. “Men fund what they fear,” then Rep. Pat Schroeder so famously observed when fighting for increased funding for breast […]
