Justin Katz
I always try to remember, when stuck in traffic, that my predicament is often the result of a situation that far outweighs inconvenience. How many hours of commute time would one prefer to being personally involved in a situation such as this: An off-duty Portsmouth police officer has been identified as the driver who struck…
Kiersten Marek offers what might be thought of as the social worker’s response to Friday’s cris de coeur, and I’m not sure she’s understood my complaints or my worries. Most starkly, as I explained in the comments to my post, I do not blame Rhode Island’s politico-economic environment — much less the people who take…
Commenter Rhody gets to the heart of liberal/Democrat Catholics’ rationalizations with respect to what their faith is supposed to encompass and what their politics are supposed to require: When a Catholic is elected to public office, he or she is representing everyone in the district, not just Catholics (the crucial distinction JFK made). If a…
Just as I came up on the traffic, I heard a radio report of a serious accident on East Main Road in Portsmouth, so I turned around and switched over to West Main. Well, this is what I encountered there: The question is: Did WPRO mix up East and West, or is this just what…
As I said, leaving Rhode Island is certainly an option, but it’s one that comes with costs that I’m not sure I can manage. I’ve also been inclined to stick it out and fight adversity. As do many Rhode Islanders, I’ve got a bit of thinking to do. As a pretty basic assumption, the place…
This week, I lost over a third of my income owing to a corporate layoff. I can’t blame the Massachusetts research company for which I’ve worked for nearly a decade, because it is just trying to do what it deems necessary to survive, and to be honest, I welcome the opportunity to reshuffle the deck.…
Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, wants his fellow newspaperati to stop caving to the urge to give away news content for free: News has become ubiquitous, free, and as a result, a commodity. Anytime you are trying to sell something that becomes a commodity, you have lost much of the value…
This letter to the Projo, which links to righttax.org, makes a point worth hearing: In Rhode Island public schools are funded by a combination of state-supplied money and funding generated by cities and towns via property taxes. Unfortunately, in Rhode Island we rely too heavily on the property tax to fund our schools. The second…
The Providence Journal’s recent editorial on technology and the cultural slide has an outdated ring to it: Computers are “extending” our intelligence through a panoply of electronic devices. But whether we are creating anything of more value is debatable. We spend more and more of our lives hitting computer keys but not more time thinking,…
Perhaps this is an annual reality that I’ve just been slow to notice, but my parish priest phrased the traditional blessing of mothers during the closing of today’s Mass as a general blessing for women. He alluded to the pain and regrets that some childless women might feel at having never had the ability or…