Commentary

Today marks Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day, an urgent reminder that we need to do everything we can to protect pregnant people and children, including undocumented mothers and their unborn babies. A new policy solution gives this often-overlooked part of the population hope. Last year, Maryland enacted a new law — the Healthy Babies Equity Act — that provides comprehensive health care coverage to pregnant people regardless of immigration status.

What was it that Joseph Campbell said? “Follow your bliss.” It became a catchphrase in the 1990s after Campbell, the author and mythologist, gave an interview to Bill Moyers on PBS. “If you follow your bliss,” Campbell said, “you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.”

U.S. Rep. Andy Harris confuses the heck out of me.b Most of the time I hardly think about the conservative Republican from Cambridge. He represents Maryland’s 1st District in Congress, which covers the nine counties of the Eastern Shore, plus Harford County and part of Baltimore County. But now, he’s become someone to watch.

Tanea Renee, the star of “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” says she had some guiding principles in preparing for the role of Billie Holiday, who’s life and career is the subject of the play. “I decided not to focus on the fact that she was an icon,” Renee told me. “I focused on what we have in common as a woman and an artist,” said the Baltimore native, who has moved back after more than a decade living in New York.

Ashkelon, the Baltimore Jewish community’s sister city in Israel, sits just 8 miles north of the Gaza Strip, and the relentless rocket attacks of Hamas’ latest and deadliest terror campaign are far from the first to hit the coastal community. Two years ago, a rocket landed in Sigal Ariely’s living room and destroyed her home while she took cover in a bomb shelter.

It is one of the hardest decisions that elected officials charged with running an historic city must make: when to protect an old building and when to let an owner destroy it. The calls are almost always close ones. Perfectly preserved buildings are easy to protect. The ones that have been badly damaged and no longer being used for their original purpose, which now may be unneeded and unwanted by the owner, present a tougher question.

Every so often we’re confronted with the stark realization of all that the COVID pandemic deprived us of — the experiences we were denied, the friendships that were deferred, the opportunities to connect with others in meaningful ways to share mutual interests and passions. The inability to revel in the enjoyment of our Baltimore’s rich artistic and cultural assets was a particular burden for our community, and those local creatives, artists and cultural institutions that make our lives so much better, so much fuller.

The Annapolis Sailboat Show takes place this week on City Dock, and I’ll make an assumption about most of the people who plan to attend: They will not expect to see a boat that comes in a couple of bags. They will expect something conventional — boats that weigh 8,000 pounds or more, that come on trailers and sit in marinas. Most show-goers will not expect to see a sailboat that inflates and assembles in less than an hour — actually, less than half an hour, once you get the hang of it and don’t waste time gabbing with a newspaper columnist.