Commentary

The Washington region just had its most intense September heat wave on record, and climate disasters fill our news media. If you’re looking to turn your anxiety into productive and empowering action, there are many effective local- and state-level opportunities that Washington region residents can tap into. This post provides a list of action opportunities rooted in the fact that making our cities, suburbs, and towns more livable, inclusive, and vibrant is one necessary area of climate action.

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.