Commentary

It was one of those dreary, cold and windy days — so much so that I was certain to pass on my usual neighborhood walk and spend the day in a sour mood. Then at mid-morning my daughter-in-law’s sister, Negin, called me, suggesting we go to lunch. “But the weather,” I responded. “Come on,” she said laughing, “we can do it.” She picked me up an hour later and decided we’d try a new, nearby restaurant that was built to look like a train dining car. The diner was a bright spot in our turn off the main road — literally. It was lit up with more silvery bulbs than you could count. As we entered the shiny car, we were quickly greeted by a young, smiling host, who appeared to be somewhat nervous.

If Dante had needed a 10th circle of hell, he might have chosen a faculty meeting. A half-dozen universities were already operating in Italy by the time his Inferno began circulating in the 14th century. Readers who have spent time in these gatherings — at any level — will likely know what I mean. Yet, even faculty gatherings produce, on rare occasions, more than just bitter battles over small stakes. I attended one of these gems last week at the Fowler School of Law at Chapman University. Professor Mario Mainero gave a riveting presentation on artificial intelligence and legal education. AI has been much in the headlines recently after the debut of ChatGPT, a relatively young iteration of software with untold room to improve. And yet: ChatGPT can pass law school-level exam questions.

Early one Sunday morning more than 20 years ago, I traipsed downstairs to find one of my four children, my 12-year-old daughter, Alexandra, scribbling away at the dining room table. “What are you doing?” I sleepily inquired. “Writing a letter to The Washington Post!” she answered. The “Sunday papers” had been a fixture in our household for many years. Alexandra’s mother and I encouraged our kids to take an interest in current events by subscribing to several newspapers and by reading interesting articles from the papers out loud to them. So our “tween” had read the Sunday papers and taken offense at one of the news articles (about the content of books in schools). She was familiar enough with the Post’s op-ed page to believe a letter to the editor was in order. Her letter ran the next weekend.

When WRNR went off the air this month, Annapolis mourned the demise of its only FM station. It was a refrain similar to the one two years ago when Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak sold WNAV for $1 to develop the land under the city’s only AM station. The new owners dropped local programming in favor of that syndicated sound you can find anywhere and everywhere. “Oh, woe is me,” cried Annapolis.

The observance of George Washington’s birthday reminds us not to tell lies. Yet, if he were a public school teacher these days, he would be forced to fib a lot. And if, in addition to being father of our country, he was father of a school child, there’s a good chance he would be badly misled about his child’s academic progress. Teachers are my heroes. They are under-valued, underpaid and overworked. And yet, am I suggesting that they are untruthful?

Baltimore wears its weirdness, the grand and the shabby, on its star-spangled sleeve. We named a football team after a poem about a guy being haunted by a bird because its troubled creator died here. We obsess about crab seasoning. We know you don’t understand our accents, and we like it that way. In short, we’re the only kind of place that could have created a character as singularly and endearingly odd as Detective John Munch, played by comedian Richard Belzer, who died Sunday at age 78. For six years, he was the conspiracy theory-spouting soul of “Homicide: Life On The Street,” filmed in and around Baltimore and based on real-life Detective Jay Landsman from the David Simon book that inspired the series.

By the time Erik Heinonen, a humanitarian worker for Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services, returned to his home in Irpin, Ukraine, last month, the coffee shops and grocery stores were open again. It was safe to walk the dog and take his daughter to the playground. Heinonen’s house was still standing. But his neighbor’s house, across the alley, was gone. The apartment building across the street had been hit with missiles. “We were lucky,” Heinonen said over the phone the other day, as the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine approached. “A shell had landed in our front yard. It broke windows and punctured a fence and left divots in the wall of the house. We were fortunate.”