Commentary

Every week, two newspapers in this country go out of business, according to a report issued in June by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Twenty-five hundred newspapers have closed since 2005 and many more are expected to stop operating by 2025, the report concluded. Since 2004, the number of newspaper newsroom employees in this country has fallen from 71,640 to 30,820, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier this year. These declines have caused a rise in “news deserts,” which are rural and urban communities with limited access to credible news and information that can influence how their residents live their lives.

I thought I’d been everywhere in Baltimore, thought I’d seen everything from every possible vantage, until the other day. While standing on Oliver Street, on the far east side of the city, I looked to my left. A half-mile to the west, where the street rises, was a magnificent bell tower I had never noticed before, almost shocking in its singularity against the gray sky. It looked to be more than 100 feet tall, but taller still because of its location.

The day after the 2016 election, I arrived on campus with students lined up outside my office. A few were slumped in chairs, devastated that Hillary Clinton had lost. Others were jubilant, wearing red hats in victory because Donald Trump had won. How do I effectively teach them both? How do I provide a classroom space that can accommodate both groups and shape these fierce, impressionable hearts at the same time?

I open the envelope from the city of Baltimore with the usual dispassion that accompanies bills. But this time it is a jury duty summons with pages of instructions and warnings. I panic. I consider myself an abolitionist, focused on ending the punitive status quo that relies upon policing, prisons and jails. My academic work surrounds the use of the United States criminal courts to shape and perpetuate racial, ethnic, economic, ableist and sexuality-based oppressions. I have been in jails and prisons as a public health worker. They are unimaginably awful, and I am haunted by them.

In October, the Food and Drug Administration postponed an advisory committee meeting to hear and review testimony as it considers allowing birth control pills to be sold over the counter. This delay is deeply frustrating. Every day we wait is a day longer that barriers to contraception remain in place. While over-the-counter birth control pills would be a first in the United States, we would be following the pathway of more than 100 other countries.

Life expectancy is down across the United States for the second year in a row — from an average of 77 years in 2020 to 76.1 years in 2021 — with much of the drop attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. But an even more troubling and persistent trend is evident in the data presented earlier this year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Black Americans are still expected to live much shorter lives than white, Asian and Hispanic Americans, with their average life span last year pegged at 70.8 years.

With Election Day less than a week away, we want to remind voters of the editorial board’s researched recommendations in select state and county races. Ballots must be postmarked or dropped off at an approved location by 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 8, or marked in person on that date at your assigned polling place.

Dear Black women: If you could write a letter to your younger self, or to your daughters or nieces, what would you say? What wisdom would you impart? What warnings? What you would write to uplift and affirm? Artist, activist and Baltimore School for the Arts graduate Tamara Payne asked that question of African American women.

Obsessed over which party is going to control Congress come January? Wondering whether the Democrats have a shot in Montana’s new 2nd congressional district? Worried about how many competitive races in California you’ll need to keep track of on election night? Then you will need to check out — if you haven’t already — the website politics1.com. This scrappy, indispensable 25-year-old website — one of its charms is it doesn’t look much different than it did when it launched a quarter century ago — contains updated political headlines and tweets from around the country and other interesting information.