Commentary

So I’m watching and listening to my precious 10-year-old granddaughter as she effortlessly and flawlessly reads the sweet birthday card wishes from my wife and me. When she gets to my simple yet eloquent and deeply profound handwritten note (my column, my assessment) painstakingly penned adjacent to the Hallmark boilerplate, the poor child stops cold, with a look of chagrin on her beautiful little birthday face. Simultaneously, grandfather and granddaughter look desperately to daughter/mommy for explanation and reassurance. “You used cursive, dad. They don’t really teach that in school anymore.” Excuse me? Who is this “they,” and why did they make such a bonehead decision? Full disclosure, I do recall learning of the pending demise of cursive a few years back and at the time thought it an absurd and senseless mistake.

Baltimore County voters have two choices for county executive this fall: One-term incumbent Johnny Olszewski Jr., who has touted his record and campaigned on a promise to build upon it, or former state Del. Pat McDonough, who would prefer to dismantle it. Republican McDonough, who served in Annapolis from 2003 to 2019, said he would fire Melissa Hyatt, Democrat Olszewski’s chosen police chief, eliminate a regional housing program mandated by a legal settlement and file numerous lawsuits — a frequent refrain of his.

Dear Kanye West, or “Ye”: We’ve never met, and I hope we never will. Still, I’d like to express a sort of gratitude. With a few outbursts in a few days — you threatened in a tweet this month to go “death con 3” on “JEWISH PEOPLE,” and it’s been downhill from there — you’ve probably done more to raise public awareness about the persistence, prevalence and nature of antisemitism than any other recent event.

In the years following World War II, with a growing economy and the vast expansion of automobile ownership, there was broad support for investment in highways that would knit the country together. While there was already 1944 legislation envisioning a 40,000-mile system of highways on the books, it took the leadership of President Dwight D. Eisenhower to bring about the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. Also known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, Ike’s signature domestic legislation, with an initial authorization of $25 billion for the construction of 41,000 miles of roadway, was the largest public works program in American history through that time. But the president did not understand all the details of the bill he had signed.

Almost everyone agrees that our country should give special treatment to the men and women who have served in our armed forces, whether in aid for education, preference in federal hiring or generous pensions. If you put yourself in harm’s way to protect and defend your country, you have gone above and beyond the role of the ordinary citizen and deserve special treatment. That still holds true for any veteran whose life has gone off the rails and who ends up in the justice system. If they are arrested for a nonviolent crime, their actions cannot be excused, but they need and deserve as much help as the community can give. That is the reasoning behind the creation of veterans’ courts, where they can get the help they need. Veteran advocates and the local United Way are laying the groundwork for such a court here.

Taylor Swift was quite the romantic when she burst on the scene in 2006. She sang about the ecstasies of young love and the heartbreak of it. But her mood has hardened as her star has risen. Her excellent new album, “Midnights,” plays upon a string of negative emotions — anxiety, restlessness, exhaustion and occasionally anger. “I don’t dress for women,” she sings at one point, “I don’t dress for men/ Lately I’ve been dressing for revenge.” It turns out Swift is part of a larger trend. Researchers Charlotte Brand, Alberto Acerbi and Alex Mesoudi analyzed more than 150,000 pop songs released between 1965 and 2015. Over that time, the appearance of the word “love” in top-100 hits roughly halved. Meanwhile, the number of times such songs contained negative emotion words, like “hate” rose sharply.