Commentary

What do disability rights, labor law, flirting and tort reform have to do with congressional and legislative redistricting? Not much, really — unless you’re interested in the work and philosophy of the man who has been empowered by Gov. Lawrence J. Hogan Jr. (R) during the redistricting process. Officially, there are three chairs of the Maryland Citizens Redistricting Commission — one Democrat, one Republican and one unaffiliated voter.

Much has already been written on the life and times of former secretary of state Colin L. Powell, who died Monday. As a high-schooler in Northern Virginia, I looked up to him as the kind of leader I was raised to respect, a beacon of honor and patriotism. But he had something in common with my family and me that had nothing to do with politics: We were all aficionados of old Volvos. I drove my dad’s 1964 cherry-red 544 in our homecoming parade.

The serious health risks associated with smoking tobacco have been too well established for too long to harbor any doubts about that link. On average, studies show, people who smoke die about 10 years earlier than those who do not. It’s the leading preventable cause of death. And smoking is linked to about 30% of all cancer deaths in the United States. As a result, virtually any public policy choice — from public education and outreach programs that warn against smoking to state laws banning tobacco sales to teens —can be relied upon to pay enormous public health dividends. Tobacco is linked to about 480,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. That is COVID-19 pandemic territory.

Baltimore County’s proposed redistricting map — which retains six majority-white districts and one majority-Black district, despite the county’s current population being nearly 50 percent nonwhite — arrives in the context of the county’s long history of racist segregation. If accepted, it will lock in racial exclusion for yet another generation.

“The graveyards are full of indispensable men” is a mordant observation traditionally attributed to a French general, Charles de Gaulle, among others. With a shrug we are told there are no indispensable persons. But for the Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs there was one: Frank Burd. BCFA was founded in 1980 by a broadly representative and distinguished group of academic, business and community leaders.

Professional workers are more likely to value their own work and feel it contributes to their team’s success when their managers show they trust them, according to a study I recently completed as a part of my unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. I wanted to understand how various types of social capital, such as building trust and creating common values, influence employees’ performance and how they feel about their work.

If you don’t notice my work, it means I’m doing my job properly. I’m an audiovisual translator, which means that I write the subtitles for films in other languages. There is something about the anonymity of the work that appeals to me. As Bruce Goldstein, director of repertory programming at New York’s Film Forum, put it in “The Art of Subtitling,” “Good subtitles are designed to be inconspicuous, almost invisible.”

The decades-long war on drugs was a big mistake. We sent hundreds of thousands of men and women to jail and prison for drug crimes when we could have been helping more of them end their addictions. Cracking down on the supply and use of drugs, from marijuana to heroin, had little effect on the demand for them.