Commentary

Ten years ago, as a college graduate looking for a place to live, I chose Columbia. Not for the car-dominated suburbs, the fantastic school system or the amenities provided by the Columbia Association. I chose to live here because it was one of the few walkable and inclusive places in Maryland. The Lakefront Library, announced over a year ago, added to my excitement.

It had been nearly eight years since I visited southeastern Baltimore County to see what was happening at Sparrows Point, the site where Bethlehem Steel had been producing steel products and engaged in shipbuilding for the better part of a century. When I visited in 2016, steelmaking had already ended four years earlier. Shipbuilding had stopped much sooner.

There’s encouraging news about crime rates in the United States. After a spike in both violent crime and property offenses after the pandemic-and-protest year of 2020, statistics show that crime is reverting to 2019 levels. That’s according to a newly released midyear report by the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, based on monthly offense rates for 12 violent, property and drug crimes in 39 cities that have consistently reported such data over the past six years.

President Joe Biden is an American hero in his own way. To be sure, he is no George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln. But as late Republican Sen. Roman Hruska observed about the U.S. Supreme Court justices, “We can’t have all Brandeises and Frankfurters and Cardozos.” President Biden withdrew his reelection bid on July 21 not because he loved the White House less but because he loved America more.

While Donald Trump’s agenda and a massive think tank document clearly indicate his second-term strategy for federal workers, nothing captures those plans as succinctly as a statement made by his running mate. If Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), the Republican vice-presidential nominee, were to give Trump “one piece of advice,” he said in 2021, it would be “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people.”

I am a white student at Hereford High School — statistically the whitest public high school in Baltimore County — and when I signed up for an Advanced Placement African American Studies class, I was scared. First, because the class was new and I didn’t know what to expect, but second, because I knew that in that class, I would have to grapple with my contribution to the racially disproportionate 85% white population of my school.

“Shrimp kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo, pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There’s pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich.” Fans of the 1994 movie “Forrest Gump” may recognize that list offered by the fictional character of Bubba Blue who longed to be in the shrimping business. He was thinking Louisiana.

That is the urgent question of our time. The rapid progress being made on artificial intelligence means that we face a strategic choice about what kind of world we are going to live in: Will it be one in which the United States and allied nations advance a global AI that spreads the technology’s benefits and opens access to it, or an authoritarian one, in which nations or movements that don’t share our values use AI to cement and expand their power?