Commentary

This was going to be a column about fancy-pants horse dancing. You know, dressage. Four years ago, the American horse Mopsie made the world lose its collective, Olympic-watching mind with his rave-dancing performance in Tokyo. Equestrian events started Friday in Paris, and dressage continues this week at the Palace of Versailles.

Retired tennis great Roger Federer’s recent commencement speech at Dartmouth College went viral, and it’s easy to see why. The speech was a masterclass in effective communication, blending authenticity with approachability. As Baltimore faces its own challenges, Federer’s words offer valuable lessons for the city’s youth, showing them how to strive for excellence, remain resilient and think beyond their immediate surroundings.

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.