Commentary

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.

The U.S. Postal Service recently launched a postal banking pilot program that allows customers to cash payroll and business checks up to $500 in four cities: Washington, Baltimore, the Bronx and Falls Church, Virginia. This modest pilot is the foundation for more expansive contemplated postal banking services that could include bill-paying services, ATM access, and money order and wire transfer capabilities, all of which would provide critical financial services for millions of people shut out of the banking services that foster economic security and wellbeing for many Americans.

As of Thursday morning, there had been 2,259 homicides in Baltimore during the nearly seven years Marilyn Mosby has been the city’s top prosecutor; that’s an average of around 322 murders a year since 2015. During the four years previous, when Gregg Bernstein was Baltimore state’s attorney, the city averaged 215 homicides a year. I make the comparison only because, as she campaigned to unseat Bernstein in the 2014 Democratic primary, Mosby criticized him as ineffective and blamed him for the relatively modest increase in city violence, from 197 homicides in 2011 to 211 in 2014.

“Have you seen the zebras?” I yelled out of my car window. “No! But I’m looking for them! Every day!” replied the woman walking her Rottweiler in the hilly, wooded, sprawling expanse of Maryland equine heaven, where a dazzle of zebras were on the loose for more than a month. We found out on Thursday their herd was thinned, when officials announced one of them died after being caught in a snare trap.

Baltimore’s Pier Six pavilion, now officially known as the MECU Pavilion, has seen all kinds of famous and sometimes peculiar acts in its 40 years, but surely none more grotesque than that promised next month by a far-right group known as St. Michael’s Media, set to coincide with a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Bishops in Baltimore. Headliners are Steve Bannon, the grungy political strategist to Donald Trump, and his former Breitbart News colleague Milo Yiannopoulos, the British alt-right troll banned from multiple social media platforms.

“If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.” That oft-quoted line has been attributed to German statesmen Otto von Bismarck. He was right. Sometimes things that can turn out very good can be quite messy, difficult, and even unappealing in the making. But that doesn’t mean they’re not worth the effort or that the effort itself is somehow tainted.

Even though the rationale behind our drug policies is hard to defend, reform is painfully slow. The overwhelming majority — lawmakers, activists, health care providers — want the same thing: a steady and significant drop in overdose fatalities, access to effective treatment for those who seek it, quality health care for all and safe communities, especially for children. Together, we could save thousands of lives and billions of dollars.