Commentary

I’m standing across the street from the apartment where I lived, back in 1983, in this city’s River West neighborhood. The street looks substantially the same, though I’m sorry to discover that Harry’s Chapel, the tavern that used to be two doors down, where a 12-ounce glass of Miller High Life on tap sold for a quarter, is gone.

Last week’s jaw-dropping $1 billion donation from billionaire Michael R. Bloomberg to Johns Hopkins University, enabling tuition-free medical school for most students, probably kicked off a lot of celebrations from Homewood to Name-Your-City-Here. The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine was already ranked among the nation’s best (second only to Harvard University, according to U.S. News & World Report rankings).

Money dominates the headlines during elections, whether it’s a city race or the race for the White House. We want to know who’s funding whom, who’s raised the most money, and who’s being backed by which big-money PAC. If it feels like the role of money in politics has gotten more powerful, it’s because it has.

After the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump last weekend, political participants, pundits and observers on all parts of the political spectrum should take a deep breath and dial down the rhetoric. Thankfully, Trump was not seriously wounded, or worse, in the attack. If he had been killed, the ramifications for our country are too horrifying to consider.

The Donald Trump allies behind Project 2025, the plan to shift the federal government to the ideological right and expand presidential power, want to abolish the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration because NOAA is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” I didn’t know that tracking weather and climate change was an “industry.” I thought it was science.

There’s an internet meme that asks what message you’d write to let your loved ones know you’ve been kidnapped — a statement so unlike you that they’d know something was wrong and to look for you immediately. My longtime answer was, “I am voluntarily camping in the woods,” as I am a proud, lifelong, five-star-hotel snob who considers roughing it to be a place without room service. After three peaceful, lo-fi but not completely unplugged nights looking at the stars from under a canopy of green along Virginia’s Shenandoah Mountain, though, I’m going to have to come up with another one.

Seventeen years ago, one of the busiest bridges in Minnesota fell into the Mississippi River in the middle of evening rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring 145. The tragic fall of the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge in downtown Minneapolis was correctly judged a national catastrophe. The Red Cross was called out. Huge memorial services were held for the victims. The eyes of the world were upon the “Star of the North.”