It’s hard to know which is worse—to be accused of total indifference toward the lives of 400 people locked in a building with no fire protection or to be accused of continuing the racist tactics of Southern sheriff Bull Connor.

Now that George Bush’s economic policies have finally put the country on the brink of financial disaster, even Republicans appear to tacitly acknowledge that the administration’s rationale for exorbitant tax breaks to the wealthy...

We talk so much about the value of education and the need to reduce dropouts that it may surprise some people that nearly half of all freshmen in the Milwaukee Public Schools have been ordered not to come to school.

Sen. Barack Obama’s history quaking win in the year’s first presidential contest in Iowa prompted one particularly absurd journalistic analysis to suggest that Obama’s victory showed that America had finally become colorblind.

Something new seems to be spreading from Milwaukee politicians. Unbelievably, local officials have begun expressing something that sounds remarkably like political courage regarding criminal justice. Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm gave a year-end interview to the local newspaper looking back on his first year in office.

When we were growing up, Wheaties were considered a performance-enhancing substance. The top athletes of the day in every major sport would appear on Wheaties boxes eating heaping mounds of the stuff.

NEW ORLEANS, La.—Robert Green lives out of two small FEMA trailers jammed together on a small plot of land in the Lower Ninth Ward. The one-story home where his bedridden, elderly mother lived in August 2005 is no longer there.

The whole idea of incarceration was supposed to be to make our communities safer. So why is it that as we have massively increased incarceration in recent decades, our communities have become less safe?

The whole idea of incarceration was supposed to be to make our communities safer. So why is it that as we have massively increased incarceration in recent decades, our communities have become less safe? Clearly, we have been locking up the wrong people.

Is it just my imagination or is the outpouring of gushing boosterism over the Wisconsin deer hunt tinged with a little more desperation than usual this year? For years, I’ve been one of the few columnists to present an alternative view to the glories of the hunt as extolled by every newspaper in the state with full-frontal pictures of middle-aged men proudly holding up the lifeless heads of formerly magnificent creatures.