The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization of senators and lobbyists in Washington, D.C. dedicated to the “principles of limited government, free markets...

The University of Minnesota Women’s Club is full of accomplished, lively and fascinating women. A few weeks ago, I had lunch with the UMWC and talked with its president, Maggie Hoover, whose dynamic...

In France, around the years 1890-1910, a group of artists produced a series of cartoons called "En l'an 2000" depicting French life as imagined in the year 2000. The artists went beyond the typical futuristic...

Imagine you were born in 1998. Unlike our 1998, in this imaginary one, Facebook and all the other internet connectivity norms existed. Your parents adored their healthy, happy baby and so did their friends...

It’s possible that I never learned about the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory fire in school, but I certainly heard about it at home as a fixture of Manhattan’s abuse of the working class, in the...

Anyone who has happily wasted time in front of the television show Scrubs is aware of hospital rounds: the educational method where a doctor and her residents focus on patients, one at a time, to diagnose,...

On March 6, Gayle King interviewed R&B singer R. Kelly for his first public interview after his arrest two weeks prior for 10 charges of criminal sexual abuse. Kelly has been under scrutiny for sexual...

The bare-minimum financial move any time we receive a paycheck is to put a certain amount of it away for retirement and emergencies. As you may have heard, rough common knowledge is to have six months’...

Greece is across the Aegean Sea from Turkey, and five Greek islands bear about 20,000 refugees and migrants who have escaped conflict zones through Turkey. One island is Lesbos, which has a few refugee...

On Feb. 22, NPR reported the Department of Health and Human Services issued the rule that “any organization that provides or refers patients for abortions is ineligible for Title X funding to cover STD...

People have decided to use the internet in adverse ways.  Election meddling is everywhere, and it's found easy footing here in the U.S. I believe U.S. intelligence agencies found this in their investigations....

A company called Cooler Screens installs screens on freezer doors, like in Walgreens, which monitors customers for their age, gender and “emotional response" in order to present an advertisement that...

If a homeowner renovates or builds a house, the very name of the career expert who is key to that job is “contractor.” Certain people specialize in carpentry, masonry, plumbing, roofing and painting,...

When students like us enter the job market, we’ll either be hired directly or contractually. It depends on which is better. For a steady, 9-to-5, part-of-the-workplace job, the preferred option is almost...

The federal government has been shut down since December 22, 2018. There’s a fairly cut-and-dry way to think about how we got here.  During the 2018 midterms, we elected a Democratic-majority House...

Dinkytown has been brimming with new businesses in the last year or so. College staples like Annie’s Parlor for burgers and malts, a chain cookie store, pizza joints and a couple of bars have been doing...

The Gophers took the Badgers’ axe away, but the state of Wisconsin is managing to chop their own house down just fine without it. Republicans in Wisconsin’s post-midterm, outgoing legislature are deliberately...

Between the afternoon of November 16 and the morning of November 17, a 26-year-old American citizen named John Chau was murdered and allegedly buried in the sand on North Sentinel Island in India. The...

I recently read a guest column in the Guardian from April 2017 called, “Confessions of a reluctant gentrifier," about Rogers Park — the neighborhood in Chicago where I grew up. The article was a cool...

If you haven’t noticed already, take the time to look and you will see that Michelle Obama’s new memoir “Becoming” has renewed a quiet wave of emotion for the former first lady. I would say there’s...

Not every kid is umbilically and emotionally attached to their cell phone, and not every parent makes a habit out of scrolling mindlessly through an iPhone through a toddler’s tantrum. But there is enough...

Since Apple rolled out the first one-button cellphone, screens have been an especially touchy subject. And the more commonplace they’ve become, the more influential they are, because we’re head-over-heels...

When the going gets tough — and it sure is, for every single contender in the upcoming midterms — we can sometimes make snap judgments, or even heavily meditated ones, that in retrospect were wrong....

If anything will break my heart, it isn’t Darnell Epps’s moving New York Time's opinion piece about his life during and after an approximately 17-year stint in prison. It’s the comments.  In...

Climate scientists’ prognosis for the future is so daunting and demoralizing that it takes uncommon strength to confront the problem head-on. Another saddening outcome is that most people, especially...

I have said things to the people I love most in this world that I would give anything to go back and stop myself from saying. By hurting those I love, inadvertently or not, I’ve always done more or unintended...

The 2018 Midterm Elections are on Tuesday, Nov. 6. See bottom of column for voter information. 1968 was a turbulent year. As a U.S. citizen at the time, overseas, the Vietnam War took and mangled Vietnamese...

Hurricane Florence would have happened, regardless of climate change. But the fact of the matter is that change in climate means a change in storms, too.  Like many of their peers, researchers at...

Most students in their young, fun-oriented lives are not focused on having children. But bringing kids into the picture might help put a security issue into perspective. Most people don’t pay much attention...

On April 20, 1999, the Columbine High School shooting became the deadliest in U.S. history thus far when two shooters claimed the lives of 13 people and then their own, injuring 23 more. Since then, shootings...

My friend walked into the room the other day and said: “You know those adult scooters? There have been two of them on my front yard. They’ve been just laying there, for days. Going nowhere.” At the...

The fourth-deadliest mass shooting to date in the United States was at Sandy Hook, on December 14, 2012. After that shooting, the National Rifle Association got to work to put together a response to prevent...