Is it already that time of year? It must be: black lecturers are busy on the speaking circuit; black authors have been pushed to the front shelves of book stores; school teachers, black, white and brown, are teaching their charges how George Washington Carver, ah, invented the peanut. It’s Black History Month, that annual tribute […]

Poor Hillary Clinton. She’s rich. And that’s a problem for her presidential campaign. Even as the economy finally mounts an apparently sustained recovery, income inequality remains a primary worry for American voters. According to a poll by the Pew Research Center last November, 78 percent saw the gap between the haves and the have-nots as […]

My parents didn’t fear vaccines. They feared the diseases — whooping cough, measles and polio, among them — that vaccines were meant to prevent. They saw immunizations as a godsend. They grew up in rural Alabama in an era when medicine had not conquered common and highly contagious diseases that sickened, maimed and sometimes killed. […]

She didn’t mean it. Alabama state legislator Patricia Todd now says she’s not going to name those among her conservative colleagues who have had extramarital dalliances, although she had threatened to do so. But she has stiffened her resolve about this much: She’ll continue to combat anti-gay bigotry, which is what started this imbroglio. Todd, […]