As gun owners, my husband and I understand that the Second Amendment is most at risk when a criminal or deranged person commits a gun crime. These acts only embolden those who oppose gun ownership. Promoting responsible gun laws protects the Second A...
How can we teach our children to be responsible beyond themselves and care for other human beings' welfare and for the welfare of the planet and all that it contains? It's a difficult lesson to convey, when, more than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez ...
The strips about the military do seem to provoke moving and thoughtful responses. It's nice when the strip resonates, but more importantly, I need to know when I'm getting something wrong. The last thing I want to do is contribute to the suffering th...
When I went into 'Fiddler,' I wondered about the response I'd get - the backlash because I'm openly gay. There was none. I toured Canada and America, and not one single review suggested that I played the role gay or that I seemed anything but Tevye.
Before I read the 'Bloody Sunday' script, I have to admit I hadn't thought about it that much. There was probably even part of me which assumed there was no smoke without fire. That the Catholics who were shot must have done something to provoke such...
We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity but we do not - nor will we ever - monitor ideology or political beliefs. We take seriously our responsibility to protect the civil rights and liberties of the American people, including subje...
I'd grown up in the U.K., where the surveillance apparatus went into place in the 1970s in response to the Troubles with the IRA. When I was a kid, we moved to Chicago, and I was surprised to see you could live in a large city in which you didn't hav...
Robert Burns enriched Scottish song with his genius and is mainly responsible for the rich treasure house of song that we enjoy today. He collected folk songs, retained the melodic line, kept what words were usable and rewrote the rest. He didn't cla...
I've occasionally wished I had Caller ID. Even telemarketers, I hate to hang up on them. I try to explain I'm not interested, but they have all these canned responses so I end up having to hang up on them anyway.
It's now up to the full Senate to move swiftly to confirm John Roberts so he can assume his duties and responsibilities as chief justice when the Supreme Court begins its new term in a matter of weeks. We call on the Senate to confirm John Roberts wi...
We know that if memory is destroyed in one part of the brain, it can be sometimes re-created on a different part of the brain. And once we can unravel that amino chain of chemicals that is responsible for memory, I see no reason why we can't unlock i...
Being raised Catholic in a pressure-cooker household besieged by alcohol and bill collectors enforced and heightened a sense of sentry duty in me, the oldest of five children and the one most responsible for keeping everything from capsizing. Wild in...
If you rely on the media for your information, to educate yourself about the candidates and what issues are facing the country, then you get just part of the equation. I think it's important that we as citizens of this democracy take the responsibili...
There's something about a roller coaster that triggers strong feelings, maybe because most of us associate them with childhood. They're inherently cinematic; the very shape of a coaster, all hills and valleys and sickening helices, evokes a human emo...
Individual companies now have the voluntary responsibility of recalling their own products. While many companies have acted properly and swiftly to recall contaminated goods, the delay between the identification of tainted foods and the company's dec...
When people buy, rescue, or otherwise acquire a dog from unscrupulous breeders or amateur rescue groups, they are making a decision with ethical consequences. They have a profound responsibility to consider their actions; to gauge the dog's behavior,...
I know that being seen as a role model means taking responsibility for all my actions. I am human, and of course, sometimes I make mistakes. But I promise that when I fall, I get back up.
In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, 'Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?' I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response.
We are all used to paying a sales tax when we buy things - almost 9 percent here in New York City. The application of this concept to the financial sector could solve our need for revenue, bring some sanity back into the financial sector, and give us...
You know what I hate? I hate people who give me plants. The whole giving someone plants - it's like giving someone a pet. I'm giving you responsibility, I'm giving you a thing that you now have to take care of for, like, a year until it dies, and the...
I live a half mile from the San Andreas fault - a fact that bubbles up into my consciousness every time some other part of the world experiences an earthquake. I sometimes wonder whether this subterranean sense of impending disaster is at least partl...
