Featured Commentary category, Page 13
Jason ‘J.J.’ Park: Israel vs. Iran? Or the prime minister vs. the ayatollah?
The Israel-Iran conflict is a tit-for-tat. On June 13, Israel struck Iranian nuclear facilities and military leaders. On June 16, an Iranian drone targeted the U.S. Consulate in Erbil, Iraq. On June 22, the U.S. bombed three Iranian nuclear sites. On June 23, Iran bombed Al Udeid Air Base in...
Hallie Leach: We must work together to teach students about Holocaust, antisemitism
In an era marked by a troubling resurgence of antisemitism and misinformation, it has never been more critical for educators to work collaboratively and purposefully to ensure that students are learning not only the history of the Holocaust but also how its lessons apply to the world today. In June,...
Nate Picarsic: U.S. must keep pace with China on energy, technology
Today Pittsburgh hosts the inaugural edition of Sen. Dave McCormick’s Energy and Innovation Summit. The event will gather champions in energy and AI, investors, labor leaders and government officials. The focus will be on American energy dominance for a new technological era — and the opportunity that provides. Western Pennsylvania...
Mark Masterson: How much longer does Pittsburgh have to wait for inclusionary zoning?
Ten years ago, in June 2015, the city of Pittsburgh’s first ever Affordable Housing Task Force met for the first time. I was one member of the Task Force, along with members of City Council and other elected offices, local housing developers, building trades and organized labor, as well as...
Lisa Jarvis: When an HIV scientific breakthrough isn’t enough
A landmark breakthrough in HIV prevention — a scientific feat decades in the making — received final approval from the Food and Drug Administration last month. Gilead Sciences’ lenacapavir is so effective that global health leaders had started to cautiously talk about the end of an epidemic that continues to...
Ted Kopas and Jeff Balzer: Pa. opioid settlement fails to fund full cost of crisis
The opioid epidemic has left few communities in Pennsylvania unscathed. It has stolen lives, fractured families, overwhelmed emergency services, and put unbearable pressure on county and municipal budgets. Westmoreland County is certainly no exception. So when the opioid settlement funds began to flow as part of a national reckoning with...
Catherine Thorbecke: We’re losing the plot on AI in universities
An artificial intelligence furor that’s consuming Singapore’s academic community reveals how we’ve lost the plot over the role the hyped-up technology should play in higher education. A student at Nanyang Technological University said in a Reddit post that she used a digital tool to alphabetize her citations for a term...
Mary Ellen Klas: Want students to thrive? Lock up their phones
There are few things most American politicians seem to agree upon, but banning mobile phones in classrooms seems to be one of them. Based on the experiences of some schools that have required students to prioritize learning over TikTok scrolling, there’s also a welcome side benefit: less conflict and more...
Desirée Cormier Smith, Kelly M. Fay Rodríguez and Beth Van Schaack: A plan to take human rights off the table at the State Department
What a difference eight years make. During President Trump’s first term, then-Sen. Marco Rubio pushed the president to expand his human rights diplomatic agenda. Rubio recognized that promoting human rights abroad is in the national interest. He urged the president to appoint an assistant secretary for the Bureau of Democracy,...
A. Robert Jaeger: Why sacred places still matter in Pa.
The oldest Catholic church in Scranton, the Nativity of Our Lord Church, recently held its final Mass. For 120 years, it stood as a cornerstone of city’s South Side, a space where generations gathered to worship, connect and create memories. But due to declining attendance and rising maintenance costs, the...
Sheldon H. Jacobson: You cannot ‘restore’ high scientific standards if they are already in place
President Donald Trump’s executive order “Restoring Gold Standard Science” provides a directive to restore a higher standard for scientific research and discovery. Yet despite the concerns it raises, the very standards that it describes already exist and are widely applied. Section one of the order describes why the administration believes...
Jen Mazzocco: Communities need help to cope with storms
This spring, Western and Central Pennsylvania were struck hard by thunderstorms that damaged homes, felled trees, flooded roadways, and overwhelmed local infrastructure and resources already stretched thin. At the storms’ peak, more than half a million businesses and households lost power — some for over a week. As a local...
Cal Thomas: Politics in the pulpit
The Internal Revenue Service announced on Monday it is overturning a restraint on churches and other houses of worship that was supposed to keep them from endorsing candidates for political office. The root of the ban extends back to 1954. Then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson, D-Texas, was running for reelection and faced...
Carl P. Leubsdorf: Trump etches his place in history
Over the past three elections, President Donald Trump has redefined the United States politically, strengthening Republican support among blue collar workers and reducing traditional Democratic majorities among racial minorities. Now, with the enactment of his misleadingly titled “One Big Beautiful Bill,” Trump has — for better or worse — redefined...
Oliver Bateman: What Pa. Dems can learn from Zohran Mamdani
Thirty-three-year-old state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s triumph over aging dynast Andrew Cuomo in New York’s Democratic mayoral primary should have Pennsylvania Democrats taking notes. Not because the state’s voters will eagerly cast their ballots for a democratic socialist preaching about subsidized gender-affirming care — that dog won’t hunt in a purple...
Noah Feldman: The Supreme Court’s majority is playing the long game
Many legal commentators apparently believe that, in the term that just ended, the Supreme Court further enabled President Donald Trump. The court did, in fact, issue a series of conservative decisions that Trump likes. However, under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, the court also simultaneously pursued a careful...
Colin Fleming: Charlie Chaplin’s 100-year-old film ‘The Gold Rush’ has timeless lessons on how to keep going
The wisest among us realize that what we normally think of as opposites are also associates. There’s life and death, joy and pain, fulfillment and absence. And, as Charlie Chaplin understood and helped millions to understand, comedy and tragedy. Cinema was about a quarter of a century old when Chaplin’s...
Mihir Sharma: RFK Jr. is playing with babies’ lives
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was appointed secretary of Health and Human Services, everyone knew he was capable of doing great damage. He had a long history of indulging conspiracy theories, particularly when it came to vaccines. Already, his attempt to reassess immunization schedules in the U.S. has outraged pediatricians....
Martin Schram: Peace through power – it’s electric!
For several hold-your-breath weeks, as spring sizzled into summer, the nuclear dealmakers of President Donald Trump’s USA and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Iran seemed astonishingly close to a deal. So close that it seemed they’d soon reach out and seize the deal. But no one was willing to...
Allison Schrager: America’s broken politics is breaking economics, too
The political realignment has come for economics. At least since the days of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes in the last century, the divide in economic thinking roughly corresponded to the political split. In the mainstream, everyone was a capitalist and saw some role for government. The right/left divide...
Jim Lee: Fetterman stuck between rock and a ‘hard’ GOP place
SP&R’s latest Pennsylvania poll conducted June 16-21 (with 713 likely voters) shows U.S. Sen. John Fetterman with a 41% job approval after 2½ years in office. On the surface, this isn’t so bad. For comparison, former U.S. Sen. Bob Casey had a 37% job approval rating in our polling in...
David M. Drucker: Mamdani’s rise is a gift Republicans are already using
Zohran Mamdani isn’t the most famous Democrat in America. But the front-runner to serve as New York’s next mayor is well on his way — and he’ll get there, if Republicans have anything to say about it. Immediately after the previously little-known state assemblyman from Queens won the Democratic nomination...
Austin Sarat: In a democracy, protest is good for the soul, even if it does not change anyone’s mind
For the past several months, I have organized a weekly “Stand Up for Democracy” rally/protest on the busiest street corner in my hometown. On Fridays at 5:30 pm., students, teachers, townspeople and senior citizens come together, hold signs and wave at passing drivers, some of whom honk their horns in...
Rep. Mike Kelly: One Big Beautiful Bill a gamechanger for Western Pa.
Last week, Congress passed, and President Trump signed, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). This historic package of legislation prevents the largest tax hike in modern American history while providing tax relief for Americans across the board. From employers to employees, from children to seniors, this legislation provides historic...
Bill Lueders: Reasons to celebrate July 4
Every Fourth of July, Erwin Knoll, the late editor of The Progressive magazine, would host a party. He’d grill burgers and brats and tack copies of the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights to trees in his backyard in Madison, Wis. The U.S. government has never had a fiercer...
