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California's bad idea: gender quotas for corporate boards

September 16, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

DOES PORCINE male chauvinism exclude women from the highest ranks of American corporations? No one could have doubted it in the 1880s, or even the 1980s. But today, a rising tide of female business talent is transforming the nation's boardrooms.

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Celebrity gossip may entertain, but it makes our whole culture sick

September 9, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

CELEBRITY GOSSIP is social pollution, dirtier and more destructive than anything emitted by industrial smokestacks or automobile tailpipes. Just ask Geoffrey Owens.

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The White House handshake that made everything worse

September 5, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS ago next week, on Sept. 13, 1993, the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" was formally launched with the signing of the Oslo Accords at a White House ceremony hosted by President Bill Clinton. The moment was captured in an epochal photograph of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat shaking hands before a beaming Clinton.

I was there that day, one of many guests on the South Lawn of the White House invited to witness the encounter in person. A quarter of a century later, there are two things about the event I vividly remember — one small but telling, the other overwhelming and pervasive.

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In easing up on mileage rules, the Trump administration gets one right

September 2, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

LABOR DAY WEEKEND marks the traditional close of the summer driving season, but for those of us who live in a college town like Boston, it's also when the throngs of arriving students clog the city's streets with their cars, and empty parking spaces become more elusive than a winning Powerball ticket.

But not all the automotive news is bad.

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Why is a great Senate office building named for a modern racist?

August 29, 2018  •  The Boston Globe

PHILIP HART was right.

When legislation was introduced in 1972 to name the Old Senate Office Building for the recently-deceased Richard Russell Jr. of Georgia, the only senator to speak against the resolution was Hart, the gentle Michigan Democrat known as "the conscience of the Senate."

Hart did not deny that Russell had been an "impressive and effective" legislator, one of the Senate's "giant figures." But rushing to name one of the capital's major buildings after someone who had just died was a mistake the Senate might later regret. "I thought we had learned," he said, "that it is unwise to anticipate history's verdict."

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