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Suburban State of Mind

by Miriam Axel-Lute May 10, 2012

Have you visited our lovely suburbs Schenectady and Troy lately? No, I haven’t become a proponent of some weird dedensification plan. I’m just following the classifications that Wendell Cox, author of War on the Dream: How ...

Bone Headed

by Miriam Axel-Lute April 25, 2012

Cracked.com’s “5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women” did not initially appeal to me, but after seeing it repeatedly recommended, if with warnings about it being “depressing,” I behaved like a predictable social ...

Just Say No (To Drugs)

by Miriam Axel-Lute April 11, 2012

You probably don’t expect me to mean that literally. But I do. Let me tell you why. I assure you it has nothing to do with feeling any right to control what you put in ...

Raising Our Equity Grade

by Miriam Axel-Lute March 29, 2012

I adore the Capital Region, as most of you know. But when it comes to racial equity, we flunk. Don’t take my word for it. Take the Urban Institute’s, which ranked Albany-Schenectady-Troy 93rd out of ...

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Who’s a Socialist Now?

by Miriam Axel-Lute March 15, 2012

In a recent Doonesbury cartoon, a telephone operator at a company called MyFacts.com helpfully suggests to a grateful anti-Obama caller that an acceptable new definition of socialist is “A black man with power.” That is certainly ...

Ouch, My Wrist

by Miriam Axel-Lute March 1, 2012

For all the fanfare over the National Mortgage Settlement that was eventually agreed to by 49 state attorneys general, you’d think the banks were actually being held accountable or something. I know, that would be nice. It’s ...

Brother, Can You Spare Some Time?

by Miriam Axel-Lute February 16, 2012

“As people become wealthier, time becomes their major scarce resource. Suppose that you are very rich but have only a few hours a week of spare time. Give some examples of steps you can take ...

No Theocracy, Thanks

by Miriam Axel-Lute February 1, 2012

This is what happens when we let people run for office opposed. Consider yourself warned. Albany’s new county executive Dan McCoy—whom, for the record, I did not vote for despite his having no opponent, though I ...

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Indians in the House

by Miriam Axel-Lute January 18, 2012

My older daughter has recently passed a major milestone: ability to handle any sort of plot tension. Not like we’re going in for scary movies or anything, but this does vastly increase the range of ...

New Year’s Permissions

by Miriam Axel-Lute January 5, 2012

There are as many conflicting opinions on New Year’s Resolutions as there are on any other form of self-help or self-improvement. Which is to say, rather a lot of them. A quick survey shows that there ...

We Won’t Go

by Miriam Axel-Lute December 21, 2011

“Welcome here, or welcome not, old Father Christmas should never be forgot!” Where, you might ask might Father Christmas not be welcome? Perhaps if he is part of a rag-tag band of mummers, bringing a archetypal play ...

Fix It First

by Miriam Axel-Lute December 7, 2011

Our car died this weekend. Blessedly, it chose a few blocks from home to do it, leading only to a Saturday night wrong-side-of-the-street parking ticket rather than a highway-side-with-two-kids drama. It was the hybrid mechanism itself ...

Things Fall Apart

by Miriam Axel-Lute November 22, 2011

To the news hound it may seem that the hardest harvest is consequence: the richly deserved chicken slaughtered on her roost, the open-pollinated burrs of hypocrisy and insincerity, the mortar-eating ivy that can’t tear down the master’s house fast enough. But ...