"Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?" -- Henry Higgins Those are the words librettist Alan Jay Lerner penned for the fictional professor Henry Higgins in the 1956 musical "My Fair Lady," and honestly, it could have been the title of Helen Andrews' much-discussed recent essay in Compact. She ...

Fifty years is a long time. Maybe it isn’t quite as long today as it would have seemed in my mind years ago, but that’s because everything related to time takes on a new perspective when you are in your retirement years. Still, 50 years is in anyone’s accounting practices half a century ...

A young woman slowly entered the front door of Sunrise Mission in Alpena. Lowered eyes and quiet pleas were followed by several young children. The seven-year-old wet herself in the lobby, deeply frightened. All the kids were dirty and some shoeless, shaking and crying having quickly fled a ...

During my tenure as a Probate and Family Court Judge, I was occasionally asked to speak to various organizations. Delinquency, abuse, and neglect are all topics of perpetual interest in any caring community. In preparation for these appearances, I would update a chart I had previously ...

The sound you heard was windows being smashed at the East Wing. The sound you did not hear was questions from officials paid to monitor what happens to a National Heritage Site. The White House is owned by the American people, not any current inhabitant. It's true that other presidents have ...

It's fashionable to call the current federal government shutdown a "crisis," to focus on the missed paychecks, delayed services and bureaucratic disarray. But what if this standoff -- this uncomfortable pause in government business -- is exactly what the country needs right now? What if the ...