Local Voices

Events over recent months have raised quite a bit of controversy over the appropriateness of materials in the collections and programs offered by some of the public (and school) libraries in our county.

Households at all income levels are impacted by Pennsylvania’s housing crisis. For affordable housing — where the resident pays no more than 30% of their income on housing costs — the need is significant. The National Low Income Housing Coalition reports that Pennsylvania currently lacks mor…

Three generations of the Gibbons family ran an Underground Railroad station near Bird-in-Hand. They helped move hundreds of freedom-seekers toward safety.

It’s tempting to think there’s a split in the Republican Party between far-right MAGA activists and traditional Republicans. Perhaps you think the MAGAs are the fringe extremists, the insurgents, and the GOP is still led mainly by pragmatic, Chamber of Commerce-type Republicans.

After 9/11, Muslims and Arabs, and those who looked as if they might be Muslim or Arab, were subjected to the cutting hate of Islamophobia in the Western world. I know this because my younger brother, more than I, encountered that bigotry in New York City. So I am aware of the injustice of b…

As university students prepare for the summer break, a relative few are drawing attention for their protests in opposition to the Israel-Hamas war. These protesters assert that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, and they are demanding that their universities divest from comp…

I spent most of one recent day in my recliner. I had a low-grade fever, and simply moving about was like slogging through soggy oatmeal.

Being bad at math has become an internet trend in recent years, with low test scores and poor comprehension being used as the punch line of many popular memes and TikToks.

According to political analyst Sukhayl Niyazov, writing in 2021, “America was ... not an attempt to create the best form of government, but rather the best possible — a political system theoretically capable of solving concrete social problems, eliminating policy errors and learning from them.”

The worst days of school are the days you go in knowing a standardized test is awaiting your arrival. You walk into class after getting a horrible night’s rest and accept your fate of staring at this test for the next several hours. Standardized tests in the classroom should be abolished, si…

Questions about the future — what career to pursue and what training or education that entails, where to live, how to be an adult on our own for the first time — swarm our brains as soon as we enter high school.

Cindy Beaston has conversations with Civil War generals.