There are three main variables in any election: the candidate, his team, and the circumstances surrounding the election, and you only have control over two of them. By early 2007, after forming the Sparkill Civic Association as a way to protect the neighborhood I grew up in from federal control, I was committed to running and had been fortunate to gain an experienced team with a long-standing interest in politics. We won a committee primary, we fought two incumbents to win the election, and yet two years later, there were still people in my own party calling me “a damned kid.” They may still be calling me that. I recount this very brief...

The Obama administration issued guidelines via the Federal Health and Human Services department (which was nearly impossible to find verbatim: http://1.usa.gov/ynRWno) that require private health plans to cover women’s contraception without requiring a co-pay, as well as provide other “preventive services,” including domestic violence screening and woman-specific doctor visits. The Catholic church successfully argued that to require Catholic institutions to provide contraception violates their religious expression, winning an exemption for non-profit religious organizations specifically. The debate devolved into a secular vs. religious...

Over 100 years ago, one of America’s earliest education reformers, John Dewey, published “My Pedagogic Creed,” succinctly and wisely declaring that “all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race.” (http://bit.ly/Ac8Svd). No doubt our social consciousness changed faster in the past 20 years than in the past 200 with the advent of personal computing power. The question is not whether old world educators relent, it’s when. The digital world took me quickly and at age 11 I began publishing a monthly newsletter, The Tappan Times, inspired by my father’s childhood newsletter,...

After watching the January 19th South Carolina debate, I thought to myself on how many of our presidents have had dalliances of one kind or another. One can start with a young George Washington’s flirtation with a married woman, Sally Fairfax. Thomas Jefferson’s decades-long relationship with the slave Sally Hemmings, who was the half-sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife. Andrew Jackson married Rachel Donelson Robards in August of 1791. Unbeknownst to them, her divorce from Captain Lewis Robards had not been finalized. The two, eventually, went through a second wedding ceremony on January 17, 1794. This sad chapter in their...

Reader Robert Boyton asked about zoning boards in this post so here goes: Despite the American Revolution, we maintain storied connections to British and, earlier, Viking land use law, which establishes that our government is the ultimate owner of the land. “That’s why Robin Hood was guilty of stealing the King’s deer, and why property taxes are more like leases from the government,” explains Robert Dell, former chair of the Orangetown Planning Board and of green energy renown at Cooper Union. America has some of the most generous property rights in the world today (http://bit.ly/zDxZEb) but because property is immobile and wholly...