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Arthurdale’s New Deal experiment, and the debate over socialism

ARTHURDALE, West Virginia — The road into this quiet Preston County community gives little warning that it was once the setting for one of the New Deal’s most ambitious, and most debated, experiments. Ninety-three years ago, Arthurdale became the first experimental community established under the federal subsistence-homesteads program, an effort to help impoverished families move from unstable industrial areas into planned rural communities. The idea was that residents could combine wage work with gardens, livestock and small-scale home production. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt ...

Dear Annie: No place for mom guilt in a partnership

Dear Annie: I have a 9-year-old son from a previous relationship and a 3-year-old daughter with my current partner. He is a wonderful, involved father and partner. He makes lunches, does laundry, cleans up after dinner, helps with bedtime and will often notice something needs to be done before I even ask. The strange part is that instead of simply appreciating the help, I sometimes feel guilty about it. I grew up in a home where my mother did almost everything. My father worked hard, but housework and taking care of the children were considered her responsibility. Somewhere along the ...

Man gets diagnosed with extremely rare form of finger cancer

DEAR DR. ROACH: Do you know anything about aggressive digital papillary adenocarcinoma? My 39-year-old nephew was just diagnosed, and his parents are searching for answers. He’s getting scans to determine whether they should amputate his finger. As far as we know, it hasn’t metastasized. — A.M. ANSWER: No, I’d never heard of this condition. It’s extremely rare (1 in 10 million people). “Adenocarcinoma,” by definition, is cancer of the glandular tissue, and there isn’t really much glandular tissue in a finger. Cancer of any extremity is almost always of connective tissue ...

Dolly Parton was rich in all the right ways

One of the unfortunate realities of getting older is finding that the people you like begin to die. There are some, maybe, who are taken before their time and others who go at the end of a complete life, but either way the obituaries pile up. When Dolly Parton died the other day, I felt the weight of another passing. I never met her, but she represented more to me (and to many others, I imagine) than her songwriting, her acting and her singing. I saw in her the way poverty can shape a person — slash their outsides and scar them in ways that never fully heal — while still failing to ...

Thank you, Dolly Parton, for your music, good humor and public service

Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I am told, I was not surprised to hear Dolly Parton say in an interview that she once entered a “Dolly Parton lookalike” drag queen contest in Los Angeles unannounced — and lost. Parton, who died Tuesday at age 80, enjoyed telling that story, which illustrated, among other things, that it wasn’t always easy to be Dolly, even for Dolly. “Nobody applauded,” she said in a May 2025 radio interview, “like a little trickle that was probably David, my hairdresser.” Go figure. Maybe she looked too much like the real thing ...

Dear Annie: Can’t get a word in with long-winded friend

Dear Annie: I have a friend I’ve known for more than 30 years. He is a good person, loyal and generous, and we share a lot of history. The problem is that he has absolutely no sense of when he has lost a room. At dinner parties, he can take over the entire conversation with a story that lasts 15 or 20 minutes. And these are not short, lively stories. We get every street name, every person’s first and last name, what someone ordered for lunch, what year it happened and usually several side stories before he finally gets to the point. By then, everyone else has stopped trying to ...