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The practice of gerrymandering must end for all of our sakes

Politics is sometimes referred to as a “great game” — with incrementally more powerful politicians moving the lesser pieces around a board of boundaries, both physical and topical. We would argue that there are few venues where this is more reflective of reality than gerrymandering. Don’t believe us? What if we told you gerrymandering has literally been made into a board game? It’s not like we are the only ones who see it this way, either. Recently, The Express had the privilege of talking to Carol Kuniholm, one of the co-founders of Fair Districts PA. In an interview ...

Labor Day an important reminder that workers are not expendable

Did you know that Labor Day has been an official public holiday since 1894 — with Oregon being the first adopter, in 1887? That makes this the 131st Labor Day, at least as a nation. People think of many things around Labor Day — the first days of school and the end of summer being two prominent ones. But we think that the original intent of the holiday — as a day to honor workers and recognize American labor movements — is perhaps too understated these days. Consider, as columnist Salena Zito does in today’s edition of The Express, the steelworkers in Clairton. Or ...

Classrooms are for learning, not phones

Let us begin by acknowledging that this is a more complicated issue than many people make it out to be. That said: as a general rule, we believe that phones should be put aside during class time. Now, we have been out of school for some number of years, so we don’t want to make a blanket statement here because we can easily imagine some class subjects where integrating phones into the coursework brings benefits as opposed to detriments. We suspect those would be the exception, however, and not the rule. And, of course, there needs to be an understanding of the real world, ...

All eyes on Washington, DC

Washington, DC is a pretty unique place. Obviously there’s the museums and historic monuments — as well as the inelegant government concrete boulders that house the alphabet soup of bureaucratic entities. But DC is more than just a showroom. The city itself occupies more than 60 square miles of land — for reference, Lock Haven reaches just more than 2 square miles. A closer, though still hilariously not to scale, comparison is Williamsport, which occupies about 9.5 square miles. Within that acreage, DC houses a population of 689,545, as of the 2020 Census. Keep in ...

Stay safe on the zombie internet

Earlier this year, digital news organization The Wrap published a story reporting that cybersecurity firm CHEQ had declared up to 76% of Twitter’s traffic during the Super Bowl was bots. We won’t get into the details here — that’s by far the most important bit and you can find the rest easily enough — but it’s a critical detail that flew somewhat under the radar. In the last 30-odd years, the internet has cemented itself: in our workplace, in our culture and in our downtime. If you’re above a certain age, you likely remember the early internet as a wide-open frontier, ...

All veterans deserve respect and their well-earned benefits — including the transgender ones

We are aghast at the lack of respect with which a subset of veterans are being treated at the hands of the U.S. Air Force, as reported by the Associated Press and published in Friday’s edition of The Express on page A2. To spare you the searching, here’s the lede for that story: “The U.S. Air Force said Thursday it would deny all transgender service members who have served between 15 and 18 years the option to retire early and would instead separate them without retirement benefits.” Folks, despite what a vocal subsection of our Facebook commenters choose to believe, we ...