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Dear Annie: The perpetual plus-one

Columns

Dear Annie: I’m 29, living in New York City, with a job I love and a great group of friends — none of whom are single. Half are married or engaged, the other half coupled up in serious relationships. I’m generally OK being single, but going out as the perpetual third wheel is wearing on me. I’ve thought about making new friends; I’ve even thought about moving cities. I’ve also caught myself secretly hoping my coupled friends break up, which I know is terrible. How do I find my people? — Odd One Out Dear Odd One Out: The odd seat out can feel isolating. Don’t be too hard ...

Woman loses consciousness when getting into her wheelchair

Columns

DEAR DR. ROACH: My mother lives with me. She’s 88 and on hospice. She’s totally bedridden. Her brain is fine, but her body has failed her. The problem is that if I try and get her out of the bed for anything (a change of scenery, to change the sheets, etc.), within minutes of getting her into a wheelchair, her blood pressure crashes, and she loses consciousness. Obviously, this is a huge issue. She’s always complained of a lifelong “vasovagal” issue. This also happened occasionally before she was on hospice, and her cardiologist gave her a new medication — midodrine. But ...

Trump’s most powerful enablers wear judicial robes

Columns

In the first Federalist Paper, Alexander Hamilton warned that a great risk to liberty comes from those who start out as “demagogues” and end up as “tyrants.” He nevertheless judged the risk worth taking to establish a constitutional republic. He can be forgiven for taking that chance. Back in 1787, there was no obvious suspect on the horizon about to overturn the new republic — certainly not George Washington, the inevitable choice for the new nation’s first president. Today’s justices of the U.S. Supreme Court cannot be let off so easily. A potential tyrant has arisen ...

What a 700-year-old fresco can teach America

Columns

There are moments when history reaches across the centuries with startling clarity. Standing in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy, and looking at Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s “Allegory of Good and Bad Government,” I had one of those moments. Nearly 700 years old, the series of fresco paintings includes a depiction of a bustling city that illustrates the effects of good government, as well as representations of the decay that results from arbitrary and unjust rulers. The visual treatise on political economy holds important lessons for us today. Lorenzetti’s city isn’t thriving ...

Americans are not as well off as people in peer nations – US safety net’s shortfalls show up in global data

Columns

As the United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, the global data we collect and analyze shows that the country is failing to “promote the general Welfare,” as the Constitution’s framers promised a little more than a decade later. We are scholars of human rights. Alongside the Human Rights Measurement Initiative, a nonprofit that tracks how well more than 200 countries and territories are meeting the human rights commitments their governments have made, we annually update scores measuring whether people can actually get the basics of a ...

Dear Annie: Hoping to heal a hurting family

Columns

Dear Annie: I’ve been married for 35 years and have four children and seven grandchildren. We are a blended family. All the children lived with, and were raised by, my husband and me. One of my daughters was always kind of a black sheep, always doing things outside the box. As a young child, teen and adult, she always did it differently. So much so that, as she got older, it actually started to hurt our family and the other children. She moved out in her early 20s, and I thought things would get better, but they just got worse. Then she came and told us she was pregnant and getting ...