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Dolly Parton was rich in all the right ways

Columns

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 ...

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

Columns

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 ...

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

Columns

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 ...

Twilight’s last gleaming

Columns

There is a point in the decline of republics when the problem is no longer that government breaks its own laws. Governments will always behave unlawfully. The deeper problem comes when the constitutional machinery designed to prevent those acts stops functioning — when spending becomes detached from arithmetic, presidential power becomes detached from law and Congress and the courts become detached from the Constitution. That’s where America is today. The fiscal warning could hardly be clearer. The government’s debt has now passed $40 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office ...

Woman weighs peritoneal dialysis against hemodialysis

Columns

DEAR DR. ROACH: My daughter, age 44, has had chronic kidney disease since she was 10 years old. She had a renal transplant at 23, then another at 32. The second graft started gradually failing a year back. In January, she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. This past month, she had a total hysterectomy, along with the removal of malignant tumors and nodules. She has since been on hemodialysis without any output of urine. What are the possibilities with peritoneal dialysis? Will this enable her to have a near-normal life? — R.S. ANSWER: Peritoneal dialysis uses the immense lining of ...

The Jeffries-Kushner meeting reveals more than either party will admit

Columns

Private meetings in Washington often speak more loudly than public speeches. The recent meeting between House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and influential outside adviser, is one of those moments. The two New Yorkers reportedly discussed immigration, housing, affordability and possible areas of cooperation. Kushner also reportedly suggested that Jeffries meet with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Neither man has portrayed the conversation as a formal negotiation, but its timing less than three months before the midterm ...