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Dear Annie: Private matters, public knowledge

Columns

Dear Annie: I love your advice and the fact you’re able to cut to the chase. I find myself in need of your level head, too! I’ve been (mostly) happily married for 26 years. My husband is very gregarious and never met a stranger. In fact, he happily opens up his life to anyone and everyone. I feel like he constantly overshares, but as long as he keeps it to his own information, that’s fine. However, he doesn’t keep my information private, especially my health information. A few years ago, I had a cancer scare and chose not to tell even my adult children until I knew for sure. ...

The President and the Pope

Columns

Call him the “antisocial” media president. When a president attacks the Pope, he telegraphs: “There’s nothing I won’t do or say.” That is a profoundly troubling message. There are no lines I won’t cross, no rules I won’t break, President Donald Trump is telling the whole wide world. Nobody is safe nor sacred in my book. Got it? And the White House press corps meekly accepts that. The worse Trump gets, the worse Trump gets, in a vortex of flexing power and expressing anger. This week he insulted the Roman Catholic Church and its 1.4 billion members. Last week, he ...

Dear Annie: The uneven split

Columns

Dear Annie: My friend insists on splitting every restaurant bill “evenly,” no matter what. The problem is, she always orders cocktails and appetizers, while I usually stick to one entree. Last week, my $22 dinner somehow became $48 after the “split.” When I suggested we each pay for what we ordered, she laughed and said, “That’s so much more complicated.” I like spending time with her, but I’m starting to dread going out to eat. How do I bring this up without sounding cheap? — Tired of Picking Up the Tab Dear Tired: There are plenty of ways to split a bill that ...

Whoa, have we lost our minds?

Letters to the editor

Tim Mannello Williamsport On April 7 at 8 p.m., the President of the United States wrote this on his social media page: “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” Pause for a moment and let this sink in: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to exist again.” Do we truly understand the gravity of that? Do we grasp what is being done in our name? Or do we simply drift on to the next medication commercial after the news report, barely noticing what we just heard? This threat would mean the murder of 24 million Iranians who are babies, toddlers, kids in ...

Man gets diagnosed with PSC, which then morphed into cancer

Columns

DEAR DR. ROACH: No parent should ever outlive their children. A couple of years ago, my son, who is now approaching 54 years young, was diagnosed with what I am told is an extremely rare illness called primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC). Since he required special bile duct tubes to be installed and repeatedly changed out, he had been waiting for a proper liver transplant. When this was finally about to happen, the disease apparently morphed into abdominal cancer, thus rendering the (long-awaited) liver transplant no longer viable. I had never heard of this illness before, but ...

Debunking five tax day myths

Columns

Every April, Americans spend more than 7 billion hours filing taxes and roughly the same amount of time arguing over them, almost entirely on the basis of several common myths. Here are the five most consequential. —Myth No. 1: The Rich Don’t Pay Their Fair Share This is the most repeated claim in American tax politics and one of the least supported by actual data. The top 1% of earners take in 22% of total income and pay 40% of all federal income taxes. The top 10% earn about half the nation’s income and pay 72% of its taxes. The bottom half of earners, collectively, pay ...