Opinion

The 2026 legislative session starts Monday but you won’t have to brave a snowy pass to watch or even participate in that drama.

I have known personally and now said farewell to an item that surely deserves special recognition in the category of “they don’t make ’em like that any more.”

Usually the final Front Porch column I write every year, or sometimes the first one of the new year, is my very favorite one of all – the word of the year column, in which I chew on the words or phrases that lexicographers and others involved in language study have selected to best define the year just ending.

This month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago is scheduled to announce whether the hands of its famous Doomsday Clock will move closer to midnight. It feels like a safe bet that Armageddon is drawing nearer today than it has in a long, long time. The Doomsday Clock started almost 80 years ago, when physicists who developed the Bomb grew alarmed at its use ...