Syndicated columns

Let’s take a breather from wallowing in politics, where the mantra seems to be that we are a nation of faded glory with doom all around us. Honestly, a lot of good stuff is happening out there.

In Trump world, women get passed around like canapes at a cocktail party.

Sen. Bernie Sanders is waging an improbable presidential campaign, but he won’t disappear after this election. Nor will his followers: Perhaps they’ll be called the Bernie Brigade or Sanderistas. The Vermont socialist probably has no more than a 10 percent shot at winning the Democratic nomination – and that’s if something bad happens to Hillary Clinton or, less likely, if after winning in Wisconsin this week, he scores a huge upset in New York two weeks later and transforms the race.

A paradox of our time concerns productivity. We are awash in transformative technologies – smartphones, tablets, big data – and yet the growth in labor productivity, which should benefit from all the technology, is dismal. This matters. Productivity is economic lingo for efficiency, and it’s the wellspring of higher living standards. If productivity lags, so will wages and incomes. The latest figures are disheartening. From 2010 to 2015, average labor productivity for the entire economy rose a meager 0.3 percent a year. If maintained over a decade, this molasses pace implies a puny 3 percent wage increase, assuming (perhaps unrealistically) that the gains are spread evenly over the labor force.

If one could pigeon-hole a religion by merely reading its holy works, why are there so many denominations that spring from the Bible?

If Trump were truly pro-life, which he apparently isn’t, given his lack of understanding of the pro-life movement to end abortion, no one in that world talks about punishing women.

Once upon a time, when a person identified as conservative, you knew the ideas he or she meant to convey – low taxes, small government, resistance to social change.

Is America obliged to both police the globe and pay for the service?

The bathroom ban is a symptom of systemic, institutionalized discrimination against transgender people.

Though it’s not clear whether that broader shift to the left will occur among corporations, there is no doubt that a dramatic change has occurred on gay rights.

We feel poor not because we are poor but because our stunted economic growth cannot satisfy all our demands.

Syrian Kurds are the only fighters willing and able to retake Raqqa from the Islamic State. The United States should work to clear the political obstacles that prevent this.

Once upon a time, I protested the Democratic trope that the GOP was waging war on women. ... Sue me if you must, but I’ve changed my mind.

Why serve a country that often hates you? Why support a country that sometimes fails you? Why tell your children to believe in a country like that?

All that goodwill Apple has amassed for its wonderful products could start draining away as Americans wonder what side it’s on.

It’s now been seven years. The real world has stubbornly refused to accommodate Obama’s pacific dreams.

What kind of alternative does the United States show Cubans on that corner of their island, Guantanamo Bay, that the U.S. controls?