The lack of civility in today’s communications is troubling, makes it difficult to collaborate and cooperate, and keeps us angry and frustrated.

It has been both heartening and frustrating to follow news accounts of the LePage administration’s proposed MaineCare cuts that would, among other things, end MaineCare coverage for 65,000 Mainers.

There may never have been a law more misnamed than the Affordable Care Act.

The United States has a terribly dysfunctional health-care system, unique among the rich countries in the word in its waste and abuse of its citizens.

Today I will relish opening up my new calendars, and placing them on walls, desks and in my purse.

It’s the time of year again when many of us resolve (again) to be better versions of ourselves: thinner, stronger, quieter, kinder, less impulsive, less wasteful, more reliable, more generous and, in a hundred other ways, better people.

Huge excitement. Two Earth-size planets found orbiting a sun-like star less than a thousand light-years away. This comes two weeks after the stunning announcement of another planet orbiting another star at precisely the right distance — within the so-called “habitable zone” that is not too hot and not too cold — to allow for liquid water and therefore possible life.

One of my newspaper friends pointed out to me recently that opinion columnists who are not actually sportswriters should resist the apparently uncontrollable desire to write about sports.

A pair of world leaders died on a single weekend earlier this month, and each of the two men embodied one of the great alternative models of politics in the modern world, totalitarian and democratic.

Britain in the early 1970s was decayed, ungovernable and globally irrelevant, done in by the cumulative effect of postwar socialist reforms. Margaret Thatcher, who came to power as the nation’s first female prime minister in 1979, returned Britain to the realm of the great powers.