A growing number of people are becoming aware of the national movement to replace Andrew Jackson’s face on the $20 bill with the face of someone less male, less presidential, less white, less racist, less slave-owning and less a-lot-of-other-things that the former president (1829-1827) represents. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator from New Hampshire, has introduced a bill in Congress to accomplish that, although I was surprised to learn that the Secretary of the Treasury (currently Jacob Lew) already has full legal authority to decide whose faces are on our paper money. The restrictions on Lew’s choices under 31 U.S. Code § 5114 (b), should he or a successor choose to exercise their autho

The Huffington Post called my attention to a study today commissioned by the Pac-12 Conference schools to assess the time demands on college athletes and assess possible areas for reform. The study (Arizona, Utah and USC declined to participate) found that athletes spend 50 hours a week on sports during their competitive season. To put that in perspective, that’s 10 hours a week more than most people work, and then these athletes – both men and women – have to go to class and study. The athletes didn’t mind spending so much time practicing, meeting, playing and traveling because they said they accepted that as the price for competing at the highest level of their sports. Nevertheless, they d

On many, if not most, issues, I’d rather North Carolina follow its most famous public university’s lead. The state would be a better place today, for example, if it had elected UNC President Frank Porter Graham to the U.S. Senate in 1950 instead of segregationist Willis Smith (a Dookie, I must point out) and boosting Smith's protégé Jesse Helms. But in the case of college sports, it would have been much better if UNC had followed the North Carolinians who, in 1893, adopted esse quam videri – Latin for “to be rather than to seem” – as the state’s official motto. Five years ago a UNC sports scandal broke that ultimately revealed hundreds of athletes’ playing eligibility had been maintained ove

The parents of Mrs. Oliver’s students at Evergreen Elementary School – and in some cases their grandparents – get us out of jams with ctrl-alt-delete. Their names flash across your computer screen every time you open a piece of Adobe software, like Acrobat or Photoshop. They put the big P in the middle of words and the pixels in the iPhone camera that took these pictures. They took the bite out of the Apple. In another decade or so they will be inventing whatever the Next Big Thing is. Krithi, one of the fourth-graders in Mrs. Oliver’s class, could be teaching English by then, but she likes math and science better and thinks she’d like to be an architect. “Big buildings,” she said. Last mont

It’s amazing how our society criticizes needy people for having needs and yet works so hard to block their every avenue of escape from poverty. I remember the mid-1960s when Congressional debate over Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights bills was the big news. Opponents complained that black people were leeches lazily soaking up welfare. So let’s keep discriminatory employment practices to keep them out of jobs. Even at 13, I knew contempt when I heard it. There’s been progress in the four decades since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We are now a colorblind nation – nobody sees white, black or even brown people any more – but the poor, as the Bible predicted, are doggedly determined to remain with u

The video below of black motorist Will Stack, who was stopped for a traffic violation in South Carolina, has gone viral with hundreds of thousands of Facebook shares. It’s not hard to understand why. He was cooperative with the white officer who pulled him, careful not to seem threatening in any way and acknowledged ignorance of the law he was accused of breaking. He said his respect was reciprocated and he got off with a warning. It’s the way we’d all like such an interaction to go between Americans and the people they entrust to enforce their laws. But videos of traffic stops that go the way everybody wants and expects don’t go viral any more than videos of routine airplane landings do – n

Last August I sent out a newsletter headlined "Surf City USA" about a vacation stop in Crescent City -- California's tsunami magnet -- on the far northern California coast. Much of Crescent City was destroyed by the tsunami from the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake in Anchorage, Alaska, and has since been rebuilt. A beachcomber just south of Crescent City was drowned in 2011 by the tsunami generated by the Fukushima, Japan earthquake. I wrote in the newsletter about high school students in Crescent City who, two years after the Fukushima quake, discovered a 20-foot fishing boat that had washed up in California. The boat's ownership was traced back to a Japanese high school near Fukushima, and a d