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Living creatively with disabilities

Jim Wiest was an exceptional human being who understood how to work creatively to make life better for others. In 1971, when I first met my sister Scottie’s future husband, I could tell that he was there to make life better for Scottie. He was a leather craftsman who had built furnishings for Scottie’s pottery shop while she was living in a garage apartment near Lewisburg. After they married, they moved to a farm in Upshur County and finally to Elkins. She continued to make pottery, and Jim took a job as the regional Xerox representative. Whenever copiers broke down, desperate ...

Tillis and Trump

Thom Tillis’s dissent from Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” ending with his announcement that he will not seek re-election to his Senate seat in North Carolina, is intriguing. A self-described moderate conservative, he finds himself a political dinosaur along with Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and others who lurk in the Senate corridors complaining about President Trump, all the while voting for his proposals. The affair says much about the Republican Party. For instance, Tillis and Rand Paul of Kentucky both voted against moving the legislation forward, but for entirely ...

Being a great place to work starts with a great place to live

Capital follows talent, but talent follows place. I first heard this statement from placemaking expert James Lima.   Most of my time is spent helping organizations create great places to work. The ability to attract and retain talent is the difference between successful organizations and others. But is being a great place to work enough to ensure that people will accept a job offer and that a company can build a strong workforce? At one time, it was. For decades, people tended to stay close to where they grew up. Today, this is no longer the case. A great place to work may not be ...

Political potpourri

Last week, I wrote about the tendency of Gov. Patrick Morrisey to continue on as if he is still trying to win a GOP primary by taking certain actions and making certain statements aimed at keeping his base in his corner. But I still don’t know who the base is that he keeps playing to on this issue of religious exemptions to West Virginia’s school-age immunization program required by State Code. I just went back to Morrisey’s website for his campaign for governor and I can’t find anything showing me he campaigned specifically on this issue. While a bill to allow for religious ...

Barista proletariat wins in New York

Zohran Mamdani’s lead in first choices in New York City’s ranked-choice mayoral primary, and his inevitable victory when second, third, fourth and fifth choices of trailing candidates are allocated to candidates voters ranked lower, mean that he’ll be the Democratic nominee for mayor of the nation’s largest city and the likely winner of the general election in November. Mamdani, 33, is a three-term state assemblyman who calls himself a democratic socialist. He has backed a rent freeze, city-run grocery stores, free buses, putting homeless service centers in the subways, a $30 ...

Trump doctrine

My young family and I were in Israel when the Israel Defense Forces and Mossad began their offensive operations against Iran on June 13, commencing what President Donald Trump has since called the “12-Day War.” Although the Mossad’s intelligence and the IDF’s rapid establishment of air superiority inside Iran proved to be nothing less than extraordinary, my wife and I lived on pins and needles for those first few days of the war. We had to be ready day or night, at a moment’s notice, to drop everything we were doing, grab our 6-month-old baby, and race to the house’s “safe ...