Writing

While my writing subjects have spanned architecture to zucchini recipes, they are largely concentrated in the topics sampled below:

SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Medicine’s New Menu
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Four-star hospitals? Thumbs up or down on medical clinics? MRIs listed from $ to $$$? One of the biggest challenges for the hot, new “consumer-driven” plans might be delivering them without looking like a restaurant review. Read Full Article

FAMILIES

Home Alone
Newsday/New York Newsday
Joe and Celia Johnson – he’s 14, she’s 11 – are home alone every day after school since their mother opened an arts shop a few blocks from their home. They take phone messages, after telling callers their parents “are not available.” The only heat-producing appliances they use are the parent-approved microwave and toaster. And there’s no TV until their homework is done. Sound too good to be true? These youngsters are the flip side of worries over “latchkey” situations. Research is clear that latchkey arrangements can be detrimental. But now researchers are dissecting the years of studies behind the depressing numbers. And they’re finding that, like Joe and Celia, many youngsters do not suffer and that, in fact, they learn important growing-up lessons when the arrangement is handled well. Read Full Article

WORKPLACE/LABOR ARTICLES AND COLUMN

Back from Iraq (Published on Memorial Day weekend)
Minneapolis Star Tribune
More than 15,000 Minnesota soldiers – National Guard, Reserve and active duty – have been deployed to global hot spots since 9/11. For most of them, as was true for their fathers and grandfathers coming home from earlier wars, the euphoric family reunions were the sweet, easy part of their homecomings. What follows is tougher: First, a kind of emotional decompression from combat to civilian life. Then the challenge of getting on with work and making a living. It can be a difficult and sometimes lonely undertaking. Employers worry about hiring them, knowing the military could call them away again. Some come back with injuries that make it impossible to return to their former jobs. And many come to realize that even the best of re-entries to the work-a-day world require serious attitude – and adrenaline – adjustments. Read Full Article

A Little Bit of Justice Can Be Prohibitive
Minneapolis Star Tribune
In employment law, one of the toughest challenges is to get a little bit of justice. Lawyers get so many calls from people who never got their last paycheck or their last raise – and often it takes more money to pursue the claims than they’re worth. But Rosanne Simons recently won her little bit of justice, when a U.S. District Judge in Minnesota said that her former employer owed her the $1,456.55 he neglected to contribute to her IRA account at work. It took a year and a half of facing that employer, whose bill to fight her will almost certainly top $100,000. But she had lawyers who stuck with her, partly because they were so convinced she would win and the court would order the other side to pay their fees. Read Full Article

PERSONAL FINANCE

Lots of Lire: LI entrepreneur targets Italians for high-cost Florida land
Newsday/New York Newsday
The sky is a clear stretch of blue-tinted heat. The roads look like abandoned airstrips, with grass pushing through cracks and the edges falling away in chunks. Alongside stand lush forests of canopy pines, prickly palmettos and spots of sand where neon-yellow crickets the size of small rabbits scratch out their sandpaper calls. A busload of Italian visitors loves the whole Florida scene, and for many, this drive through Palm Bay, 30 miles south of Cape Canaveral, is their first view of the Sunshine State. Tour impresario Victor Minca, an entrepreneur from Massapequa, is on board the bus to turn that love into a land sale, sending many of his guests home with their own piece of America: a quarter-acre lot priced at two to four times market value. Read Full Article

ENERGY

And the Wind Waits … and Waits …
Minneapolis Star Tribune
To anyone who wants to join the wind energy movement, Ryan Wolf says: Get in line. Wolf, of Le Sueur, Minn., has been waiting almost two years for the go-ahead to build 27 wind turbines in the southwest part of the state. It’s anyone’s guess how much longer he’ll be waiting, given a backlog of applications that technically could take more than 600 years to clear at the federal agency that stands between him and the renewable energy marketplace. Read Full Article