ONLINE EXTRAS

Additional opinions published recently

In addition to the articles on these pages, Star Tribune Opinion publishes others online. This week, they included:

"The 2020 election will be decided in the suburbs. You knew that."

However, the suburbs may not be what you think, writes Joel Kotkin, the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in California. "First, many people moving into suburbs are millennials, those in their mid-20s to late 30s, who were ditching big metro areas even before the pandemic. … Second, the suburbs are more diverse now than ever. …

"People seek out the suburbs," he continues, "because they are relatively affordable, compared with housing in bigger cities, and offer more space, better schools or less crime. Even suburbanites who are 'woke' on issues of the environment, race or gender still have economic and family interests, and prefer to control their own communities.

"The real issues for suburbanites are those neither party seems capable of addressing … ."

"So, some people think it's time to cancel Benjamin Franklin …"

A municipal committee in Washington, D.C., has recommended renaming dozens of schools, parks and government buildings after studying historical connections to slavery and oppression. One out-of-favor name in particular caught the attention of Tribune News Service columnist Jay Ambrose:

"It's true that, before he became an abolitionist also serving the sick, the uneducated, those whose houses were on fire and a revolution that likely would have fizzled without him, [Benjamin] Franklin owned slaves."

Ambrose continues with four thick paragraphs recounting Franklin's contributions to knowledge and well-being.

"Maybe the D.C. committee members think of him as just the inventor of bifocals and a stove, that kind of stuff. He is more nearly summed up as someone whose insights helped convert a stretch of wilderness into a continent of greatness lately veering toward wilderness again."

"In American politics today, the center is a lonely place to be"

The equilibrium between conflicting impulses that used to hold the ideological left and right together "is breaking down before our eyes," writes Tribune News Service Columnist Jonah Goldberg.

"Both movements share an antipathy toward the bedrock American and classically liberal right to be wrong, to live differently, to care about unfashionable things, or simply to not care about fashionable ones. Dissent is a kind of assault that must be policed and silenced, by state or cultural power — or both."

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