Each time Congress debates its priorities for the farm bill every five years, as it is doing this year, it faces legislation that profoundly affects the economic well-being of Americans nationwide. From managing natural resources to rural development to funding labs and researchers at institutions across America, the farm bill is the most important tool […]
Ben Bragdon
Staff Writer
Ben Bragdon is managing editor of the Sun Journal. Prior to that, he was deputy managing editor for news at the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. Ben was previously editorial page editor for those newspapers and Central Maine Sunday for more than 10 years. Before that, he was managing editor for weekly newspapers at Current Publishing in Westbrook. He began his career as a reporter at the Piscataquis Observer in Dover-Foxcroft and editor at the Moosehead Messenger in Greenville. He has a bachelor’s degree in history from Boston University.
Posted inOp-Eds, Opinion
Commentary: Medical debt is making Americans angry. Doctors and hospitals ignore this at their peril.
For Emily Boller, it was a $5,000 hospital bill for a simple case of pink eye that took four years to pay off. For Mary Curley, it was the threatening collection letters from a lab that arrived more than 2½ years later, just as her husband lost his job and the family was fighting to […]
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Posted inEditorials, Opinion
Our View: Work authorization would help migrants, and the rest of us
The effort got a big boost last week with support from the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Posted inOp-Eds, Opinion
Commentary: Actors are striking because we’ve long been in crisis. It’s not just streaming or AI
In late 2014 I was hired to play friend #3 in a new commercial for Garnier Nutrisse, the at-home hair color line. The company offered me a payout of $100 for my likeness, which they would use online and elsewhere. I spent that paycheck on a cab to and from the shooting location in a […]
Posted inOp-Eds, Opinion
View from Away: Hoping fossil fuel giants will see the light on climate hasn’t worked. Change only comes with mandates and force
One of the most demoralizing things about the world’s response to the climate crisis is the fossil fuel industry’s continued success in blocking the pollution-cutting actions that are in the interest of all of humanity. The solution to our predicament couldn’t be clearer: We need to stop burning fossil fuels and pumping pollution into the […]
Posted inEditorials, Opinion
Our View: Amid deadly heat wave, some good news on the climate
There is a boom occurring in clean energy, and we are all reaping the benefits.
Posted inOp-Eds, Opinion
Scholars Strategy Network: In turbulent times, Maine makes investments in its people
The times in which we live are, and have been, difficult. Turbulence confronts us at every corner, upon every turn. Around us things are constantly changing — economically, politically, medically, socially. There is too often too little upon which to rely to attain and maintain a degree of certainty in one’s life. As we emerge […]
Posted inOp-Eds, Opinion
Dan Rodricks: Attacking the fentanyl crisis — have to do it all, haven’t done enough
I once gave a drug dealer some career advice: Sell cars, not cocaine. The guy seemed open to that idea. He had come to me in the summer of 2005, after reading one of several columns in which we offered advice for “getting out of the game.” He was about 30 years old, dressed in […]
Posted inOp-Eds, Opinion
LZ Granderson: Yacht-busting orcas and board-stealing otters? The Earth is angry
A handful of college students caught a record-breaking 19-foot Burmese python in Florida last week. That’s longer than the width of an NFL goal post. Jake Waleri, an amateur hunter himself, said he wanted to show his friends “the true Florida experience,” and so he decided to take them into Big Cypress National Preserve in […]
Posted inOp-Eds, Opinion
Commentary: ‘Oppenheimer’ is here. Is Hollywood still afraid of the truth about the atomic bomb?
In 1945, Hollywood set in motion its first big-budget movie drama about the making and use of the atomic bomb. Almost immediately a competing project emerged (with a screenplay by Ayn Rand, no less). Yet for over seven decades, only two other major movie dramas about this epochal event emerged from a studio. Now that […]