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(With apologies to Jonathan Swift .) In a hail of bullets, students at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida were thrust into the role of activists. Within hours, it became clear that they were to become the most determined, effective, and articulate public citizens we have seen in our country in a very long time. The fact that they were responding to a terror attack in our most politically benighted state made their achievements all the more remarkable. They drew attention to Senator Marco Rubio 's misplaced priorities more effectively than anybody of my generation has done, shaming him into endorsing a reduced limit on ammunition magazines. They caused the famously inflexible Gov. Rick "Skeletor" Scott to make a small concession on the question of whether someone too young to buy a Bud Light should be able to buy an assault rifle. The even convinced the president of the United States to speak out in favor of universal background checks, so that terrorist

PRI journalist Jason Margolis reports that even with recently rising wages, the United States remains one of the world's most inequitable nations , by several measures. The report alludes to two prominent measures of income inequality -- the Gini coefficient and ratios of executive pay to that of average workers. By either measure, the United States is either in poor company or in no company at all. That is to say, a broad measure of income distribution puts the United States in the company of relatively underdeveloped countries -- certainly not any of the countries of Europe. And the stratospheric pay of CEOs compared to ordinary workers cannot be found anywhere in the world. As other studies have found, sharp inequalities are bad for public health. In countries with highly concentrated wealth, increased stress and other factors mean that even the wealthy are less healthy than they would be in more equitable societies. The problem in the United States, of course, is that "eq

Library of Congress researcher Shameema Rahman discusses several failed efforts to count federal laws , and does not offer an estimate. Blogger Dave Kowal argues that there are "too many" and provides a rough estimate of 4,500 criminal violations , with thousands of additional laws throughout the U.S. Code. Neither writer estimates the number of state and municipal laws, but presumably they number in the tens or hundreds of thousands. Image: Puntifications In other words, many  things are illegal ( adj .) in our country -- literally more than we can count. And yet ... and yet! There is one very narrow category of legal violations that will cause the perpetrator to be known as an  illegal. As if the word were a noun. It is not rape, murder, jaywalking, tax evasion, burglary, arson, or treason. People who do these things are described by very specific nouns usually ending in -ist  or -er . But the perpetrators of these crimes are understood as distinct from the crimes themselve

Avery Island, Louisiana is very high on the list of places I have never been but to which I feel a strong connection. Since I started getting serious about chili in middle school, I have never been far from a bottle of Tabasco. One of the nice things about my three-year stint in the specialty food industry is that our packaging plant always had hundreds of thousands of tiny (1/8-ounce) bottles of the pepper-mash sauce, because we put one in every Meal, Ready-to-Eat that we packaged. When we had meetings in the office, it was often the case that every man in the room was wearing a Tabasco necktie, as we each had a small collection. I remember my boss there admonishing me when I returned from a meeting in New England and complained about the bland food. "What were you doing traveling up there without Tabasco in your pocket?" she scolded. Its Louisiana home has loomed large in my imagination for years. Even though my parents have visited -- and they did bring me some nice gifts