Days before the U.S. Supreme Court revoked the nearly 50-year-old national right to abortion, I viewed “The Janes,” a 2022 HBO documentary about a clandestine group of women activists who helped arrange for women to get medically safe abortions in the years before Roe v. Wade.

I can only recall one conversation with my maternal grandmother. I lived with her, my mother and my younger sister in Lakewood, N.Y., for more than a decade before I left home at 21 to move west.

My newspaper career started in May 1973, neatly coinciding with the U.S. Senate Watergate hearings. It was about as thorough a baptism into real-world journalism as a young reporter just out of college could get.

Gov. Kathy Hochul is an admitted chess player. In recent weeks, she has used those skills to politically move across a chessboard of cryptocurrency controversies as the June 28 Democratic gubernatorial primary approaches.

The world’s supply of wheat is running out. It’s another crisis-in-progress we can blame in good part on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United Nations says.

When I was 10 years old, my mother bought me a 14-foot aluminum rowboat. She, my younger sister and I had just moved from Brooklyn to live upstate with my grandmother on the shores of Lake Chautauqua. My mother thought a boat would be safer than having me pedaling my bicycle on narrow, Lakew…

The Southern Tier town of Conklin, N.Y., is not far from the Finger Lakes. That’s where an 18-year-old gunman lived and went to high school before committing mass murder at a Tops Friendly Markets store in Buffalo last week.

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution begins with “We the People,” not “We the States.” But, more than 200 years ago, as the Constitution was being drafted, there was debate whether “We the States” might be preferable.

The most surprising thing about the news that the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to strike down 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision soon is that we are surprised by it.

When we think of climate change refugees, we usually think of people living on low-lying Pacific Islands threatened by rising seawater. Or dangers to people posed by melting Arctic ice.

Public hearings are a familiar and routine part of government and regulatory agency operations. Their purpose is simple: Get public input. Input into proposed budgets, new commercial and industrial developments (or changes to existing ones), amendments to existing laws and regulations, schoo…

A just-completed, three-week vacation to California to escape some cold and soggy spring weather in Oregon turned out to be much more than a quick trip to a drier climate.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s recent three-month extension of time to continue pondering Greenidge Generation’s expired air-quality permit is troubling evidence the state agency could be in the grip of regulatory capture.

“When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.”

Regular visits to the U.S. Post Office are part of my near-daily routine, right there with a public library stop and grabbing tea at a local coffee shop.

Activists intent on protecting the water and air quality of the Finger Lakes will urge Gov. Kathy Hochul next week to deny renewal of an air-quality permit for Greenidge Generation’s Dresden facility.

This week I drove past my local go-to gasoline station four times as the gas price jumped 10-15 cents per gallon each time.

I was in elementary school when my family got its first television in the 1950s. One of the early programs that haunted me then — and still does — was a newscast of an atomic bomb test in the Nevada desert.

A growing kerfuffle over a five-year-plus effort to draft a zoning law in Schuyler County’s Town of Hector is a textbook example of what happens when a community becomes a “news desert.”

Clearly, I rely too much on my GPS.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation’s reputation for bending over to support industry in the Finger Lakes is well established. So is the state agency’s disdain for activists who complain loudly about the DEC’s oft-demonstrated deference toward projects like Greenidge …

Whenever I read about a move to ban a book from a high school library — like the current flap in Auburn over George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue” — two questions come to mind.

The prevailing wisdom seems to be that the Omicron variant of Covid-19 sweeping through the Finger Lakes and the nation is somehow milder than earlier strains of the coronavirus.

The RV dealer cautioned me “it could take a while” for replacement pneumatic arms for the window of my camper shell to arrive from a supplier.

“The 1619 Project” book shatters many myths and long-taught misinformation about the lives of Black people in the United States, beginning with the arrival of a group of African enslaved people in 1619, the year before the Pilgrims landed.

The recently released Netflix film “Don’t Look Up” could be the most troubling movie I’ve seen in recent memory.

For many of us, the past two years have been a Covid-induced train wreck for friendships and familial relationships.

Since Covid-19 first reared its spiky head, the focus of medical professionals and governments has been on keeping hospitals and medical facilities available for patient care.

The book “Madhouse at the End of the Earth” was a poor choice for me to read right now as the days grow shorter in my northern latitude.

As if getting ready for the upcoming holidays doesn’t provide us with enough stress, a new Covid-19 variant has popped up with a sinister name that sounds like it belongs in a “Transformers” movie.

This past Thanksgiving week has been filled with more children than I have been around in decades. Downtown streets, stores, restaurants and friends’ homes were filled with kids, from toddlers to teens.

The rosy thoughts that Covid-19 would eventually, simply, disappear were never realistic. And I’m not talking about the seat-of-the-pants predictions of our former U.S. president.

If you tuned into, or read about, the ongoing Glasgow climate change talks and debates, you’re familiar with the dramatic rhetoric about the urgency to do, well, something.

My mailbox overfloweth — again.

Last weekend’s Finger Lakes Times full-page list of election material was impressive.

The city of Geneva-Seneca County dispute over ownership of the bottom of Seneca Lake adjacent to the city resembles many familiar Finger Lakes debates.

The most chilling piece of email to hit my mailbox recently came from the Seneca Lake Pure Waters Association.

How many times has the phrase “And then, there was Covid” crept into your conversations?