My parents yearned to help make the world a better place. In their New York apartment they found the ideal vehicle for their project.

Football season is upon us again, and so are the inevitable calls for its elimination, not to mention my own personal conflicts concerning this violent sport. Is football good or bad? Maybe we’re asking the wrong question.

My Penn class of 1964 produced its share of overachievers. My freshman roommate wasn’t among them. But his survival was a remarkable feat in itself.

If politics is such a serious business, why is an overgrown adolescent like Donald Trump outpolling serious adult candidates? Why was a “fake news” anchor like Jon Stewart more trusted than real news anchors? For good reason, it turns out.

From Russia to Hungary to Egypt, the forces of democracy seem in retreat. Who will champion government of the people? Funny you should ask. . . .

At a low point in French history, an obscure general aroused his nation to drive out a seemingly invincible foreign army, much like Joan of Arc five centuries earlier. You and I were among the beneficiaries, as I discovered last month.

The simulated terror of World War I trench warfare was behind us. Now, we were on the last leg of our vacation, heading for Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris. We were about to experience a real nightmare of our own.

My 15 minutes arrived last month, only 35 years after the seed was planted, and for a reason I would never have expected.

Is considering Jackson’s treatment, personal and political, of blacks and Native Americans an example of political correctness gone awry, of unfairly “judging a 19th-century figure by 21st-century standards”? No, not at all.

Suddenly, Andrew Jackson is being reviled as a slave-owner and Indian killer. Yet in his own time, America’s seventh president was a transformational figure who laid the groundwork for all the reforms that have empowered the dispossessed to this day.