Several weeks ago, I watched a family lose their young child to bacterial meningitis — an infection of the tissues around the brain and spinal cord. By the time the child reached the hospital, the infection had progressed too far; our treatments could not stop or reverse the damage to the child’s brain. He died within a few hours.
The bacteria we found growing in this child’s bloodstream was one that could be prevented with vaccination. This child was unvaccinated. As we cared for him in his last moments of life, many care team members echoed the same thought.
“This is going to keep happening.”
On Jan. 5, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released updated vaccine recommendations that decreased the recommended number of childhood vaccines. Based on this new schedule, children would receive routine vaccinations for 11 diseases instead of the previous schedule that protected against 18 ailments. The vaccinations no longer recommended include those for the flu, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), hepatitides A and B (which cause liver disease), rotavirus (a gastrointestinal illness), and meningococcus (a cause of bacterial meningitis).
The data is clear: Childhood vaccination saves lives, and we have seen increased morbidity as vaccination rates decline. But as a pediatrician, this also goes beyond the data.
When I think about vaccines, I think about that young boy in the ICU. I think about how, if the circumstances were different, he might have lived. I think about his siblings, the ones who will no longer get to play in the yard with their younger brother. I think about his parents and how they will no longer get to hold their son or hear his voice. I think about what could have been.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s radical overhaul of established health practices has included reducing the number of recommended childhood vaccinations from 18 to 11.
While I do my best to uphold the doctrine of shared decision-making with the families I see in practice, we must also acknowledge that the decision of whether to vaccinate ultimately impacts others.
Eroding herd immunity
For decades, we have relied on herd immunity to protect vulnerable patients — such as those too young to receive certain vaccines or those who are immunocompromised. With declining vaccine rates, herd immunity has been diminished, leading to outbreaks of preventable diseases. With fewer recommended vaccinations, our vulnerable patients will continue to suffer.
Pediatricians are grieving the children we have already lost to vaccine-preventable illnesses, and we are grieving the losses that will come from these new recommendations.
We urge parents to have open conversations with their pediatricians, look to verified sources such as the American Academy of Pediatrics for information, and trust that we pediatricians do have your child’s best interests in mind. We may be grieving, but we will never stop advocating for your children.
Frances Avila-Soto is a pediatric resident in Philadelphia.
Sometimes, in our bewildering health system, a patient’s gratitude is a sign of how much the system has failed them. When someone tells a new doctor, “I feel so lucky to see you,” the appreciation can come from years of trying to get high-quality care. And much of that struggle may not be accidental — it is the direct result of how our health system pays doctors.
As a new year begins, it’s worth confronting a hard truth: Our healthcare system fails to treat everyone equally. A key reason is the financial incentives we have created. We pay doctors less to care for some people than others.
Our new research shows that practices receive 8.8% less for visits with Black patients and nearly 10% less for Hispanic patients than for their white peers. For children, the gaps are even wider. Physicians got 13.9% less for visits with Black children and 15% less for Hispanic children.
How does this affect patients? Consider childhood asthma. Having a regular pediatrician and the right inhalers can mean the difference between living symptom-free and taking many miserable trips to the emergency room. Yet, one in eight children with asthma lacks a usual place for care, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports, and poor access is far more common for Black or Hispanic children than for their white counterparts.
The hidden math behind denied appointments
We get what we pay for. In the U.S., doctors are paid very different sums for different patients, even when providing the same service. Commercial insurance tends to pay the most. Medicare, which primarily serves older Americans, pays less. And in most states, Medicaid, which serves low-income Americans, pays the least.
What does this mean for a child on Medicaid? Many physicians refuse to treat anyone with Medicaid. When researchers posed as parents and called pediatrician offices seeking an asthma appointment, over half of callers with Medicaid were denied appointments.
Eliminating pay disparities would cut the gap in general checkup visits by more than half between white children and Black or Hispanic children, write Aaron Schwartz and Rachel M. Werner.
Yet, when these same clinics received a call about a child with private insurance, every single one offered an appointment. Financial incentives matter.
This disparate pay will only worsen after the largest funding cut in Medicaid’s history. The recently passed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” reduced federal Medicaid support by roughly $1 trillion over the next 10 years.
States now face three options: remove people from Medicaid, cut optional services, or further reduce what they pay providers. States like North Carolina have already moved to cut doctor pay, and others will likely follow suit.
With this law, we are hitting the brakes instead of the accelerator. It recalls a scene from The Simpsons in which Bart is put in a remedial class and says: “Let me get this straight. We’re behind the rest of the class, and we’re going to catch up to them by going slower?”
Commercial insurance also pays less
In our new research, Medicaid is a major driver of these payment disparities, but not the only factor.
Even among patients with similar coverage, like commercial insurance, Black and Hispanic patients still found themselves in plans that paid doctors less. These differences amount to a “tax” physicians face for treating patients whose health insurance pays less. This tax not only penalizes physicians in safety net roles but also shapes which patients ultimately get treated.
Physicians provide more care when they are paid higher prices. One frequently cited study showed that raising physician payment by 2% resulted in 3% more care provision. Based on this figure, we project that eliminating pay disparities would cut the gap in general checkup visits by more than half between white children and Black or Hispanic children.
As long as we provide less incentive to treat some patients, we will get what we pay for: a system that falls short for people with less, especially children. Reversing this trend will require strengthening Medicaid rather than gutting it. Raising Medicaid payments to doctors to be equal to Medicare rates would improve access, evidence suggests. But reforms like this require investment.
Right now, we live in a country where modern medicine achieves great things, sometimes at very low cost. But those benefits are out of reach for those who can’t get a doctor’s appointment.
Our national policies embed inequality into our system of healthcare financing. Unless we confront and reform those policies, uneven access to care will persist and likely worsen.
Aaron Schwartz is a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, where Rachel M. Werner is the executive director. Both are also practicing physicians.
Out of the ashes of the Second World War, the United States led the creation of several global institutions to ensure we would never again have to fight such a war. We created the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and, most importantly, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Decades ago, NATO’s first secretary general, Hastings Ismay, remarked that the purpose of the alliance was “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Then, aside from the threat of Soviet aggression, the other major threat was that the U.S. would turn its back on European allies and return to the isolationist posture it disastrously pursued in the early 20th century.
Today, NATO faces its greatest threat from an entirely new source: a belligerent United States that may attack a fellow NATO nation.
The White House has said President Donald Trump is weighing “a range of options,” explicitly including the use of the U.S. military, in his efforts to control Greenland. If that threat ever becomes reality, NATO as we know it will not survive.
I write this as the lead Democrat for the U.S. congressional delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, which brings together lawmakers from every NATO member country to provide democratic oversight of the alliance and coordinate on shared security threats.
I also write as someone who believes deeply that NATO is the bedrock of the post-World War II world. It is why Americans and Europeans have avoided a great-power war for nearly 80 years.
NATO endures because of trust: The shared belief that allies do not threaten one another, and that borders are not rewritten by force.
Greenland is a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a founding member of NATO. A U.S. attack on Greenland would mean the United States using military force against a member of its own alliance.
Danish military forces participate in an exercise with hundreds of troops from several European NATO members in the Arctic Ocean in Nuuk, Greenland, in September.
There is no playbook for that scenario because it was always unthinkable. The moral authority of Article 5 — the pledge that an attack on one is an attack on all — would collapse overnight.
No country on NATO’s eastern flank would ever again fully trust American guarantees. Estonia, Latvia, Poland, and others would be forced to reconsider their security in a world where Washington seizes territory from a smaller ally.
The Trump administration’s rhetoric also plays directly into the hands of our fiercest adversaries.
Beijing and Moscow have spent years trying to fracture the transatlantic partnership through disinformation, coercion, and intimidation. Every hint that America might use force against an ally becomes propaganda for authoritarian regimes that insist the rules-based order is a fiction, and that power — not law — is what matters.
The administration argues that Greenland is strategically vital because of rising Russian and Chinese activity in the Arctic. But that reality is precisely why the United States must deepen cooperation with Denmark and Greenland — not threaten them.
America already maintains a robust security presence in Greenland. A critical U.S. base supports missile warning, missile defense, and space surveillance under a long-standing defense agreement with Denmark that grants extensive U.S. access.
Danish leaders have made clear they are open to strengthening cooperation with the U.S., writes Brendan F. Boyle. Pictured here is Mette Frederiksen, Denmark’s prime minister, at the European Political Community summit in Copenhagen, in October.
Danish leaders have made clear they are open to strengthening that cooperation, and Greenland’s elected government has welcomed dialogue conducted with respect for international law and democratic self-determination.
That is the path forward. The United States must expand joint Arctic operations, invest alongside Denmark in new capabilities, and work directly with Greenland’s leaders to protect shared security interests. Partnership strengthens deterrence while preserving the alliance that makes deterrence possible in the first place.
This moment is a choice between partnership and coercion. America must choose partnership.
The consequences of coercion would be devastating: European allies would begin preparing for a world in which U.S. commitments no longer carry weight. Some nations would pursue independent nuclear deterrents. Others would seek alternative security arrangements. Critical partnerships — including Trump’s own agreement with Finland to build polar icebreakers vital to deterring Russian aggression in the Arctic — would collapse.
The alliance that has underpinned global stability since 1945 would fracture, not because of Moscow or Beijing, but because of decisions made in Washington.
After the disastrous Iraq War, Americans are already uneasy about another prolonged foreign war. Now they are being told military force against a NATO ally is under consideration, an act that would inevitably risk escalation and could drag the United States into a costly, dangerous occupation.
At home, families are trying to afford healthcare, keep their jobs, and provide for their children. They do not want to bankroll another unnecessary conflict that risks American lives and diverts attention from urgent needs here.
Congress must draw a clear line. No funding for military action against a NATO ally. No ambiguity about America’s commitments. The United States must reaffirm — in law and in action — that its power is exercised through its alliances, not against them.
An invasion of Greenland would not make America safer. It would end the alliance that has kept Americans safe for generations and plunge us into a new, dark world.
Brendan F. Boyle represents Pennsylvania’s 2nd Congressional District and is the lead Democrat for the U.S. congressional delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. He is also a visiting lecturer at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs.
POTTSVILLE, Pa. — Because I love Pennsylvania and football (and not always in that order), I drove 90 miles recently to this coal-region city of 13,300 to take a peek at a bronzed football shoe, a trophy carved from coal, and a battered football, its laces askew.
On Dec. 12, 1925, 100 years ago last month, a 23-year-old kid named Charlie Berry — who also played baseball for the Philadelphia Athletics and later became an American League umpire — used that high-top shoe to kick that ball to lift the Pottsville Maroons to a huge victory.
The Maroons got that trophy, emblazoned with the words “TRUE WORLD CHAMPIONS,” after beating a squad of former Notre Dame players, 9-7, in an exhibition game at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. But the Maroons were true world champions only in sentiment. They did not even win their own league.
That would be the National Football League — the same NFL that now includes the Eagles and opens its annual playoffs this weekend, ending with Super Bowl LX. The NFL would deny the Maroons the league championship despite clearly having the best team, having disposed of the Chicago Cardinals a week earlier in icy Chicago, 21-7.
The shoe that Pottsville Maroons kicker Charlie Berry used to kick the winning field goal in the 9-7 victory over the Notre Dame All-Stars on Dec. 12, 1925. The shoe was bronzed in 1961.
The exhibition game turned out to be a big problem. Long story short: Although the Maroons had requested (and, they said, been granted) permission to play the Notre Dame team, they were treading on the turf of the city’s NFL team, the Frankford Yellow Jackets. The Maroons were thrown out of the league.
You have probably heard of the Yellow Jackets, who folded in 1931 and whose remnants were purchased in 1933 by Bert Bell and Lud Wray for $2,500 and relaunched as the Eagles. The Maroons have faded, like a photograph in an album. That is a shame. The Maroons were a town team that climbed through a primitive organizational ladder to reign supreme over a sport.
Payne, who had not heard of the Maroons while growing up in Erie, acknowledged that the NFL is unlikely to declare the Maroons as 1925 champions, saying, “It would take a higher force for this to happen.” And it is old news: The last Maroons player died in 2003, at age 101.
The ball used in the Maroons’ win over the Notre Dame All-Stars.
Rendell wrote that he did not intend “to have any more communications with the cowardly barons that run the National Football League, including their extremely well paid leader, until they relent and grant the gallant Pottsville Maroons what is rightfully theirs.”
(He added that the vast majority of NFL owners lack “cojones.”)
But Rendell only had two NFL teams behind him: those from Pennsylvania, the Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers. So that Tush Push, of sorts, failed to reach the line to gain. The NFL still places the Cardinals atop its official 1925 standings, with the Maroons second.
Plus, the Cardinals padded their final winning percentage — used then to determine the champion — by beating teams with some high school kids. They refused to accept the trophy (the one not made of coal) until years later, after the team had been sold to Charley Bidwill.
The last name may ring a bell. The Cardinals, now in Arizona, are still owned by the Bidwill family. How interesting it is that the team has won only one NFL championship since — way back in 1946. They have played in just one Super Bowl, losing in 2009 to the Steelers.
Some “Skooks,” those from Pottsville and surrounding Schuylkill County, still enjoy claiming the Cardinals have been afflicted by the Curse of the Maroons. “And that 1925 championship was stolen. Never forget,” says a Skook friend of mine, still seeking retribution.
“It’s just so tragic and cruel. What should have been a watershed moment by winning such a big game ruined Pottsville and their football team,” David Fleming, who wrote an astonishing book in 2007 about the controversy, Breaker Boys: The NFL’s Greatest Team and the Stolen 1925 Championship, told me recently. “Pottsville put the NFL on the map.”
The NFL of 1925 was prehistoric compared with the NFL of 2025. Salaries were meager, from $100 to $300 a game, and players had to hold down second jobs to pay the bills. Moreover, college football was far more popular and considered to be a far better product.
Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne (left) and team captain Clem Crowe watch the team practice in 1925 — the same year a group of former Fighting Irish players fell to the Maroons, 9-7.
Pottsville sort of ignored the Pennsylvania “Blue Laws,” so the Maroons often played at home on Sundays against opponents that played in Philadelphia the day before. The Maroons set trends that last to this day: For example, the coach insisted his players live in town.
Pottsville was among the smallest cities with an NFL team, but the city more than made up for it by adoring the Maroons — even during a contentious miners’ strike that nearly broke the town. For the exhibition at Shibe Park, as Fleming wrote, several Maroons fans playfully wore coal-miner garb to distinguish themselves from the overwhelming majority of Notre Dame fans.
Even after both teams had arrived at Shibe Park, the exhibition game was nearly canceled because only about 8,000 had paid to see the game, some 10,000 fewer than expected, leading Notre Dame star Harry Stuhldreher, one of the legendary “Four Horsemen,” to push for $25,000 upfront — which is worth about $450,000 today — for his team to play in the game.
(The gate was surely smaller than expected because the Yellow Jackets suddenly scheduled a game at the same time in Frankford, beating Cleveland, 3-0, before 7,000.)
In this 1924 file photo, Notre Dame’s infamous backfield known as “The Four Horsemen,” from left, Don Miller, Elmer Layden, Jim Crowley, and Harry Stuhldreher, pose on the practice field in South Bend, Ind. Stuhldreher asked for $25,000 up front for his team to play against the Maroons.
At the same time, the Maroons were holding out for $10,000 upfront, or about $181,000 today (the pay disparity underscores the difference in perception then between the college and pro games), so the kickoff was delayed. Then Notre Dame took a 7-0 lead on an Elmer Layden touchdown. But the Maroons rallied — gallantly.
“YES, THE POTTSVILLE MAROONS WERE HORSE(MEN) OF A DIFFERENT COLOR,” The Inquirer gasped the next morning. Gordon Mackay, the reporter, labeled it “perhaps the greatest football battle that this Quaker City has known in years and years.”
The Maroons had put in 28-year-old Tony Latone, the “Human Howitzer,” after halftime. Latone’s story was mythic: He began working in nearby coal mines to support his family when he was 11, after his father died.
At first, he was a “breaker boy,” working 70-hour weeks picking slate and debris from the valuable anthracite coal. (After a week or two, the skin on the tops of a breaker boy’s fingers would peel off.) Later, he strengthened his legs by pushing loaded coal carts from the mines.
The Pottsville Maroons of 1925, a squad that was comprised of miners from Schuylkill and Luzerne Counties.
Berry, already a catcher for the A’s, hit the crossbar on an extra-point attempt after Latone scored a touchdown late in the third quarter, so Notre Dame still led, 7-6. But Latone, playing on a sore right heel, gained five first downs on another brutal, physical drive.
“He just ripped the Notre Dame team to shreds,” Payne told me of Latone, who ran for more yardage in the NFL in the 1920s than the legendary Harold “Red” Grange.
The drive stalled at the Notre Dame 18-yard line, so Berry tried a 30-yard field goal, which was hardly automatic back in those days. He’d made only three of nine attempts in the season to that point, none past 29 yards.
But, as Mackay so colorfully wrote in The Inquirer the next morning: “He swung that agile hoof. There was a crash of ball and foot, and the crowd, awed into silence, held their breaths as the sphere soared and soared and skipped straight through the crossbar.”
As Fleming wrote in 2007: “Most of the fans at Shibe Park, even the ones from Pottsville, had come out for a fun day of football and a glimpse at the famous Four Horsemen. Instead, they were witness to a watershed moment in the history of American sports: the very moment that professional football surpassed college ball.”
A replica of the trophy — which, like the original, is carved from coal — that the Maroons received for winning the “true” championship resides at the Schuylkill County Historical Society in Pottsville, Pa. The original is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Books about the Maroons, including Fleming’s and the recent release by Payne and Hayes, are on sale at the museum’s gift shop (and online, as well), as are $18 maroon T-shirts with “The Real Champions.” A 100th anniversary celebration was held in August. Students at nearby Nativity BVM High School premiered a documentary, MaRooned.
Fleming, whose book, A Big Mess in Texas, about the antics of the ill-fated 1952 Dallas Texans, was published in October, had Breaker Boys reissued before the 100th anniversary, with a new cover: a photo of the trophy made of silver, not anthracite coal.
“I just wanted to give them the title that they were denied,” he said.
Well, more like, robbed of. Payne and Hayes make a six-premise thesis in their book for the NFL to award the 1925 NFL title to the Pottsville Maroons. They write, “Until the NFL corrects the situation, the Pottsville championship status remains, very simply, marooned.”
Until that day comes, and as a native Pennsylvanian and football fan, the matter should at least be considered; there is only memorabilia from a bygone age in a second-floor alcove at the Schuylkill County Historical Society, a cozy museum in a former school on Centre Street.
Joe Zacko, the late sporting goods store owner and die-hard fan who ordered the jerseys that gave the Maroons their name, had Berry’s shoe bronzed after a 1961 reunion. The goal was to present it to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, then under construction.
The shoe is still in Pottsville. I am not a Skook, but, as I said, I love Pennsylvania and football, and I say a real NFL trophy belongs right next to that shoe, coal trophy, and old ball.
Dave Caldwell, an Inquirer sports writer from 1986 to 1995, grew up in Lancaster County and lives in Manayunk.
Pennsylvania’s two largest cities have more in common politically, demographically, and economically with one another than with the rest of the commonwealth. For decades, they also had in common the presence of great American newspapers serving their diverse and dynamic communities: The Inquirer and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Sadly, that may no longer be the case.
On Tuesday, Block Communications, the owners of the Post-Gazette, announced that on May 3, it will shutter the newspaper, the roots of which date back 240 years. The loss of a once great newspaper in a major American city is itself a civic tragedy. The fact that this loss was entirely preventable is even more unfortunate.
It is no secret that the traditional print newspaper business is in sharp decline. Self-inflicted wounds — including a long history of labor strife, family disunity, and financial losses — have compounded these headwinds at the Post-Gazette. The Block family’s announcement cited cumulative losses of over $350 million over a 20-year period.
Disclosure of a decision to close the paper came the same day the U.S. Supreme Court denied the company’s appeal of a decision that required it to honor the terms of an earlier union contract, and after the resolution of a bitter three-year labor strike. Striking workers agreed to return to work on Nov. 24 and were told this week they would be severed.
John Santa, a copy editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, walks a picket line outside the newspaper’s offices with his fellow journalists in October 2022.
The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, of which I am CEO, is in the business of helping sustain and support local news. I heard this week from more than half a dozen news industry colleagues about the potential to “save the Post-Gazette.” As a Philly-based journalism executive, I was unsure what was really left of the Post-Gazette to save. So I reached out to Pittsburgh newsroom sources, readers, and local foundations.
While the Post-Gazette has suffered multiple layoffs and a reduction in its print schedule to two days a week, there is unquestionably still a there, there. The current newsroom numbers 110 employees. And its journalists still produce great public service journalism, covering politics to sports. More importantly, with or without the Post-Gazette, there remains a need and an appetite among readers for independent local news in Pittsburgh. As of the end of 2025, more than 60,000 pay for the P-G in digital form, and 27,000 in print.
To save, reinvent, or perhaps replace the Post-Gazette, it is instructive to look at recent local news investment in Philadelphia and Baltimore:
Ten years ago this month, the late H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, a philanthropist and cable television entrepreneur, donated his ownership of The Philadelphia Inquirer to the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism, allowing The Inquirer to invest long term in the transformation of its news and business operations.
The late H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest, a philanthropist and cable television entrepreneur, donated his ownership of The Philadelphia Inquirer to the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism in 2016.
The Inquirer’s 200-person newsroom is supported in large part by the loyalty of readers, the growth of its digital revenues, and supplemented by donations from readers, foundations, and the Lenfest Institute. The Inquirer, which remains a for-profit enterprise, is well-managed, both editorially and as a business. It has more than 120,000 paying digital subscribers, and philanthropy — a finite resource — is a single-digit percentage of total revenues, although mission-critical.
Emulating the Lenfest Institute model, Stewart W. Bainum Jr., a Maryland-based hotel and healthcare executive, sought to acquire the Baltimore Sun from its parent company and to convert it to nonprofit ownership. Unable to come to terms with a difficult seller, Bainum chose instead to launch the Baltimore Banner from scratch in 2022, an impressive, all-digital nonprofit news enterprise that won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting last year for coverage of its city’s opioid crisis.
Pittsburgh’s journalistic, business, and philanthropic interests have several paths open to them:
The Post-Gazette could be acquired by a nonprofit organization similar to the Lenfest Institute. However, local leaders with whom I have spoken seem loath to take on its obligations and liabilities.
The Post-Gazette is by no means the sole source of independent journalism serving Southwest Pennsylvania. The region is covered by NPR station WESA, by Pittsburgh’s Public Source, a small but effective nonprofit, and by Harrisburg-based Spotlight PA, of which the Lenfest Institute was a founder. Each of these entities could help form the foundation of expanded Pittsburgh news.
Or the community could build from scratch, mirroring the approach of the Baltimore Banner.
Each path has its complications, but they all have one thing in common: the need for determined, deep-pocketed, and strategically aligned funders to create sustainable local news at scale for the city of Pittsburgh.
Maxwell E.P. King, a former editor of The Inquirer and past president of two of Pittsburgh’s leading philanthropies — Heinz Endowments and the Pittsburgh Foundation — has sounded the alarm.
Maxwell E.P. King served as the editor of The Inquirer from 1990 to 1998.
“I am heartbroken, both as a reader and a contributor” to the Post-Gazette, King told me. “But the community, particularly the foundation community, must rally to this moment. Nonprofit journalism is succeeding around the country, most notably in Philadelphia with The Inquirer. We have to find a viable nonprofit way to continue daily journalism here. It is crucial for the region.”
Let’s hope Pittsburgh finds the resolve to serve its residents with the local news they need and deserve. Certainly, we at the Lenfest Institute are here to help.
Jim Friedlich is CEO and executive director of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, the nonprofit, noncontrolling owner of The Inquirer. @jimfriedlich
I was a firsthand witness to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Inside the House chamber, we heard shouts, footsteps, and gunshots. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was rushed off the floor. The rest of us, representatives and journalists, stayed as frozen as the Rotunda statues.
That was not only an attack on the building itself. That bitter day destroyed an illusion we Americans held dear about our nation: Fair is fair. Win or lose, peace prevailed in our elections. We took pride in our place as the world’s oldest democracy.
Echo in history
History shows that much the same thing happened in Philadelphia, the Quaker city where our cherished founding documents were drawn up by the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
But slavery festered in Jacksonian America, and open hostility to abolitionists was common. Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist editor, was murdered by a mob in Alton, Ill. Philadelphia was not spared.
In 1838, a majestic new building changed the Philadelphia cityscape. Built by the Society of Friends (the Quakers) for abolitionist gatherings, Pennsylvania Hall was envisioned as a temple of liberty and free speech, with elegant touches like damask drapes and a sunflower-shaped mirror.
There, Philadelphia Quakers worked with “the world’s people,” as they called non-Quakers — notably Bostonians and Unitarians — to speak out against slavery. Fiery William Lloyd Garrison spoke during opening week. The Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, white abolitionists from South Carolina who had fled North and become Friends, bore witness to the evils of slavery.
Lucretia Mott, the leading Philadelphia Quaker abolitionist voice, cofounded the Female Anti-Slavery Society.
Lucretia Mott, the leading Philadelphia Quaker abolitionist voice, cofounded the Female Anti-Slavery Society. And it was Mott who most enraged some Southerners studying medicine in the city.
The medical students jeered at Black and white female abolitionists walking together in pairs, a procession led by Mott. The word for Black-white mixed company in those days was “amalgamation,” and the racist Southerners would not tolerate it, hurling insults at the members of the Female Anti-Slavery Society.
On Sixth Street, the students grew into a pack of hundreds, perhaps thousands, rioting and eventually focusing on the beautiful hall, which they burst into and set ablaze in one of the worst mob scenes in antebellum America.
Narrow escape
But the rampage was not over. Lucretia and James Mott, their son, Thomas, and others went to the Mott home on North Ninth Street. They sensed the mob might be looking for them, and they were right.
They were spared an ugly scene by the Quaker poet and journalist, John Greenleaf Whittier. He kept pace with the moving mob as it shouted, “To the Motts!” and pointed them in the wrong direction. (Much as Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman did in the U.S. Senate on Jan. 6.)
A bronze statue of Bishop Richard Allen outside Mother Bethel AME Church, photographed in February 2024.
Instead, the mob damaged Mother Bethel, a Black church and the oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation in the nation, as well as a nearby Black orphanage.
That shattering night shocked Philadelphia’s civic pride as a haven for freedom and democracy. Was it a place where the free Black community could still feel safe? Clearly not.
For sobered antislavery advocates, the riot and fire landed as a moment of reckoning. Violence in Philadelphia meant they had an even more determined foe in proslavery forces than they had thought. Abolitionists would have to rise from the ashes and press their campaign harder for the next 25 years.
Today, we may see Pennsylvania Hall’s burning as a template for the savage attack on the Capitol in our own era. White nationalism, no stranger to America’s streets, rose again — with a vengeance.
Jamie Stiehm, author of “The War Within” and a Creators Syndicate columnist, is at work on a biography of Lucretia Mott. She lives in Washington, D.C.
A protest at an event honoring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over his antigay policies. The right has targeted trans people, in particular.
Meanwhile, the abundance of research demonstrating that transgender people suffer disproportionate violent victimization, homelessness, and suicide has remained largely unaddressed.
Moderate politicians’ concern with appealing to wider audiences in thesedivisive times exacts a cost: to trans kids’ health, safety, and dignity in their schools and communities.
Ambivalent Democrats
Rather than forging alliances to protect the safety and constitutional rights of transgender citizens, some of the most influential members of the Democratic Party — from Kamala Harris to Pete Buttigieg to Rahm Emanuel to Gavin Newsom — have at least partially capitulated before the political tidal wave of anti-transgender disinformation, complete with all of the red herrings it washes ashore.
More importantly, by keeping to the intentionally distorted discourse about transgender people — rather than countering sensationalized falsehoods and vitriolic rhetoric with integrity and conviction — politicians end up appealing to and emboldening constituencies who lean into disinformation out of fear. This isn’t only cynical, it’s dangerous. FBI hate crime statistics tell a bleak story of the rise in vigilante violence against transgender Americans, coinciding with a steep rise in political antagonism and targeted scapegoating.
A recent effort led by U.S. Reps. Sarah McBride (D., Del.), Mark Takano (D., Calif.), and members of the Congressional Equality Caucus calls upon House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) to enforce the rules of decorum in Congress by holding those who defame and denigrate the trans community to account. As of this writing, no response has been issued.
A path forward
The only ethical and effective path forward demands that we fundamentally reframe the political conversation about transgender people in factual terms that are grounded in foundational democratic principles, credible science, and a commitment to the protection of civil rights and civil liberties of all Americans.
There is some hope to be found in the lawsuit filed this week by 19 Democratic states to block the federal government’s efforts to ban gender-affirming care nationally.
Ideally, we would see more leadership on both sides of the aisle to protect the safety, freedom, and human dignity of all LGBTQ+ people, as demonstrated in the introduction of the bipartisan Global Respect Act by McBride and U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.) to protect LGBTQ+ people around the world from identity-based violence, torture, and persecution.
Regressive political forces have always sought to isolate and villainize minoritized groups, to paint them as threats to the majority by virtue of whatever marks them as somehow “different” from those in power — and therefore less deserving of the same rights and protections.
Consider that during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, boycotts of segregated lunch counters and department stores were underway in Southern communities when New York U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell famously corrected a reporter who queried if he was advocating for “Negroes” to stay out of segregated national chain stores in solidarity with the boycotts.
A genuine commitment to our democracy demands that we shift our discursive paradigm from one that impugns the existence of transgender people to one that impugns the de jure and de facto denial of transgender people’s humanity, dignity, civil rights, and personal safety.
It is long past time to reset the terms and reclaim the narrative on the equal protections and constitutional rights of transgender Americans. The political leadership we need in this moment requires the clarity, intentionality, and fortitude to do just that.
Ashley C. Rondini is an associate professor of sociology at Franklin and Marshall College.
In Pennsylvania, just over 2% of Gen Z students believe elected officials act in their best interests. Three-quarters say they don’t.
These findings come from more than 2,800 conversations across 16 colleges and universities in the state. Project 26 Pennsylvania collected them without a script, giving students space to speak freely.
Young Pennsylvanians believe the commonwealth’s institutions are slow to respond and are detached from daily realities. They pointed to artificial intelligence and its workforce implications, social polarization, and global issues that feel increasingly vital to confront on a local and regional level.
In my role withthe United Nations Association of the USA, I meet regularly with young Americans across the country. They’re not apathetic — far from it. They know what it looks like when institutions function — and when they drift.
A few weeks ago, I visited a campus in Bethlehem and heard from students who were deeply engaged and informed. They focused on conservation, economic growth, healthcare access, and local governance. But when the conversation turned to institutional performance, their confidence plummeted.
They described government bodies that move slowly, communicate inconsistently, and prioritize politics over problem-solving.
There is a clear contrast between what they see at home and what I see globally.
The U.N. has expanded youth engagement at a historic pace. It created a dedicated Youth Office and invited young people into negotiations. Leaders expect a direct report on the concerns and ideas of young Americans.
Pennsylvania’s institutions should view this as a model if they want to start restoring trust.
That’s because the risk of inaction is more than disengagement; it’s dislocation. Young adults are moving to places that do pay attention to and meet their needs.
A Pennsylvania State Data Center analysis found that almost half of Pennsylvanians moving out of state were between the ages of 18-34. Many of them are opting for faster-growing places like Florida, North Carolina, and Texas.
If a global system of 193 member states that agree on little else can coalesce around the need to build structured pathways for youth involvement, then Pennsylvania’s agencies and local governments can do the same.
This shift does not require a redesign of government — just consistency and intention. There are steps the Keystone State can take now.
Several Pennsylvania cities already show what youth engagement can look like.
Allentown created a Council of Youth by resolution, though all 16 seats appear vacant. Pittsburgh has a youth coordinator who runs its Youth Commission, and Philadelphia operates a Youth Commission of its own. These are promising starts, and all townships and boroughs should follow. But they are often tucked deep into municipal websites rather than positioned as visible civic priorities.
Gov. Josh Shapiro should create a statewide youth advisory cabinet with a direct line to major agencies. States like Iowa, North Carolina, and Massachusetts already run strong statewide youth councils.
In fact, Pennsylvania does have a strong model already in the NextGen Advisory Council, which brings young leaders into decision-making on conservation and public lands. That same approach should be extended across agencies.
These steps are practical. They also reflect respect for young people, who are not the “next” generation, but are active contributors shaping our commonwealth.
They organize events, testify at meetings, vote in local elections, and devote time to issues that affect their communities. They have shaped mental health advocacy, launched small businesses, and pushed for housing initiatives in cities across the state.
If institutions want to restore trust, they need to match that level of seriousness.
Trust does not return through campaign outreach or social media posts. It grows when young people see their work is taken seriously and leads to outcomes — and when institutions welcome their involvement with regularity and purpose.
Pennsylvania has a window to rebuild confidence. The Project 26 findings should not be dismissed as youth discontent, but read as a statement of expectations — and an opportunity.
Half of the students surveyed said they would be motivated to take political action “if they felt it would make a difference.” They are engaged, ready, and eager to help build a stronger Pennsylvania.
The question is whether the commonwealth’s leaders will invite them into the process.
Jarrett James Lash serves as the 14th UNA-USA youth observer to the United Nations and is a municipal planner in Montgomery County.
The images are historic and alarming: Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, captured and transported by a U.S. warship to stand trial in a New York federal court. President Donald Trump hails this as justice, promising Maduro will face the “full might of American justice.”
This double standard extends to the world stage. The United States fiercely rejects the jurisdiction of respected judicial bodies like the International Criminal Court, even restricting its prosecutors in order to protect Americans. Yet, it now unilaterally extends its own domestic courts to sit in judgment over a foreign leader, echoing the 1989 capture of Panama’s Manuel Noriega.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro places his hand over his heart while talking to high-ranking officers during a military ceremony on his inauguration day for a third term, in Caracas, Venezuela, in January 2025.
The charges of “narco-terrorism” may be serious, but the process is purely an assertion of power through legal theater.
This action shatters global order; it does not uphold it.
What principle will stop China from arresting a Taiwanese leader for “secessionist terrorism” to face a court in Beijing? What stops Russia from charging a Ukrainian president with “Nazi conspiracy” in Moscow? By normalizing this model — where powerful nations kidnap and try the leaders of weaker states — the U.S. is inviting a world of legalized vendettas.
It replaces a fragile system of rules with raw power.
For Americans, this is a direct threat to our security. It makes every U.S. official, diplomat, and service member abroad a potential target for retaliatory arrests by rival powers who will cite this case as their precedent.
We have just handed our adversaries a blueprint for political kidnappings disguised as “law enforcement.”
The acting president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, is right to call this a mortal threat to sovereignty. True democrats in Venezuela, who seek a future free from Maduro, now face an impossible dilemma: Their cause has been co-opted by a foreign power’s invasion of their nation’s self-determination.
This act will not foster democracy; it will fuel nationalism and anti-American resentment for a generation, making a genuine, Venezuelan-led transition harder.
We cannot defend democracy by obliterating its foundations.
If we believe in any kind of justice, it must be a justice that respects the equality of nations before the law, not a justice delivered at gunpoint by the world’s most powerful navy to a courtroom in Manhattan.
The capture of Maduro and his wife by Trump may seem like victory for the U.S. administration today, but its legacy will be a more lawless, dangerous, and unstable world for all of us tomorrow.
He is not enforcing the law; he is proving that, in his view, only might is right.
Januarius Asongu is a scholar and the author of more than 20 books on political philosophy and international conflict. A resident of Townsend, Del., he is the founder and chancellor of Saint Monica University in Cameroon and of the American Institute of Technology in Sierra Leone.
These multiple assaults on nursing inspired us to take stock and unify around our profession’s need to collectively speak up and help federal decision-makers better understand the work of nursing and what it contributes to society.
Most trusted
For years, the public has consistently identified nursing as the most trusted profession. Patients and families have invariably called attention to how nurses helped them get through the worst possible times in their lives.
In hospitals, nurses keep patients safe. They work to get to know patients and families as individual people so they can better align their care with what is specifically important to them.
Nurses are watchful 24/7, anticipating and preventing potential problems in patients at risk. They manage patient symptoms to give comfort and alleviate suffering. Nurses provide hands-on physical, therapeutic, and, when necessary, end-of-life care. They collaborate with interprofessional teams, coordinating the work of many.
They also help people understand what they need to know about their care, enabling them to better manage it at home. Nurses and patients alike thrive within the caring relationships that facilitate patient and family health and healing.
What’s more important than that? What else does the nursing profession need to do?
Looking forward to 2026, nurses need to let everyone in on their best-kept secret. Registered nurses provide the glue in our fractured healthcare system and are crucial to helping keep Americans healthy.
In 2026, we need a bold, united campaign that delivers evidence, action, and impact. To share what nurses know about their profession, and what patients and families know after experiencing their care.
Nurses demonstrate for better staffing levels and patient care in Philadelphia in 2019. Nursing today faces dire new challenges.
Nursing must focus on developing health-centered metrics that matter to patients and families, and that clearly demonstrate nursing’s value to society and to the payers, accreditors, and credentialing bodies that fund or evaluate the work of nursing.
Developing better patient-centered outcomes through our work in hospitals will allow us to provide more informed care to the right patients at the right time. While current Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) measures aligned with nursing, like rates of hospital-acquired infections, are important, they are narrow in scope and only call attention to the absence, not the presence, of stellar bedside nursing.
Challenges of AI
In 2026, nursing needs to lead in the thoughtful implementation of artificial intelligence to optimize patient and family care. AI can unburden healthcare professionals from tasks that can — and should be — automated so nurses can better focus on the empathy and experience that inform quality care. AI can be used to help predict untoward events, keeping patients safer while freeing nurses to provide the one-to-one human interaction that technology simply cannot.
In primary care, the U.S. healthcare system faces a shortage of providers, rising healthcare costs, and an increasing number of people with chronic health conditions like obesity, diabetes, asthma, and heart disease. Imagine a healthcare system in which nurse practitioners provide the majority, not just 20%, of primary care, better helping patients and families stay healthy.
To make this a reality, we must remove restrictive practice barriers and allow nurse practitioners to directly bill for their services. Nurse practitioners already help guide patients through complex transitions from acute care to palliative care and end-of-life. Nurse-run virtual clinics have successfully provided just-in-time consults that replace more costly emergency room visits. Nurse-run specialty clinics help manage long-term illnesses, such as diabetes and asthma, by coordinating care with specialists to prevent exacerbations.
Registered nurses, working in primary care, can help mitigate these challenges and strengthen America’s healthcare system by providing care, education, and support to all people, regardless of their level of health.
In the community, nurses partner with local leaders to design safety nets like vaccination clinics and disaster relief programs. They run urban community clinics, providing care to people who need help, including the homeless, the uninsured, and the marginalized. Imagine school-based registered nurses not only helping educate children about health, but also managing their chronic illnesses like asthma and mental health needs.
The future will require bold and collaborative action from nurses to combat the oncoming healthcare crisis. Millions of Americans will suffer the consequences of our government’s inaction to pass a comprehensive health bill in 2024 or shore up the Affordable Care Act in 2025.
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, registered nurses have been — and remain — a vital national asset. In 2026, nurses are the solution for delivering compassionate and evidence-based healthcare in America, and a driving force for the well-being of the public they serve.
Our healthcare system is stressed, but it can be sustained with empathetic leadership, investing in nursing research, expanding practice authority, and designing innovative models of care that recognize the value of nurses and their critical, myriad contributions to the nation’s health.
Martha A.Q. Curley is a registered nurse and professor of pediatric nursing at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Connie M. Ulrich is a registered nurse and professor of nursing and of medical ethics and health policy, and Mary D. Naylor is a registered nurse and professor of gerontology and nursing, both also at Penn’s School of Nursing.
