Opinion

Let’s meet the Republicans seeking to be Arkansas’ next secretary of state: Sen. Kim Hammer, R-Benton; Miller County Judge Cathy Hardin Harrison; and Bryan Norris.

I’ve invented a new game that I’m hoping will catch on. It’s called “Mailer Madness.” The way it works is sort of like a hand of poker. Everyone puts in a dollar to start, and then adds a dollar each round until someone correctly guesses the gist of the next dark-money mailer that will clutter up our mailboxes and ultimately our landfills.

It’s a couple of weeks late, admittedly, for a column outlining my New Year’s resolutions, but I’ve been busy and this list says nothing about getting things done in a timely manner.

Arecent column of mine asked questions about what might happen in Arkansas this year. Let’s go a step further and make some actual predictions, starting with …

NFL Sunday aside, sports headlines the last several days have been dominated by the opening round of the College Football Playoff and influencer-turned-boxer Jake Paul’s latest boxing match as a sizable underdog against former heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua.

As the world becomes increasingly unreal thanks to artificial intelligence, we’ll all need to seek reality wherever we can find it — in nature, in faceto- face relationships and in trustworthy sources of information like the local news outlet you are reading now.

Typically, the last two or three weeks of one year and the first two or three weeks of the next make for a slow news cycle. Sometimes, filling up the paper during those few weeks can be a challenge — although thankfully, that’s not the case this week.

This year’s commemoration of the attack on Pearl Harbor in Honolulu on Dec. 7 was missing one irreplaceable element: Pearl Harbor survivors.

Editor’s Note: This column originally was published July 19, 2023. I’m sharing it again today as the Friends of the Berryville Library continue to raise funds to furnish the new library, which is now under construction on Springfield Street. To all of you reading, thanks for supporting your local newspaper. Please consider supporting your local library as well!