5 of our top opinion pieces this week: ICYMI
From air travel safety to Tucker Carlson's comments to a mother's struggle to get medications, here are some of our top columns of the week.
In today's fast-paced news environment, it can be hard to keep up. For your weekend reading, we've started in-case-you-missed-it compilations of some the week's top Paste BN Opinion pieces. As always, thanks for reading, and for your feedback.
1. Airline pilot: Is it still safe to fly in a Boeing 737 Max? Don't worry about it just yet.
By Patrick Smith
"My best advice, maybe, is to take a step back and look at this through a wider lens. The fact is, Lion Air and Ethiopian notwithstanding, air travel has never been safer. Out of 35 million commercial global flights in 2017, only two ended in accidents resulting in deaths of passengers. Since the Lion Air incident, two fatal crashes in five months is tragic, but in decades past it wasn’t unusual to see a dozen or more air disasters worldwide in a given year. Nowadays, two or more is downright unusual. In the United States, there hasn’t been a large-scale disaster involving a mainline carrier in a decade — an absolutely astonishing statistic."
2. Marie Kondo, back away from my piles of junk. I've got baggage I’m not ready to bury.
By Eliana Salzhauer
"To the untrained eye, I would seem an ideal candidate for Kondo-ing. My giant piles of stuff must mean that I am the very definition of a hoarder, the piles a sign of my insanity. You couldn’t be more wrong. I don’t bring new items home every day or compulsively collect anything on sale. In fact, I rarely shop. My stuff is an accumulation of sentimental souvenirs — defined and finite. Keeping that crap boxed up and untouched is the only thing keeping me sane. Ignoring them enables me to live each day in a state of blissful ignorance."
3. Tucker Carlson is another victim of the leftist mob
By Tim Young
"Tucker Carlson said things that were not only par for the course for shock jock radio a decade ago, but also pretty much expected to be heard from the genre. The comments were heard by hundreds of thousands of people then and have been publicly available forever since. They could have been brought up when he was an employee of other networks and not a top political commentator on Fox News, but they weren't. Now that he has one of the largest and most successful platforms in the world to share his viewpoint from, these quotes were pulled out in an attempt to get his advertisers to abandon his show or for Fox News to fire him."
4. From urgent care to pharmacists, the struggle to get my kids antibiotics drove me to tears
By Elizabeth Cronise McLaughlin
"Our health care system is broken. It punishes all of us, regardless of income, for getting sick, and it punishes the poor most of all. My story is the story of a single mother with insurance and a solid income. Yet I still had to spend an entire day chasing basic medicine at outrageous cost. It is infinitely worse for those without my privileges. Health care should be about quality care with dignity for all. Our current system is anything but that. It reduces us to mere numbers, competing payers instead of human beings. It requires us to fight for care when we’re vulnerable."
5. A Donald Trump coup if he loses in 2020? With all the norms he's busted, don't rule it out
By Jerry H. Goldfeder and Lincoln Mitchell
"Not one of 10 defeated incumbents in 58 presidential elections refused to hand over the keys to the White House — from President John Adams, who lost to Vice President Thomas Jefferson in 1800, to George H. W. Bush, who was ousted by then-Governor Bill Clinton in 1992. Yet, given how Trump has already blown through the norms of governance in previously unimaginable ways by attacking the judiciary, Congress and the free press — as well as the increasing possibility that Trump’s post-presidential life could very well consist of criminal trials — Michael Cohen’s warning is worth serious consideration. After all, during the last campaign Trump refused to commit in advance that he would accept the results."