In his 2005 work, “Memorial Flag (Toy Soldiers),” Providence, Rhode Island-based Dave Cole (born 1975) gives expression to just the kind of moral conundrums all great political art points to. Sometimes, such art adopts a powerful point of view towards the conundrum (think of Picasso’s fiercely anti-war “Guernica”), while other times it rests with merely noting a deeply troubling question or perspective while allowing viewers to grapple with it as they will.

Cole’s “Memorial Flag” painting strikes this viewer as decidedly more the latter.

Cole created what he considers an actual flag rather than an artistic representation by melting together and then painting 18,000 toy soldiers armed with their guns, the soldiers of the type that most every American boy learned to play and fantasize with growing up in the 20th century...

Watching the entirety of the Republican presidential debate Wednesday night and then reading the transcript the next morning, I felt compelled to check my passport and a calendar to make sure I’m not living in Poland in 1939, right after Hitler’s armies moved in with their tanks, robbing us of our sovereignty and destroying our way of life.

To hear the candidates tell it, we have never lived in more perilous times, nor has our country ever been in as sad-sack shape as we are now under the craven and cowardly leadership of President Obama.

Ben Carson: “We need to be on a war footing. We need to understand that our nation is in grave danger.”

Jeb Bush: “We need to restore the defense cuts of Barack Obama to rebuild our military, to destroy ISIS before it destroys us.”

Chris Christie: “We have people across this country who are scared to death…If a center for the developmentally disabled in San Bernardi...

Frank Sinatra turned 100 years old yesterday, and there was ballyhoo aplenty in the media and various entertainment circles taking note of the occasion.

Not that Frank was alive to hear the accolades, but as famously dismissive as he most always was of praise and the gushings of adoring fans, he surely would have been pleased that the scrawny Mama’s Boy From Hoboken that he was left a body of work behind that would be duly noted and celebrated 100 years after his birth.

And such an unscrawny body of work it was!

Just one of the notable aspects of Sirius Radio’s channel 71—aka “All Sinatra All the Time”—is that the 24/7 airing of Sinatra songs seems to repeat itself as little as it does. (A small percentage of the tunes are actually sung by “Sinatra era” compatriots such as Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis Jr...

“After Paris,” says the lead editorial in the bi-weekly magazine that arrived in my mailbox on Thursday. The issue was put together early last week, placed in the mail by week’s end and then took a few days to make its way across the country to me from New York.

By then, it was hopelessly outdated, lacking even mention of “After Planned Parenthood” and “After San Bernardino” and “After Wherever Mass Shootings Will Occur Again Today or Tomorrow” as the United States continues on its average pace of at least one multiple murder by gun daily during 2015, though most of them have resulted in less carnage than occurred at the San Bernardino Regional Center. (Should we be thankful and express relief for that fact?)

France: not even close to keeping pace.

For my own part, I continue trying to keep a sense of historical perspective on matters of humankind’s evolution...

“When you’re a poor kid from a poor family and a priest pays attention to you, it’s a big deal. How do you say no to God?”

That’s the trap door that thousands of children—young boys mostly, but plenty of girls, too—fell down through over only-God-knows-how-many years, centuries, even, of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, a particular historical epoch of which has been captured so stirringly in the movie Spotlight, currently in theaters.

The question posed above comes from one of the priest’s victims who operates a survivor’s support network that has long been mostly ignored by the media.

The movie follows an investigative journalism team for the Boston Globe that in 2002 pursues an appalling story of widespread sexual abuse by Boston-area priests...