They’ll have a costume parade through town. Hundreds of kids, all brave and silly and hepped up on Twizzlers, with fangs and wings and claws. I wonder, I always wonder, how many of them have already had to contend with real monsters.

If a carbon tax of $40 a ton were levied, and every red cent of it turned over directly to every American with a valid Social Security number, the resulting incentive to lower carbon emissions would probably spur more clever efforts by power companies to green the grid than even the most stringent EPA regulations.

A couple of weeks ago, somebody started duct-taping creepy white supremacist flyers over my wife’s campaign signs. “You will not replace us,” the flyers blared, over a photo of a white couple with a baby.

Just about everything you can buy at the annual Cauliflower Festival in Margaretville is local, except the cauliflower.

I’ve discovered since then that Ivan is something of a Rorschach test for people. Sometimes they think it’s cute that he had a name. Sometimes they’re delighted that he had a nice life on a farm down the road, where he had friends both bovine and human, and pretty much did whatever he felt like. But mainly, it seems, a lot of people are horrified.

The brave new world is here — and it has me doing all sorts of things I never thought I was capable of. I signed a contract this week on a brand new plug-in hybrid car, the 2017 Prius Prime. 

In disasters, there is helpful help, and then there is all the other stuff people do in a well-intentioned spasm of conscience.

Few places on Earth are as unfriendly to the carless as rural Delaware County.

The statues are in the south, but this isn’t just a question for southerners. Up here — 500 miles north of Appomattox, and more than 150 years after a Virginia farmer wrote that he’d rather “endure all the horrors of civil war than to see the dusky sons of Ham leading the fair daughters of the South to the altar” — Confederate flags wave from porches and pickup trucks.