While criminal justice reform has gained mainstream, bipartisan acceptance over the past few years, the system remains a tangle of overlapping issues—racial disparities in sentencing, felon disenfranchisement, and disproportionate rates of mental illness in prisoners, for example. As of 2014, Connecticut had 326 people sentenced to state prisons for every 100,000 residents, and 35 women for every 100,000 female residents; this rate of female incarceration is just over half of that nationwide. Yet, American incarceration is so extreme that Connecticut’s relatively low rates are still higher than those of most medium- and large-sized countries in the world for both incarceration in general and incarceration of women.

Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal need to follow the example set by their peers in New York and Massachusetts and responsibly question the further building and enhancement of the interstate methane (natural gas) pipelines running through Connecticut.

When people are faced with an overwhelming challenge, the advice they often hear is “take it one day at a time.” While I see the wisdom in that way of thinking, I recently have adopted my own mantra—I’m taking life 12 weeks at a time.

Wood smoke has become the new “second hand” smoke and it is making thousands of people sick across the country. The components of wood smoke are virtually the same as cigarette smoke and yet wood smoke is hardly regulated while cigarette smoke is highly regulated.