Author: Reporter

Governor Tony Evers announced on June 8 that he had reached a bipartisan deal with Republican lawmakers to provide more funding to local governments across Wisconsin, including allowing cash-strapped Milwaukee to raise sales taxes without voter approval. As part of the deal, the GOP-controlled Legislature agreed to spending an additional $1 billion on K-12 schools, along with increasing payments to families whose children attend taxpayer-funded private voucher schools. Governor Evers, a former state superintendent of education in the first year of his second term as governor, has made spending more on education a cornerstone of his time in office....

Widespread loneliness in the U.S. poses health risks as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes daily, costing the health industry billions of dollars annually, the U.S. surgeon general said in May, in declaring the latest public health epidemic. About half of U.S. adults say they’ve experienced loneliness, Dr. Vivek Murthy said in an 81-page report from his office. “We now know that loneliness is a common feeling that many people experience. It’s like hunger or thirst. It’s a feeling the body sends us when something we need for survival is missing,” Murthy told The Associated Press in an...

At the end of “The Searchers,” one of John Wayne’s most renowned Westerns, a kidnapped girl has been rescued and a family reunited. As the closing music swells, Wayne’s character looks around at his kin and then walks off toward the dusty West Texas horizon, lonesome and alone. It is a classic example of a fundamental American tall tale — that of a nation built on notions of individualism, a male-dominated story filled with loners and “rugged individualists” who suck it up, do what needs to be done, ride off into the sunset and like it that way. In...