From the Editor

     I am going to take this opportunity to mention the online presence of The Torch at the IATC website—www.torch.org—because I have a feeling that this issue contains some pieces you will want to share with friends. You cannot tell your friends to get to the nearest newsstand to pick up The Torch, but you can (and should) go to the website, look under "About Torch" for "Torch Publications," click on "Current Issue," find the right article, and cut and paste the link to send to anyone (or everyone) in your address book. (The direct link to the magazine is <www.thetorchmagazine.org>.

    More than a few of you, I expect, will want to share Leland Robinson's "Right Speech," this year’s Paxton Award winner. Leland, who belongs to the Frederick club and who previously took the Paxton honors in 2013, dazzled this year's convention in Durham with his examination of political dialogue in the context of Buddhist teaching—an amazing intersection of the timely and the enduring.

     Also timely—even urgent—is "The Carbon Climate Crisis" by Marshall Marcus of the Richmond club. In a kind of sequel to his "Connecting the Dots between Species Extinction, Overpopulation, and the Use of Resources" from our Winter 2016 issue, Marshall here focuses on biodiversity, a topic much in the news as I write this due to the fires in the Amazonian rain forest.

     The topic of providing for the poor is always timely, unfortunately. Judith Landes of the Winchester club looks at our not-always-inspiring past record on this score in "Poorhouses in America."

     In "Relationship Crucibles: Why Everyone Should Sail," John Falconer of the Kearney club looks both at psychological and sociological research about family interaction and at a particular instance of a family under a very particular kind of strain in a very, very particular setting—John and his wife, Tracy, out in a sailboat.

     It is not easy to find fresh angles on the history of World War II, but you can trust contributors to The Torch to have them—consider Barton Shaw’s piece on the "Ghost Army" in our previous issue, or "Sieg High: Psychostimulants and Opiates in World War II" by John Elrick of the Winchester club, in this very issue.

     Dan Lundquist of the Saratoga Springs club has an immense store of experience in university and college administration, but his piece is not about looking back to higher education’s past, but about looking ahead to its fast-approaching future, and being ready for some serious changes.

     How often does the word "cyanobacteria" occur in two different articles in the same issue of The Torch? Not even once during my tenure—until now, that is. The microscopic creatures who form part of the evidence in Marshall Marcus’s article appear here as well, as Kalamazoo’s James Coppinger gives a fascinating, up-close account of the discovery of extremophiles.