Check out the thermometer or step outside. The mercury is inching upward and before you know it, we’ll be broiling for a few months.

On the morning of March 21, video of 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg being run down by a self-driving Uber vehicle in Tempe quickly became the most-watched drama on local television and across the Internet. This should come as no surprise. A barbarous bunch getting more bloodthirsty by the day, …

You know those “national conversations” we have all the time, about the big issues: guns, sexual harassment of women and the latest episode of “The Bachelor”? It’s time for Arizona to have a “state conversation.” The subject?

We were standing on the 14th hole of the Arizona Biltmore golf course when The Guy From Grand Rapids, maybe four beers and 80 strokes in, began to expound about his lack of desire. Not that kind of desire (for which I thank heavens). His lack of desire to see the Grand Canyon.

Spring is coming, producing not only longer and warmer days but also an overproduction both in our homes and on our streets of unwanted puppies and kittens. As a result, more animals will be dumped at local shelters or left to mature and reproduce on their own in our alleys and neighborhoods.

Some weeks, you cannot stomach another cynical look at our cynical times. Instead, you seek a few hundred words of inspiration. Then you spot Captain Benny Ashley shuffling across Columbus Avenue in midtown Phoenix and you know his is exactly the story to tell.

Here’s a modest proposal, one that makes perfect sense in 2018, when our nation has never been more divided: Rather than an American flag colored red, white and blue, as we’ve had for going on 242 years, perhaps it’s time to change the Stars and Stripes to our new official colors.

The .40-caliber bullet was fired Sunday morning one week ago, at about 26 minutes after 2. Court documents locate the crime at the intersection of North Civic Plaza and East Stetson Drive in Old Town Scottsdale. Really, though, the murder of Captain Kyle Brayer is a crime with echoes all across this Valley, this state, this world of ours. Because if you can measure a human being by the sum total of the lives he or she touches, then Kyle Brayer, who died two weeks short of turning 35 years old, lived more than any 10 of us.

The two words appeared everywhere last week in the days surrounding Sept. 11, the phrase offered like a magical incantation meant to conjure a sense of reverence in the writer or speaker, reader or listener.

One year ago, Clate Mask, co-founder and CEO of Infusionsoft, delivered a powerful keynote message at the East Valley Partnership Economic Forum.