Articles on PR for People

Gingerbread Joy

Wearing red-and-white polka-dotted bows behind her ears, Gracie looks fetchingly festive. Her post-bath embellishment won’t last long, because Gracie is a self-respecting Shetland Sheepdog. But she puts up with it for a little while in order to please her human, Dawn Kuhlman. 


Trouble’s Brewing

No surprises in that headline because we’ve had trouble leap out at us at the federal level for nearly a year. There are so many examples to choose from, not only in the executive branch, but in Congress and the Supreme Court as well.  Following along in  the 2025 Project playbook shows us that, no matter how chaotic and illegal things might look, there are a few players -- Steven Miller, Scott Bessent and Russell Vought  come to mind – whose ideological discipline makes sure that the administration is sticking to the script.  


Featured Book: Ursula Dreaming by Frank Heynick

Author Frank Heynick created a poignant Holiday card that was developed from the cover of his novel Ursula Dreaming


The Fair Society: It's Time to Complete FDR's New Deal with National Health Insurance

Social insurance was originally conceived as a way to cover/protect everyone “from the cradle to the grave”, as the British prime minister Winston Churchill put it back in 1943 (a term that Franklin D. Roosevelt also used). However, in this country the American Medical Association (AMA), among others, fought vigorously against government health insurance, and so it was excluded from the original Social Security Act in 1935. It's time for a major political climate change (and the needed votes in Congress) for a long overdue set of measures to finally achieve national health insurance! 


How Unregulated Capitalism is Killing Democracy

Rosemary Curran writes about the roots of resentment amid the explosive growth of economic inequality. Her three-part series begins with How Unregulated Capitalism is Killing Democracy. 


Fa-La-La-Hacked: 5 ways hackers target you on holiday trips

With Christmas travel season soon to hit full swing, cybercriminals are taking advantage of travelers’ lowered guard - even inside hotel rooms. Cybersecurity expert weigh in on five often-overlooked ways hackers can compromise devices while you’re away, and shares simple, practical steps travelers can take to protect themselves.


The Democratic Party Lacks Competent Leadership

Members of the Democratic Party are arguing over who was responsible for their failed attempt to use the government shutdown to pressure the Republicans into renewing the enhanced tax credits for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Their message was that without that extension, more than 2 million people will lose health insurance coverage next year, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office.


November 2025 Magazine

We celebrate gratitude in November. Telling someone thank you is another way of showing that you care. Showing gratitude doesn’t have to be taught or learned; it’s simply saying Thank You. Thank you for everything. Thank you for being in my life. My article this month The Writing On The Wall examines reading, writing and the decline of the novel. I am grateful for the many novels I have read, and I adore the authors who have written them. Some books are better than others, but every book I have read has become part of me. My article is my way of saying thank you to all of the authors whose books have touched my life. Do you have a story to share about a book that transformed your life? Happy Thanksgiving!  –Patricia Vaccarino


Tone, Culture, and Conflicts of Interest

In 2016, I was asked to write a chapter for a new British book titled Conduct Risk: A Practitioner’s Guide, on the root causes of conduct risk and how it manifests itself.  I was writing primarily about financial institutions from an operational risk perspective, but my conclusions about those questions apply equally to governance issues in both the public and private sectors.  Here, I want to identify what I saw as the root causes in 2015-2016 and provide several current examples that are destabilizing our country.


The Writing On The Wall: On Reading, Writing and The Decline of the Novel

Novels enrich our lives because we touch the fragile threads of the diverse fabrics that weave us together. We begin to see the connections in things and become spellbound by the certainty that no one person is on this earth alone. All of us are slogging through the muck and the mire, navigating the joy, the sorrow, the grief, and the pratfalls that throw us haphazardly off course only to be consumed by a reckless wind. A good novel teaches us that it is noble to be a human being.