It's time for our listeners to weigh in. Here are this week's highlights from the WAMC Listener Comment Line.

Commentator Keith Strudler offers deep thoughts on the wide world of sports.

Poverty. It’s a political issue. It’s a social justice issue. And it’s an education issue. In fact, it’s the elephant in the room whenever we talk about education in America. And a mighty elephant it is, because poverty plays into every aspect of a child’s health, well-being and academic success.

Our conversation stimulated some thoughts about the job Biden is doing.

Here’s a hypothesis and a modest proposal: I’d say that truthful information is the lifeblood of democracy. That’s got to be so, because it’s only with a grasp of what’s true that voters can make good choices when they cast ballots. Yet we are awash in lies and distortions by people in public life and disreputable media sources.

The state budget deal that recently was hammered out failed to adequately tackle the worsening climate threat, but it also did little to attack another environmental crisis: the generation and disposal of solid wastes.

We again are experiencing mixed reactions to the demonstrations at Columbia University and actions taken by its administration. The real issue is what constitutes anti-Semitic actions or language, which in some instances is difficult to define much like Justice Holmes saying that he would know pornography when he saw it.

Just as I was about to declare Miller Lite the beer that litterers were most tossing from moving cars in my annual totally subjective Earth Day survey of trash deposited on our road, I happened to look down and got a shock.

I didn’t turn on Game 2 of the New York Knicks vs. Philadelphia Seventy Sixers playoff series Monday night until the 4th quarter, largely because it felt inappropriate watching the game during a Passover Seder. But like a lot of folks, I actually turned it off with less than a minute to go, I believe switching to House Hunters, or something like that. That’s because the Sixers went up four and heading to the free throw line with only 47 seconds left. So by all accounts, this game was over. The best of seven series would be tied at a game apiece heading to Philadelphia.

Though it grows mostly in the southeastern United States, the sweetgum strikes me as an All-American tree. It is, as it were, nature’s version of good old American ingenuity: a supremely versatile resource in the nation’s arboretum that has, over the generations, yielded easily to inventive people who transformed its botanical riches.