Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

Lights Out (1977). A great rock-and-roll song by a great rock-and-roll band.

To the Editor:

“Leaps in Leave, if Only Parents Would Take It” (front page, Sept. 2) reports that many employees do not use all of their paid family leave because of pressure to work or advance one’s career. That pressure could also be called caring about one’s work community.

After all, when one person takes off, many others at work are affected. Others—many of whom also have families—must pick up for the absent employee.

There is also concern about the product or service that we are supplying. When someone takes off, our customers are affected. For example, if your doctor takes several months’ leave, that can make it difficult for you as a patient.

Our families are incredibly important. Still, they are only one aspect of our lives.

Of course, leave is something everyone needs to take. However, leave should not be viewed as simply the employee versus the company. Rather, it is about employees acting within their work community and the community of those who are being served.

FRAYDA LEVIN

Mountain Lakes, N.J.

The writer is the former owner of a small business.

Here.

Here.

To the Editor:

I was disappointed to read Kate Murphy’s account of the D.I.Y. animal slaughter movement (“Blessed Be My Freshly Slaughtered Dinner,” Sunday Review, Sept. 6). She offers the movement as a plausible ethical answer to the grotesque violence of industrial animal agriculture, but it is not.

Eating delicious and nutritious vegan food, by contrast, effectively answers the call to live peaceably with our fellow earthlings. Contrary to Ms. Murphy’s implication that people need meat, there is a mountain of evidence that a whole-food, plant-based diet is not only adequate but also superior to a diet consisting of the flesh and secretions of animals, quite apart from the ethics of the matter.

Numbing oneself to one’s victims and praying over their remains after killing them may provide comfort and “meaning” to the slaughter hobbyist, but it does no such thing for the victim that wanted to live. To suggest otherwise tortures—among other things—the English language.

SHERRY F. COLB

Ithaca, N.Y.

The writer teaches a course in animal rights at Cornell Law School.

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To the Editor:

Re “The Anti-Party Men,” by David Brooks (column, Sept. 8):

Bernie Sanders is surging on the left because he authentically speaks to the economic concerns of ordinary Americans—unlike candidates who take their orders from elites while they simultaneously fatten their own wallets. Donald Trump is surging on the right for a more or less similar reason—even if his proposed solutions are wildly superficial, likely draconian and largely unrealistic (given how a majority of the country has no stomach for deporting 11 million people).

Americans are hungry for an authentic populist movement—a movement that would place the real-world concerns of ordinary Americans front and center and the obsessions of America’s wealthy, warmongering elites on the back burner. If seeking a decent life makes one an “expressive individualist,” then rational human beings should all be one. Americans on both the right and left increasingly resent being treated as mere serfs and cannon fodder in our elite’s great globalist games.

MATTHEW CARNICELLI

Brooklyn

This morning, at a Shell station in Fort Worth, Texas, I paid $2.059 per gallon for regular unleaded gasoline. With my Kroger card, it came to $1.959. What're y'all payin' in your neck o' the woods?

Addendum: Thirty years ago today, in Tucson, Arizona, I paid $1.139 per gallon for regular unleaded gasoline. Ten years ago today, in Dallas/Fort Worth, I paid $3.089 per gallon for intermediate-grade gasoline. Thank God for Obama!

4 August 1993. Whenever I'm low (which is rare), I watch this and it cheers me up.

Addendum: The incident calls to mind the following lyrics:

You don't tug on superman's cape
You don't spit into the wind
You don't pull the mask off that old lone ranger
And you don't mess around with Jim

Jim Croce, "You Don't Mess Around with Jim" (1972).