Most of us who messed up when we were teenagers didn’t wind up in prison.  Instead, we went on to   learn how to make a living, prepare for a career, make connections, find a job, be coached by a mentor, balance risks and rewards, maybe fall in love and create a stable family life among supportive friends and neighbors. But those who did become incarcerated spent months or years going nowhere.  They spent soul-crushing days at menial, repetitive, distasteful tasks with maybe

Call me crazy, call me naïve.  But why not hope that bad news could trigger a good result?   A staggering 42,000,000 Americans struggle to put food on the table every day. So in more civil days, we rallied with a safety net.  SNAP and other support programs were put in place during times when care for our suffering neighbors seemed normal.  But these merciful provisions—and even their emergency backups—are being sabotaged by ruthless members of an administration hostile to c

“Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.” If you were a kid back when I was a kid—the thirties, forties, fifties—you heard that advice often from your elders.  They knew that life was routinely corrupted by those with an axe to grind and the means to spread misinformation.  It’s been going on since mass media emerged.  Newspapers were respected and persuasive just by dint of being published, even when the publishers were trying to start a war or ruin a p