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 a few hours for...

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 caring and...

Just yesterday, I shared my thoughts about the danger to "truth" and "reality" caused by the ubiquitous and growing use of plausible misinformation and AI-generated images and videos almost impossible to detect as bogus. And now today the New York Times does a deep-dive into the myriad ways Trump is using these tools nonstop to create a world in which whatever he says carries inordinate apparent authority. I urge you to read this amazing account from the NYT below to see just how flagrant...