I have spent much of my life being obnoxiously optimistic.

      When friends have worked themselves into a state of doom and gloom about subway service in New York City on weekends because of construction, cheery Mitch can be counted upon to note that upgrading the signal system will increase the speed of the trains and shorten the wait between them.

      Two and a half couples sitting around a dinner table could be bemoaning global inequality and I, as one half of one couple, will feel called upon to note that extreme poverty has been declining in the world in this century.

      However—Thank you, President Trump!—I’m not feeling optimistic any more. . . .

      Cory Booker on Tuesday provided us with a moral moment, a ray of light in the wreckage of warrantless arrests and heartless, destructive firings escalating by the week in Donald Trump’s America.

      The Democratic senator from New Jersey spoke — with force, coherence, dignity and humanity — for 25 hours and 4 minutes straight on the U.S. Senate floor, the longest one-man filibuster in the nation’s history. He never sat down. He never took a bathroom break. He spoke from 7 p.m. Monday until 8:04 p.m. Tuesday.

      “These are not normal times in our nation, and they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate,” said Booker. . . .

This piece first appeared on Jerry Lanson’s Substack—where he regularly takes on the various Trump/Musk attacks on democracy.

       How could so many people have voted for Trump—not once, but twice? What were they trying to say, if anything? Or were they just saying a big fuck you to us all?

      I think I may now understand that attitude because more than 50 years ago, during a national election, saying a big fuck you was exactly what I wanted to say.

      My first vote in a presidential election was 1968: Nixon v. Humphrey.

      Nixon, of course, unthinkable. But Hubert Humphrey’s support of the war in Vietnam made him unthinkable for me, too. . . .

         Of all the chaos roiling this country over the last two months, nothing has troubled me more than the arrest and imprisonment, without warrants or charges, of a growing number of documented foreign students.

         Late last Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told NBC News that the Trump Administration had revoked 300 or more student visas. “We do it every day,” he said.

         His comment came a day after a 30-year-old Turkish-born doctoral candidate at Tufts University, Rumeysa Ozturk, was plucked off a Somerville, Mass., street in daylight by a half-dozen masked federal agents. They grabbed her phone, handcuffed her, pushed her into an unmarked car and drove away.  A neighbor filmed her abduction, footage that has ricocheted around the internet. Less well known is that she suffered an asthma attack as she was flown to a holding facility in Louisiana or that her lawyer had no idea where to find her for 24 hours. She is still being held. . . .

     Here’s some of what we have seen recently that might be of particular interest to our generation. (Apologies for any pay walls.) Send us what you have seen at WritingAboutOurGeneration@gmail.com.

• “Will Stimulating My Brain as I Age Keep It Sharp?” Melinda Wenner Moyer, New York Times, March 25, 2025.

• “How dumb can you get? I ditched my smartphone to find out,” Molly Roberts, Washington Post, Aug. 7, 2024.

• “Vanity Fair’s Heyday,” Bryan Burrough, The Yale Review, March 14, 2025.

• “Why Do Women Live Longer Than Men?” Mohana Ravindranath, New York Times, Feb. 25, 2025.

• “At 33, I knew everything. At 69, I know something much more important,” Anne Lamott, Washington Post, Nov. 20, 2023.

Click for more

      My assignment: Choose a movie from each decade of my life that has had the most personal impact, starting with the 1940s and ending in the 2020s.

       We’ve already covered the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, and continue now with the 1990s. These aren’t necessarily the “best” movies of the decade or the most innovative; they represent the films that resonated most with me, either from my initial viewing when they were released or when I first engaged with them in subsequent years.

      Some rules to keep these lists doable: 1) Only one film each decade by a particular director; 2) only English-language movies, due mainly to gaps in my knowledge about foreign-language films except for Italian neo-realism, French New Wave and the works of Akira Kurosawa, and 3) no TV miniseries.

      I’m sure I’ve missed some great movies that should be on these lists. Yet this still leaves hundreds, if not thousands, of movies to choose from.

      Let the arguments continue.

The 1990s:

      “Lone Star” (1996):

Andrew Sullivan was perhaps, after Dr. King, the most effective crusader for a liberal cause in our lifetimes. The cause was gay rights. Sullivan’s genius was emphasizing the right to marry. However, Sullivan is conservative on many issues. That, perhaps, gives this short excerpt from Sullivan’s Substack—on the first two months of Trump’s second term—even more weight. We strongly suggest that you read the whole piece. Our excerpt continues here.

     ….I’m not naive. As televised and online theater, the first two months have been worthy of Roger Ailes. Deporting foreigners, attacking college students, terrifying legal noncitizens, bullying other countries, brandishing brutality, and mocking left lunacy all have a real constituency. . . . Suddenly, you see how fragile liberal democracy is in the hands of a duplicitous mob-boss like Trump.

     But this embrace of indecency, aggression, and lawlessness is also itself fragile. Trump has always known how to craft a reality show. But behind the curtain, there is still a small, bitter, vengeful, incompetent man . . . .

       Here is an idea I’m confident you have not heard before: In response to the current political crisis in the United States, I am suggesting that we change the name of the Democratic Party.

      “Huh?” my friends responded when I first ran this by them.

      “So now, you want to change the name of a party?” was my wife’s initial—and a bit hasty, I thought—response.

      But hear me out.

      The Democratic Party is the oldest continuing political party on earth. It began when Thomas Jefferson’s anti-Federalists began to see themselves as an entity, as united—under the name, oddly in retrospect, of “Republicans” or “Democratic-Republicans.” Populist President Andrew Jackson was leading that party when it began being called, simply, the Democratic Party.

      And “Democratic” was and might have continued to be a fine name for a party, particularly at this moment when democracy is under threat in the oldest continuing democracy on earth. But by now that name has been around for too long. It may have too much history. . . .

      Most of my many regrets are about things I didn’t do rather than things I did (that is, errors of omission rather than errors of commission).

      For example, I don’t regret going to MIT, but I have regrets about how I ended up there the first time, including:

·      Not requesting an interview with the admissions office at Harvard (we lived nearby), instead of accepting an alumni interview with the father of a high school classmate with whom I didn’t get along.

·      Not applying to Stanford, because they had a later deadline, I was tired of the whole process (getting recommendations, etc.) and I had already been accepted at MIT.

      I’ve been laid off from jobs six or seven times, so I’ve obviously made some mistakes in addition to having had some bad luck . . .

      The song came up unexpectedly, in the car. As usual, I didn’t want to listen to the news so I slid an old mix-tape CD into the maw of the CD player. The intro drumbeats started and I immediately recognized the song and—though I hadn’t heard or thought of it for years—knew all the lyrics. I sang along.

      The song was “Glad All Over,” by the Dave Clark Five.

      It came out in 1963. Sixty-some years later, every single lyric—granted, the song is fairly repetitive—immediately came back to me.

      Those were not the only lyrics I unexpectedly have remembered recently. When my wife and I were talking about how cold this winter has been, I noted, “coldest winter in almost 14 years,” and realized quickly that was one of the lines from “Mandolin Wind,” by Rod Stewart. I pulled it up on Spotify and instantly knew all those lyrics, too. . . .

      At the ripe, glorious age of 74 I have lived a lifetime of being pissed off at the government. My blood has boiled on more than a thousand occasions as I witnessed the oppression of the neediest, heard the cries of those begging in doorways and bore the painful weight of human rights dissolving before my eyes.

      But never in my lifetime have I witnessed the horrors or destruction of all that I have cherished in the good of America. I am exhausted. . . .

      My assignment: Choose a movie from each decade of my life that has had the most personal impact, starting with the 1940s and ending in the 2020s.

       We’ve already covered the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and continue now with the 1980s. These aren’t necessarily the “best” movies of the decade or the most innovative; they represent the films that resonated most with me, either from my initial viewing when they were released or when I first engaged with them in subsequent years.

      Some rules to keep these lists doable: 1) Only one film each decade by a particular director; 2) only English-language movies, due mainly to gaps in my knowledge about foreign-language films except for Italian neo-realism, French New Wave and the works of Akira Kurosawa, and 3) no TV miniseries.

I’m sure I’ve missed some great movies that should be on these lists. Yet this still leaves hundreds, if not thousands, of movies to choose from.

      Let the arguments continue.

The 1980s . . . .

     I went to New York City this week for a few days vacation. By the time I got back, Donald Trump’s Defense Department had stripped articles about the Holocaust and 9/11 from its website. His acting head of Social Security was threatening to shut down the agency that provides me and some 73 million others with monthly checks. And Trump had moved to dismantle the Department of Education, the source of programs ranging from educational support for public-school students with disabilities to loans and grants for college students.

     There’s much more cutting and outright obliteration to come, of course. It seems to be the only certainty in American politics today.

     That’s why we all need to put aside the imprecise political definitions that too often serve to separate us from one another. Instead, we need to work together to restore the very foundations of our democracy. I’m not interested in whether you define yourself as a liberal, a conservative or a libertarian. . . .

This piece first appeared on Jerry Lanson’s Substack—where he regularly takes on the various Trump/Musk attacks on democracy.

      How did we get here? How did all this happen?

      I ascribe it mostly to two individuals: Murdoch and Mitch. (To be clear, the Mitch is not Mitch Stephens, my friend and colleague and the co-editor of this site. It’s Mitch McConnell. Murdoch is, of course, Rupert Murdoch.) They got us here.

      There were others, of course, who have brought us to this moment—Ronald Reagan, who made many believe government was the enemy; Grover Norquist, the fanatical anti-tax crusader who wanted to “drag government into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub;” social media, which spread the craziness from friend to friend; Newt Gingrich, who launched an enduring era of partisan warfare; and many others.

      But Murdoch and Mitch deserve the most dis-credit. . . .

     In a quick-cut video less than a minute long, Mitch Stephens considers the Trump Administration’s efforts to undo the progress—however incomplete—the United States had made on discrimination, the environment, poverty and encouraging democracy around the world.

     “Are we really to forget all we have learned?” the video asks.

click here for the video

      Didn’t watch a minute of the Super Bowl, not even the Kendrick Lamar part. Didn’t care about the college football playoff championship. Was out of the country for the World Series and can’t quite remember right now who won the NBA finals or the Stanley Cup.

      But boy, do I love March Madness.

      Maybe it’s because I live in a college town, where college basketball is religion, even when the reigning deity has lost some of its divine powers. Maybe it’s because I am in the center of a region that has few professional teams and has historically dominated the sport of college basketball for decades.

      Or maybe it’s because March Madness, the NCAA college basketball tournament, is the one sports event that everyone can feel a part of. . . .

This is a short sample of an article by the novelist Anne Lamott in the Washington Post.

     I turned 70 today, a young age for an older person to be, but it is the oldest I have ever been by a long shot. It has been well over six decades since I learned in arithmetic how to carry the one, and the rest has sped by like microfiche.

     One big juicy, messy, hard, joyful, quiet life. That’s what my 70 years have bequeathed me.

     In my teens, already drinking and drugging, I didn’t expect to see 21, and at 21, out of control, I didn’t expect to see 30. At 30, I had published three books but, as a sober friend put it, was deteriorating faster than I could lower my standards.

     Then at 32, I got clean and sober, the miracle of my life from which all other blessings flow. . . .

      . . . . I wish, these days, I was party to another party.

      I want to support a political movement that vigorously fights for what I believe in. I want to support a political party that understands the grave threats facing this country and is willing to do whatever is needed to meet those threats. I want to place my faith in an organization that is angry and determined and full of passionate intensity.

      That is not the Democratic Party.

      Ever since November’s election, and particularly since the inauguration, the Democratic Party has been confused about how to respond to the assault on our democracy orchestrated by Donald Trump and implemented by Elon Musk. The party has followed, for the most part, the advice from long-time Democratic strategist James Carville to roll over and play dead and wait for the Republicans to really screw it up. . . .

      My assignment: Choose a movie from each decade of my life that has had the most personal impact, starting with the 1940s and ending in the 2020s.

       We’ve already covered the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, and continue today with the 1970s, which saw the rise of a “New Hollywood,” the emergence of a host of young directors and general recognition by critics and historians as one of the most creative decades in the history of American film.

      These aren’t necessarily the “best” movies of the decade or the most innovative; they represent the films that resonated most with me, either from my initial viewing when they were released or when I first engaged with them in subsequent years.

      Some rules to keep these lists doable: 1) Only one film each decade by a particular director; 2) only English-language movies, due mainly to gaps in my knowledge about foreign-language films except for Italian neo-realism, French New Wave and the works of Akira Kurosawa, and 3) no TV miniseries.

I’m sure I’ve missed some great movies that should be on these lists. Yet this still leaves hundreds, if not thousands, of movies to choose from.

      Let the arguments continue.

The 1970s:

“The Godfather” (1972)

      This is my favorite American movie. . . .

      We could use a Tom Lehrer—probably the cleverest composer of satirical political songs this country has produced—right about now.

      One not having, to date, arrived, perhaps we might at least revisit the work of Tom Lehrer, himself, who will turn 97 next month.

      He was, you may recall, a Ph.D. student in mathematics at Harvard, who recorded a few albums in the 1950s and 1960s. Lehrer wrote the songs solo, sang the songs solo, and mostly accompanied them with some lively solo piano—which made for a particularly tight words-music-performance fit.

      His songs were wont to skewer just about everything in sight, but with a special emphasis on American policy in those days when, while the US government professed to be on the side of democracy, it often took it too far . . . .