….These experiences leave me wondering how this country has become so divided and whether even the growing extremism of Trump’s second term can bring us back to something approaching a reasoned and rational center.

      But how? The headlines at least give hint of people’s priorities.

      Today I decided to drop in on Alabama, one the three states, along with Alaska and Mississippi, that I’ve never visited in person and a state in which President Trump recently gave a commencement speech at the University of Alabama.

      The state’s capital is Montgomery, the newspaper of which, the Montgomery Advertiser, has been around since 1829. It opposed secession in 1861 but aligned itself with white supremacy after the Civil War and was an avid supporter of Gov. George Wallace. It has also won its share of awards, including three Pulitzer Prizes.

      On May 6, 2025, the lead story is titled “Mothers’ Day is on the way and so are these Montgomery events.” Lower on the homepage can be found the headlines, “Alligator harvest permit applications start in June” . . . .

Jerry Lanson is a writing consultant at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He is a professor emeritus at Emerson College. A version of this article first appeared on his Substack.

      Derek Thompson, writing in The Atlantic, describes us as living in the “anti-social century.” He cites all the statistics you’ve probably seen about the increase in loneliness in the United States in the last few decades.

      Some statistics were surprising to me: Dining alone has increased by 29 percent since 2022. The frequency of people hosting friends for parties, games and dinners has declined by 45 percent. “Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species.” 

      In an interview, Thompson talks about the decline in the number of “third places”—“a place that you choose to be with people you’re not related to and you’re not financially obligated to be around” (the bar in “Cheers,” the cafe in “Seinfeld”). Not only are these places not being built, but people are not seeking them out.

      I’d been thinking about this idea of a third place recently. After I retired, I joined a gym for older people. . . .

      Is Joe Biden still president?

      Is he the one at this very moment who is dismantling our democracy? Is he tanking our economy and isolating us from the rest of the world? Is he buddying up to dictators and white supremacists and spouting nonsense and vengeful lies? Is he eroding our moral fabric and corrupting our ethical standards? Is he the one who is turning our country into a semi-fascist state and each day transgressing what remains of our values?

      Well, no, he isn’t. But you sure would think so if you’ve been following the news. . . .

      Like the rest of us, you’ve lived a pretty long life, and for the most part, we hope, a pretty good life.

But what do you still want to accomplish?

      .Like us, you’re in your seventh, eighth or ninth decade and, let’s be frank, you don’t have all that much time left. So, in that remaining slice of your life, what do you still want to do? What do you still want to accomplish? What’s our there on the horizon that entices you?

      Maybe you’ve noted it down already—it’s on your bucket list— or maybe you haven’t really thought about it seriously till now.Let us know what you still want to accomplish by commenting here or writing to us at writingaboutourgeneratin@gmail.com. . . .

(Excerpt above from Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning.)

      What is happening to me? When I should be sleeping I am awake and when I am supposed to be awake I fall asleep.

      Dozing off during the evening news is commonplace. Waking up at 2 a.m. is a recurring occurrence. They say that REM (rapid eye movement) sleep is important to your mental acuity and well-being. Well, that explains a lot about my state of mind at the moment.

      For a time, I wore a Fitbit that tracked my sleep. I became seriously paranoid when it recorded that I had little if any REM sleep. This means that I am rarely in a deep sleep which supports mental and physical wellbeing.

      It also recorded that I toss and turn often. I became so upset by these Fitbit reports that the stress added to my sleepless nights. . .

      (From the class of a very long time ago)

      Dear soon-to-be college graduates,

      Thank you for having chosen me to be your commencement speaker even though it was probably because Chappell Roan, whoever that is, was not available. I also want to thank you, in advance, for not checking your texts during my talk.

      Although I am very grateful to be here today, and in fact I am grateful to be anywhere, I will not offer you simple platitudes like saying I am very grateful to be here today. Instead, I will offer you several more complicated platitudes that, I hope, will make you forget, if only briefly, that starting next month you will have to begin paying off your student loans with most of your beer money. . . .

       Okay, 30 or so minutes at the gym have passed—with the help of a podcast—almost pleasantly. And after pushing and pulling in various directions, on a bunch of machines, I was ready for some leg work.

      Moreover, as I have made my peripatetic wanderings among the machines, I note that the guy on the leg machine—one of a kind at this modest gym—has been sitting at it more or less since I entered the gym. He should be moving on soon.

      But he shows no signs of moving on, or of using that machine for that matter. . . .

Forty-one years have passed since the year 1984 of George Orwell’s imagined dystopian future in his 1949 novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”  As the old saying goes, “Fiction is the lie that tells truth.”

 * * *

    “We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 percent over the past year.”
— 1984
      “Prices are going down, not going up. I see that we had a couple of states where gasoline was at $1.98 a gallon. Nobody thought they’d see that for years maybe. And as you know, the cost of eggs has come down like 93%, 94% since we took office, and they’re pretty much normally priced now.”
— Donald Trump . . .

This is an excerpt from The RooneyReport, an email newsletter from Brian Rooney, a longtime television journalist.

. . . . The great Ruth Gordon (read her remarkable memoir “Myself Among Others”) was once quoted as saying her circle of friends had a pact stipulating that they’d never discuss health matters for more than a minute. And there’s a piece of smart advice undoubtedly rarely taken.

      Swapping the numbers of weekly doctor appointments, and the like, ad infinitum, means, of course, the chats are with friends and family still extant. It’s when they’re no longer there that the pain takes hold. Indeed, how many of us have hoped to predecease this or that relative or friend, because we can’t bear the thought of living without him or her.

      So, dwelling on these more and more unavoidable, perhaps maudlin, thoughts recently, there’s one that suddenly jumped to the head of my line: private jokes. . . .

      For a few days in 1985 my family and I enjoyed a period of forced relaxation that most people will never know again.

      My husband and I were moving back to the States after living in France. We’d left New York City childless and carefree with the idea of staying a year or two. We were returning nine years later with our five-year-old child in tow.

      Instead of the backpacker-filled student charter flight we’d left the States on in 1976, this time we were traveling in style: aboard the Queen Elizabeth the 2nd, the glorious ocean liner commonly known as the QE 2.

      Though we were more comfortable financially than we were in ’76, as struggling freelance writers this was still way above our pay grade. Luckily, we’d managed to score a significant press discount for writing a travel piece about the cruise. . . .

After filling my backpack

with a few generations

of chargers and wires,

and two different types

of plugs,

…after winnowing out

my t-shirts and jeans

but still having to kneel

on top of the carry-on

to close it, . . .

I’ll admit to the existence

of a moment

when we could see

in each other’s eyes

the desire just to stay

home. . . .

(Note: This is not a poem. The author just liked the rhythm provided by short lines.)

. . . .In September 1971 I satisfied the draft board in Lynchburg, Va., that I met all the qualifications for Status I-O: Conscientious Objector. They notified me that I would be required to serve two years of alternative service, working in a hospital, for instance.

      Having anticipated this, I had previously asked my boss at the lab if I could continue working there. Not only did he grant that request, but volunteered to state this arrangement in the formal letter of recommendation to my draft board he intended to write for me. All that remained was the formality of the physical and mental examinations, the same ones required of all military-service members.

      I reasoned with all the wisdom of a 19-year-old boy that I could save myself from two years of indentured servitude if I were to flunk the physical exam. 

      To explain how I planned to cheat on the Selective Service Physical Examination . . . .

      We’re not far enough into the current Trump era to know how this chapter ends. But more than 100 days in, we know these things:

•       That the only effective limits on Trump/Doge/Vought outrages and demands can come from people acting together.

•       But that before people can act together, someone needs to go first.

      This is what academics call the Collective Action Problem. In pop-culture terms, it’s known as “I am Spartacus.” . . .

This is an excerpt from the Breaking the News Substack by James Fallows, a long-time journalist and former presidential speechwriter.

      I believe, and I believe that most of the readers of Writing About Our Generation believe, that President Donald J. Trump represents an existential threat to democracy in the United States.

      But I also believe that the best way to begin the process of ridding the government of the United States of Trump and his henchmen is not to focus on the constitutional issues but to focus on the economic ones.

      Yes, the threat to the U.S. democracy—the oldest continuing democracy on earth—is clear, present and terrifying. But . . . .

     I’m 79, had a near-fatal heart attack not that long ago, and now have to decide if I want surgery for a completely different issue.

     It’s elective surgery—that is, I could continue more or less as I am without getting the procedure. The condition could—almost assuredly would—eventually get worse, but it’s not currently life-threatening and for the time being I’m pretty sure I could steel myself, just deal with whatever discomfort arises. I could get by—at least for the immediate future—without heading into the operating room.

     No doctor has yet told me I absolutely need to get it done right now. It could wait, at least a bit. it would be my choice to go ahead with it. Which is what makes the decision so damn difficult. . . .

     This is a short video, filmed in France, on the inescapable requirement, in life, that we do difficult things. For example:

• Things that we don’t want to do, like apologizing when we were wrong.

• Or things that we don’t want to do, like apologizing when we are not convinced we were wrong.

     Most of the videos I’ve been experimenting with cut rapidly among numerous shots. This includes just one shot. It is rich, however, in moral questions.

click here for the video

     I almost died before I got old, and with all due respect to Pete Townshend, that wasn’t the plan. 

     There had been broken bones, heel spurs, cataracts, sleep apnea, and plenty of therapy, but none of that was going to get in the way of a long, active, happy, productive life. Then one afternoon a year ago, I wrote an email to a friend cancelling our weekly walk. I had a headache and felt a cold coming on. After that–nothing.  My wife tells me she came home from dinner with friends that night and found me on the couch, unresponsive (she’s been kind never to “more unresponsive than usual”). When I woke up weeks later, much weakened but still myself, they told me that I’d experienced a stroke . . . .

       The Neville Chamberlain Award is given to the most cowardly effort to appease a tyrant.

      Last week’s original winners had been Shari Redstone and Paramount, for intruding on the editorial independence of “60 Minutes” in order to suck up to Trump, so he’d settle his frivolous lawsuit against CBS—thereby allowing them to sell off a chunk of CBS for billions.

      But the bigger winner is now Jeff Bezos. . . .

This is a short excerpt from Robert Reich’s excellent Substack. For the full post or to subscribe, on paid or free plans, click here.

      So, who might lead this fight?

      Too many Democratic Party leaders have rolled over and played dead while Trump and his hench-people are dismantling our republic, while this wave of fascism breaks over us.

      In this moment of absolute urgency, who are the politicians, who are the community leaders, who are the institutions and the individuals who are standing up?

     Who are the ones who have given us hope? Who are the ones who we want to follow into the streets? Who are ready to lead the charge?

There are some. . . .

      Here is how Donald Trump’s administration is “Making America Great Again.”

·       By deporting a 4-year-old citizen undergoing treatment for cancer.

·       By eviscerating, if not outright killing, “Meals on Wheels,” a vital program that feeds the sick and elderly.

·       By unveiling plans to end the federal program that distributes life-saving Narcan, a cheap and highly effective way of preventing drug overdose deaths.

·       By crippling supply chains.

·       By arresting and filing felony charges against a judge for the unspeakable crime of allowing an immigrant in her court out through a side door.

·       By investigating the main fundraising arm of the opposition Democratic Party.

      And that’s all just in the last several days. …