Well, yeah, it’s not been a great year. In fact, let’s face it, it’s been a terrible year and we all should be glad to see it gone.

      The inauguration of a vile, narcissistic, felonious psychopath, and all that has come after. The continuation of dreadful wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Masked secret police on our streets. Terrible warming-climate fueled natural disasters. Mass shootings after mass shootings. Sudan. Bondi Beach. Murders. Deportations, Brown University, Charlie Kirk, war crimes, measles epidemics, airplane crashes and so much horribly more.

      It’s been an exhausting year, a bleak year, a year that made us stop talking to each other and maybe start hating each other and wanting it all just to go away. . .

      But, alas, it’s not the worst year of our lifetimes. Alas, maybe not even close. . . .

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.‍ ‍

• Willie Nelson is 92 and Feeling Lucky, Grayson Haver Currin, GQ, Dec. 4, 2025

• These Are the 10 Old Television Series Every Kid Needs to Watch, John McWhorter, New York Times, Oct. 9, 2025

• Can we save travel's most beloved tradition?, Asia London Palomba, Dec. 12, 2025

• The Last Good Thin: DVDs, streaming, and the price of nostalgia, Jess Love, The American Scholar, Dec. 11, 2025

• Why More Older New Yorkers Are Ending Up in Homeless Shelters, Andy Newman, New York Times, June 24, 2024

• How to be the archivist of your own family, Samantha Ellis, Psyche, December 2025

• Why Are More Older People Dying After Falls?, Paula Span, New York Times, Sept. 7, 2025

Click for more

      My son Eli was only four years old back in 1976. He was surrounded by simplicity, being raised by two young hippies in their twenties with not much to their name. We were living high on a hilltop in Huntington, Vermont,on a meadow in a tiny stone house that we built ourselves. Our home was only accessible by walking because once it snowed, our steep and precarious long driveway was not made for an old front-wheel drive car with crappy tires.

      The house was unfinished, and we lived on the ground floor with a masonry tub for water that we heated on a gas stove, a wood furnace in the basement for heat, and not much else. We did not have a telephone, a television or a computer. What we did have were hopes and dreams and unwavering youthful expectations and the pleasure, contentment and peace we felt living surrounded by a hardwood forest in a home we built with our own hands. . . .

      Here’s a holiday tale, with a melancholy tinge and an ultimately hopeful ending.

      It was December, a couple of weeks before Christmas. It was Paris, and although it may have been the holiday season, in the terribly misnamed City of Light it was monochromatically gray and drizzly, as it almost always was from November through March.

       It felt cold and cold-hearted, which matched our mood.

      We felt alone and adrift. I mean, really alone in a way that’s really hard to be these days.

      We had moved to Paris a year and a half earlier, mainly because we had wanted to and we could. Without kids, without jobs that tied us down, we were young and flexible, somewhat adventurous and reasonably foolish. And of course we had absolutely no idea what we were getting into. . . .

This moment is seamless. What we think of as time is itself an aspect of eternity. We use the idea of time to focus our attention—to notice, to point. Sometimes, as in this moment, our pointing is also a remembering.

When we mark something on the Christian calendar, as we do with Advent, we are highlighting something already present. We draw it forth from the seamless ground of being and render it remarkable. It is fitting that Advent is a season of darkness. This small message highlights not darkness versus light, but their interpenetration: the light present in darkness before we see it clearly—before we recognize it as Light.

To navigate what we call life, we have developed a language that divides the world into pairs of opposites. This serves us well in some practical matters, less well in others. One such division is us and others. Often, without noticing, we set people apart from ourselves—othering them—forgetting who we actually are. . . .

     The conquering of the world by smartphones has certainly been one of the most visible and most significant technological changes we have witnessed in our lifetimes.   

      Opinions on whether it has been a change for the better most definitely differ.

      A month ago I suggested that we post on this site an intelligent and interesting, though in my view wrongheaded, screed by James Marriott, who thinks the smartphone has been a giant step backwards. Then we published my rebuttal, in which I argued that the smartphone is just another new technology that makes old folks nervous but ends up broadening horizons. And, because smartphones have become such an important part of our lives, we published my friend and colleague Neil Offen’s own thoughtful attack on the smartphone and its consequences: a rebuttal of my rebuttal.

      But this is a big subject and, given the time we’re all spending on our phones, an important one. There’s more I want to say—this time in a satirical vein, or at least an attempt at a satirical vein . . .

        When I was studying early childhood special education, I became a lifelong fan of North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt. Children, and in particular young children, did well during his four terms as governor.  

      In 2009 Elon University was taking its sweet time deciding who would be its next dean of education. Even after extensive interviews, my professional credentials earned at the University of Maryland were judged inadequate in some critical way. Elon decided they needed to bring in the former “education governor” to check me out, and soon I was on a plane for the third time to Carolina where I would be interviewed by former governor Hunt himself.

      Yikes.

      I had a few days to prepare for what I knew would be tough questions from perhaps the most education-wise governor ever . . .

      Status report on my body:

• Right shoulder — painful when lifting or reaching; likely partially torn rotator cuff.

• Left foot and leg — regular numbness and weakness; possible nerve impingement.

• Lower back and right hip — frequent, occasionally severe, stiffness with deteriorated spinal vertebrae; MRI needed.

• Ears — profound hearing loss in right ear; hearing aids on the way.

• Throat — voice hoarse more often than not.

• Heart, left anterior descending artery — blocked; stent implanted; recovery continuing.

      If it seems like it’s one thing after another, it’s because it is indeed one thing after another. That’s the deal when you get old. . . .

This is an excerpt from a longer list of Trump’s corrupt profiting published in The Contrarian and written by Norman Eisen, and Gabriel Lezra. We urge you to read the entire piece there.

No president in American history has profited off the presidency the way Donald Trump has—and it’s not close.

1. Trump’s Qatari Boeing

In May, Qatar presented Trump and his administration with a $400 million Boeing 747, ostensibly to use as Air Force One—a present reportedly worth more than all foreign gifts bestowed on all former American presidents combined. As my colleagues and I noted in a legal complaint, the Trump administration is apparently illegally transferring the nearly $1 billion from a nuclear weapons program at the Defense Department to retrofit the jet, a gross mismanagement of key federal funds. And it will barely have time in the air before Trump’s term ends and it gets “donated” to Trump’s presidential library for his continued use. . . .

      Betcha it sucks to be a Trumplican right now—or at least one with a still-functioning frontal lobe. After all, now you have to defend this shit.

      The Orange Pustule's obscene, unhinged—and fundamentally callous and cruel—screed following the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife probably is the worst thing this monster ever has said in public as president.

      No need for me to re-post; it's all over the #!@%!! internet. And it says a lot that when I first read those heinous words, I assumed they were written by some anti-Trump troll bent on tasteless mischief.

      Silly me. For there it was, up on Truth Social, with Trump himself proudly owning his words like a toddler on the toilet for the first time proudly holding up his turd for all to see. …

I tend to be a relatively cheery fellow, but some important things have very much not been going our way. To wit:

10.  All that intolerant religious stuff: folks not known for turning cheeks or loving enemies imposing their own views of abortion or morality on the rest of us.

9.  Alcohol has really—and this sure looks like one they are not going to change their minds about—turned out to be bad for you, even that one modest glass of wine you were thinking of sipping this evening.

8.Rock ‘n’ roll has finally and conclusively proven not to have been here to stay. It grew. It peaked as an explosive force in the culture with soul music, the Beatles, Dylan, the Stones and, maybe, punk. But by the standard to which so many 20th-century artists in all genres subscribed—those not busy doing something new are busy dying—rock began rolling over and playing dead well before the turn of the century. Tell Bruce Springsteen the news. . . .

      The smartphone is not just another new technology, just like the atomic bomb wasn’t simply another new weapon of war. The device we always have at arm’s length is a quantum change, an innovation that has not just altered how we encounter information but how we process it and also how we live and how we think. And the data—perhaps preliminary but nevertheless striking—suggests those changes are profound, profoundly negative and probably irreversible.

     I believe that’s true even though my friend and colleague Mitch Stephens doesn’t think so.

      In a recent post on this site, Mitch argued that what he sees as a panic over our current obsession with smartphones and new screen-based technology is overwrought and ahistorical. He took particular aim at a previous post here, an excerpt from a column by the journalist James Marriott, who saw the smartphone as evidence of a “post-literate world … characterized by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation.” . . .

Bob Dylan is a liberal. His liberalism is captured in the line, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” I hope he’s immortal, but if anything is on his epigraph, that would be a good candidate.

The notion of self-invention, of freedom, is central to basically everything. His refusal to keep singing the same song — you can hear him talking about it in some of the interviews. He said, “I could do that. I could just do that forever. I knew how they’d react.” He said, “What’s that about?” He said, “I needed to do something else.” But of course, the line, “I needed to do something else” — that’s my line. How he would put it would be much more vivid and surprising than that.

His “Like a Rolling Stone” is an anthem of freedom. . . .

This excerpt from a conversation with the tremendously accomplished Harvard economist, Cass Sunstein, is from Tyler Cowan’s website, Marginal Revolution.‍ ‍

Pope Leo recently said his favorite movie of all time was “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Mine too. I first watched it when I was a kid in the early 1950s. For years, it was shown the week before Christmas. I loved it. Still do.

The pope’s and my favorite movie has a lot to tell us about where America is right now, and the scourge of Donald Trump.

If you don’t already know it, the central conflict in the movie is between Mr. Potter (played by Lionel Barrymore) and George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart).

Potter is a greedy, cruel banker. In his Social Darwinist view of America, people compete with one another for scarce resources. Those who succeed deserve to win because they’ve outrun everyone else in that competitive race.

Potter, in other words, is Trump. . . .

(This is an excerpt from Robert Reich’s important Substack. We urge you to read the entire story there.)

      The other night we were at a dinner party with our two teenage grandgirls. We were playing Jeopardy with 30 people in five teams. I was on a different team than my husband, Rick.

      When a question came up about a 1950s hair style I buzzed in and yelled out “Ducks Ass.” My husband across the room did not hear me and he buzzed in and yelled out “Duck’s Ass.” It was the wrong answer and both teams lost 800 points.

      My exasperated grandgirl turned to her grandfather and said “Pappy, Doo Doo already said Duck’s Ass,” and then she addressed the entire group, trying to explain or seeking redemption, yelling “but my grandparents are elderly.” . . .

In 2014 I published a history of atheism, Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan). And I remain fascinated with the fact that God has so often been conspicuous in His absence. So I put together a list of some of the most important moments in which He proved a no show and handed them over to GPT 5, which now claims sufficient familiarity with my style to be able to craft an essay in “a wry, amused, idea-forward Stephens tone.” (I like “idea forward.”) Here is the result: idea entirely mine, examples all mine, most of the actually wordings the AI’s, and style intended to be mine—though probably even more “wry” and “amused” than I might have managed.   And now I can spend the rest of the morning reading the news or going for a walk or whatever we humans are supposed to do in this AI-ified world..

      God is wonderfully real in the early pages of Genesis. Not metaphorically real, not “felt in the heart” real—really real. He walks, He talks, He strolls through the garden in the evening breeze like a homeowner checking the irrigation system. [Note: this was the worst of the AI’s wordings.] He behaves more like a Mesopotamian super-being than an ineffable First Cause. . . .

      It’s a big closet, a walk-in, my stuff on the left, my wife’s stuff on the right. The top rail of my stuff is long-sleeved dress shirts, ties, sports jackets and suits. The bottom rail is short-sleeved dress shirts and pants, not including the two pairs of jeans I actually wear, which are in the bedroom hanging from the clothes tree.

      I haven’t worn the dress shirts or the ties or the sports jackets or the suits or the regular pants in  . . . I don’t know how long. These were clothes I had accumulated over the years, clothes I wore when I had a job to go to, clothes I wore when there were occasions to wear such clothes. But I no longer have a job to go to. I also don’t have many reasonably fancy occasions to dress up or at least dress a little better than my now common everyday uniform of t-shirt (short-sleeved in the summer; long-sleeved in the colder weather) and jeans or shorts. . . .

One of the greatest guitarists in the heyday of American soul music and R&B was a white guy who grew up in segregated Memphis, Tennessee.

Steve Cropper, who died this past week at the age of 84, was an essential musician and songwriter behind the emergence of the Stax/Volt record label, which brought Otis Redding, Sam & Dave and many others to the forefront of American pop music. Later in his career, Cropper had his greatest financial success as a guitarist in the Blues Brothers Band, fronted by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd of “Saturday Night Live” fame. . . .

After criticizing media coverage about him aging in office, Trump appeared to be falling asleep during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday.

But that’s hardly the most troubling aspect of his aging.

In the last few weeks, Trump’s insults, tantrums, and threats have exploded.

To Nancy Cordes, CBS’s White House correspondent, he said: “Are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? You’re just asking questions because you’re a stupid person.”

About New York Times correspondent Katie Rogers: “third rate … ugly, both inside and out.”

To Bloomberg White House correspondent Catherine Lucey: “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.”

About Democratic lawmakers who told military members to defy illegal orders: guilty of “sedition … punishable by DEATH.”

This is an excerpt from Robert Reich’s substack. We suggest that you read the whole piece there.

The remarkable guitarist Steve Cropper—who died this week—co-wrote “Dock of the Bay” with Otis Redding, “Midnight Hour” with Wilson Pickett and “Knock On Wood” with Eddie Floyd.

Click here for a recent version of “Knock on Wood” with Steve Cropper on guitar.