Words matter. They shape the way we think about people born elsewhere, especially if they crossed into this country without proper papers.

For as long as I can remember, these immigrants have been referred to widely as “illegal aliens.” Today, the Trump Administration regularly uses the term even for those living, working and studying in this country legally.

In the last week, The Boston Globe wrote about a Jamaican-born seasonal police officer at Old Orchard Beach in Maine who was arrested by ICE and shipped to the Plymouth Country Correctional Facility in Massachusetts though his working papers in this country extended to 2030 . . .

Picture above shows the author’s father—once an “illegal alien.”

      Been thinking of English words that really don’t seem like actual real words at all.

      I’ve made a list.

      Flummox. Kerfuffle. Tumult. Bamboozled. Persnickety.

      Skedaddle. Nincompoop. Discombobulated. Frangible.

      Shibboleth. Bloviate. Spigot.

      And there are, undoubtedly, many more. Maybe you can add to the list?

      In any case, the words got me thinking about how difficult it must be to learn English, particularly as a second language, particularly for immigrants to this country. . . ..

      The world today is very different from the world into which we were born. It has gone through plenty of ch… ch… changes, as have we all.

      Many of those global changes in the period since the end of World War II have been dramatic, some so overwhelming they are difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless, here at Writing About Our Generation we are going to try and do some comprehending.

      So, after our ranking the biggest changes in the United States in our lifetime, here is how we rank, in ascending order, the 10 most significant global changes of the last 75 or so years.

      Agree? Disagree? Have a ranking of your own? Let us know in the comments below or by emailing here. . . .

As we are learning these days, artificial intelligences (large language models, to be specific) are now ready and eager to provide disquisitions on the subject of . . . just about anything.

      How is a naturally intelligent human to react to the output of such artificially intelligent machines?

      On the occasion of the debut of OpenAI’s GPT 5 the other day, the Berkeley economist Brad deLong took notes as his friend, Adam Farquhar, CEO of Digital Lifecycle Management Ltd., was expounding on human-AI relations.

     Then, on his Substack, deLong—presumably by employing AI—transformed Farquahar’s thoughts into a speech of the sort Thucydides might have reported on.

     Didn’t see that coming, did you?

But, actually, this turns out to be as good a primer on using AI as we’ve seen—at this stage of AI’s development, before AI gets even smarter.     — Mitchell Stephens

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.

• Why your body ages rapidly in two ‘bursts,’ Chas Newkey-Burden, The Week UK, July 13, 2025

• How the Risks of Drinking Increase in Older Age, Mohana Ravindranath, New York Times, July 17, 2025

• The meaning of your life isn’t a puzzle to solve, Danny Kenny, Big Think, July 16, 2025

• Remembrance of Scents Past,Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, July 10, 2025

• What Happens to Your Brain When You Retire? Mohana Ravindranath, New York Times, March 26, 2025

• How to Die in Good Health,Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker, April 15, 2025

Click for more

. . . At the moment the only life for whose existence we currently have actual evidence anywhere in the universe can be found in our local “biosphere,” which extends about five miles high and seven miles deep around the planet Earth.

       And this shallow and tiny—by cosmic standards—“biosphere” is indeed precarious. It could be smothered. It could get crushed. It could be fried. Indeed, one rogue asteroid could cause all the life we know of to die.

       Every once in a while, we catch a glimpse of the precariousness of life on earth. In the United States such glimpses are more common nowadays out West, and I won’t pretend that anything we are facing back East can compare to what happened in Los Angeles in January.

       But I experienced some of these forebodings a few days ago, when, not for the first time, a cloud of smoke from wildfires in faraway Canada drifted, our way—turning the sun orange and covering the New York area with an eerie, still shroud. . . .

      During this last month or so when it has been, give or take, a million degrees everywhere, twice we’ve been in homes without air conditioning. Both homes did have fans and both homes were in areas of the country that don’t usually get temperatures in the million-degree range, but of course these are different times. 

      And at both homes, I’ll readily admit, we were really, really warm.

      That is, we were no longer acclimated. Air conditioning has become such an integral part of our lives, so basic to the way we go about everything, that confronting a world without AC was a harsh reminder of the way things used to be. 

      Living in the South, as we do, had made air conditioning not just a godsend but essential. . . .

Seven excerpts from the post, “27 Notes On Growing Old(er),” from Ian Leslie’s Substack, The Ruffian.

1. Let’s be honest: after a certain point - 35? 40? - growing older is psychologically punishing. How could it not be? It involves getting a little bit weaker, stupider and uglier every year.

2. Let me summarize the science of how aging affects physical and mental capability: All the lines on the graph point down.

      We can slow this multi-dimensional descent but not stop it. The miracle is that most of us are not driven mad by this knowledge. We ought to congratulate ourselves on the depth of our resilience, on our heroic fortitude in the face of adversity—while quietly acknowledging that we rely on a modicum of self-deception to get by. . . .

      In other cultures, Meredith Monk would be called shaman, seer, healer; here we struggle to define her interdisciplinary prowess. Singer/composer, dancer/choreographer, actor/performer, director/playwright, visual artist/filmmaker—even together, these categories cannot capture her resplendent achievements.

      She creates visceral excavations of abstracted gesture, sound and tableau, inviting audiences to experience archetypal, transformative rituals. Distilling idiosyncratic movement, three-octave vocalizing and luminous stage design to their unadorned essence, she collages these elements into transcultural dreamscapes.

      From large-scale, multivenue events with a hundred-plus performers, to intimate pieces for solo voice and wine glass . . .

My parents participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery march, a protest that culminated in Lyndon Johnson’s signing the Voting Rights Act, 60 years ago on August 6.

*

In Alabama, as she and my father marched into Montgomery, my mother was pregnant, carrying twins.  It was a moment of heroism for them both, but it was also a moment of hope. In the shadow of the Alabama State Capitol, they heard Martin Luther King, Jr. intone those famous words, “How long? Not Long!”

That was March 1965. And “How long? Not long,” proved prophetic.  By August of that year, Johnson had signed the Voting Rights Act. . . .

A two-and-a half-minute video featuring thoughts on the fiercest animals on Africa's savanna and what we can learn from them about brutality, kindness and humans, who, after all, originated there. Lots of original lion video, plus quotes from Einstein, Darwin, Leonardo, Nietzsche, Adam Smith, Hannah Arendt, Wallace Stevens and Golda Meir.

click here for video

Another weekend day, another protest.

      This time it was called “Rage Against the Regime,” and although the name was different much was the same.

      There were the usual call-and-response chants: “Tell me what democracy looks like/this is what democracy looks like”; “A people united/can never be divided.”

 There were the usual signs, both commercially produced and handwritten, although this time there were a number of new ones that referenced the Epstein files and the current president’s relationship to the disgraced financier and trafficker (“Trump is a pedo.”)

      There were the usual speeches with the usual calls to action and there were the usual people in attendance. . . .

      I was having coffee with a college classmate in my hometown of Falmouth, Mass., last week when he told me he’d have to travel to Bogota, Colombia, to see his young grandchildren.

       “Why is that?” I asked.

      He told me his daughter-in-law, a Colombian native, is not a U.S. citizen like her husband and children. She is afraid to travel to the United States.

      A few days later, in my French conversation group, a friend told me a similar story.

      His son and family won’t visit Falmouth from Frankfort, Germany, this summer. His German daughter-in-law is not comfortable visiting the United States right now given the horror stories of how the Trump Administration is handling immigrants and international students.

      Perhaps you consider these women to be overly cautious.

      I don’t. . . .

     The just-concluded marathon road trip included visits with:

•       A friend we had first met in 1963;

•      A friend we had first met in 1965;

•       A friend we had first met in 1971;

•       Friends we had first met in 1982;

•       And our new friends, whom we had first met in 1991.

      These old friends are also, not surprisingly, all reasonably old now and part of the impetus of the trip, maybe an unspoken impetus, was the realization we didn’t know how many more times we’d be able to see these old friends. We’re at an age when continued contact is no longer a given, on either end. And we wanted to see these old friends before . . . well, you know. . . .

I started out intending to list the Top Ten, but I got carried away.

THE TOP TWENTY

1.    BACK IN MY ARMS AGAIN (THE SUPREMES);

2.    BADLANDS (BRUCE SPRINSTEEN AND THE E STREET BAND);

3.    BORN TO BE WILD (STEPPENWOLF);

4.    BORN TO RUN (BRUCE SPRINSTEEN AND THE E STREET BAND);

5.    BREATHLESS (THE CORRS);

6.    DEVIL WITH A BLUE DRESS (MITCH RYDER AND THE DETROIT WHEELS);

7.    GOOD LOVIN’ (THE RASCALS);

8.    GIMMEE SOME LOVING (THE SPENCER DAVIS GROUP);

9.    HELP (THE BEATLES);

10. I’LL FEEL A WHOLE LOT BETTER (THE BYRDS); . . .

Click for the rest of THE TOP TWENTY, plus (many) Honorable Mentions

      This collection—from someone who straddles the Baby Boomer generation and Generation X—is by no means an “ultimate” playlist, but more of a backward glance at some meaningful moments in my life. These aren’t great rock songs, although I think some of them are quite good. Rather, these songs connect me to memories that make me smile. And we can all stand to smile more these days.

Close to You. The Carpenters. Hearing this song for the first time when I was nine years old kicked off a lifelong habit of mine—listening to music in the dark. I was at my first sleepover at a friend’s house. We were playing around on her family’s piano, and I left the living room to get a glass of water. When I came back, all the lights were off, and the living room was pitch dark. The Carpenters’ “Close to You” was playing on the stereo. I sat on the edge of the sofa and felt Karen Carpenter’s clear, beautiful voice envelop me.

The Ocean. Led Zeppelin. . . .

      The Americans with Disabilities Act passed 35 years ago this month and July was subsequently named Disability Pride Month. The landmark legislation promised more than it delivered, and now we are even backsliding on what progress has been made.

      Twenty-nine years ago, I became paraplegic from spinal surgery gone very wrong. Immediately, I found myself advocating for myself and others in an oblivious ableist world. The most frustrating time was serving two terms in the Vermont House of Representatives (2019–2022). Unbeknownst to me, state governments were immune from the ADA.

      My very first day being seated was complicated. Tradition dictated new legislators’ names were called and then could find any available seat. I told the Speaker’s office this would be problematic; I needed an aisle seat since I used a cane. She agreed, but other legislators grumbled I had ruined their tradition. . . .

      We knew it would be bad, very bad. It turns out it’s been worse, much worse.

      We had read about Project 2025 and we had remembered the first term, the botched Covid response, the vengeful actions, the comic buffoonery and the ridiculous incompetence. But now, almost exactly half way through Trump’s first year—just one-eighth of his term—our worst fears already have been greatly exceeded. There’s so much we couldn’t possibly have imagined. It has been so much worse.

      We could not have imagined that masked, often unidentified, men, working for our government, would snatch unsuspecting college students off the streets..

      Or that those masked, unidentified men would grab children going to school or grab mothers out of cars, leaving their children alone. . . .

Tom Lehrer, one of the most significant social satirists of our generation, died over the past weekend at the age of 97.

  Born in New York City, Lehrer started writing clever and acerbic songs when he was an undergraduate at Harvard in the mid-1940s. He kept up his songwriting avocation while doing graduate work at both Harvard and Columbia (yet never completed a Ph.D.). He wrote enough material to record a dozen songs in 1953, which he released on his own label as a 10-inch LP. He followed that six years later with another self-released album of 11 songs.

The humor in Lehrer’s songs from the 1950s came in three basic types. First there were his hilariously macabre ditties – sort of the musical counterparts to Charles Addams or Gahan Wilson cartoons. These were on the order of the self-explanatory “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” the endorsement of cannibalism espoused in “The Irish Ballad” and the all-too-literal “I Hold Your Hand In Mine” and “The Masochism Tango” . . .

      The latest casualty of Trump’s efforts to silence media criticism is Eduardo Porter, one of the most thoughtful and intelligent critics of this heinous regime.

      [Last week], Porter wrote his last column for the Washington Post. In it, he criticized Trump’s attempt to dismantle the global trading system.

      Porter didn’t stop there. He also explained why he was leaving the Post:

      “Jeff Bezos and his new head of Opinion are taking the paper down a path I cannot follow.” . . .

(An excerpt from the Substack of Robert Reich, a university professor and former Secretary of Labor. More of Reich’s opinions, in particular about baby boomers, are in this week’s edition of The New York Times Interview.)