Lately I have been wondering what my life today would be like if I knew back then what I know now.

      One would suspect that if I had the wisdom and knowledge of a 75-year-old when I was young I would have hit the jackpot. Right?

      Well, not so fast.

      Imagine my life without dangerous fats. No ice cream with fudge sauce or whipped cream on my apple pie. Forget the butter on those pancakes, and don’t even think about cream cheese on a bagel.

      Imagine if I knew back in my youth that smoking would kill me. …

Illustration by Justin Atherton

      Every year, in the small, progressive southern town in which I live, there’s a big celebration on the fourth of July. It takes place on the Town Commons, which is normally where organic kale and gluten-free empanadas are part of the farmer’s market held every Saturday morning.

      It’s a celebration full of water balloon tossing, a pie-eating contest, bubble blowing, face painting, live blues and rock performances, info tables set up by the local library and the local homeless shelter, a bunch of food trucks and—until Covid—a watermelon seed spitting contest. With the exception of a few people dressed in red, white and blue, there are generally no signs of in-your-face patriotism to be found.

     Of which, I have to admit, I have been very glad. …

I want a squire. Not an AI personal assistant. A squire.

      AI assistants schedule meetings. They manage calendars. They answer emails and phone calls. They share slides. They transcribe your conversations. They are AI but also check with AI.

      Squires are different. Squires have history. They have romance. They carry shields. AI checks with them.

      Consider my days. I rise. I look at my devices. I write and write to a lot of people. I have meetings. I dine. I watch prestige television. I sleep. An AI assistant would add efficiency to this cycle. A squire would add meaning. …

[This is an excerpt of a column by Hollis Robbins, former dean of humanities at the University of Utah, in the Substack Anecdotal Value.]

      After law school, I went to work for a large corporation that provided office equipment worldwide. I worked out of New York City and I dealt with the sales branches of the company in the southern and eastern part of the United States.

      I hadn’t previously travelled in the south at all, but one day I got a call sometime in the late ‘70s from our branch office in Jackson, MS, It was from the guy in charge of sales to state and local governments in Mississippi. Apparently, we had submitted our normal form contract for annual approval to some bureaucratic office at the state level, as Mississippi law required, but had verbally been told the state attorney general’s office had “problems” with the contract and it was not yet approved for use. In the interim no sales could be made to state agencies.

      As this was a very large percentage of the local branch’s revenue, this was a very big problem for them. Would I please come down to Jackson as soon as possible and clear this up with the lawyers for the state …

*

This is the second work of fiction we have published on WritingAboutOurGeneration.com. We’re open to publishing more—if they shed light on what it means to have grown up over the last 75 years or so.

      It’s the age of surgeries—knee replacements, cataract repairs, artificial hips, inserted stents. But it’s not just the surgery itself, of course. At a certain age, it’s just as much about the recovery from the surgery.

      A little more than a month ago, I had surgery for an inguinal hernia. It was elective, which meant that it was my choice to do it at that moment—no doctor was pushing it, no medical necessity required it. But the hernia had been bothering me, off and on, for some time, and I just wanted to be done with it.

      I had forgotten, however, that you’re not done with it when you leave the operating room. You are not done with it until some time well after the surgeon puts away the scalpel. …

       . . . Those who live on the other Andaman Islands are engaged in modern life or are beginning to participate in modern life or are at least are aware of modern life. (Though, when I was on one of the other Andaman Islands, also a long time ago, one wild-haired, scantily-clad fellow did aim a bow and arrow at me—in jest, I assumed.)

       North Sentinel Island is different from the rest of the Andamans Islands.

       It is estimated that somewhere between 50 and 200 people now live there . . . And they will fight to keep others out.

      They want no intercourse with modern life—whatsoever. They have no understanding of modern life. They do not play nicely with others—modern or otherwise. . . .

And many anthropologists believe the inhabitants of North Sentinel Island have a remarkable distinction: they are the last surviving hunter-gatherers on earth.

It’s 3 a.m. and I’m wide awake. Given that we both have sleep problems, we try extra hard not to wake the other, knowing how difficult it is for either of us to fall back to sleep. But having to consider my every move naturally makes sleeping all the more difficult.

      What to do with the wet tissue in my right hand? I’m lying on my right side as usual, facing the outside of the bed. Slowly and awkwardly, I thrust my right arm out from under the covers and fling the tissue. It’s likely to miss the wastebasket in the darkness, but wherever it lands should be soundless on the carpet.

      The sneezes have passed, but that nagging allergic tickle at the back of my throat is threatening the serenity, not to mention my ability to breathe. The only thing that works in these situations is a throat lozenge. Fortunately, I’ve presciently positioned one within reach on the nightstand. It’s right next to the tissue box and plastic cup.

      Or at least it was. …

It’s been ten years since Trump came down the golden escalator and announced his 2016 bid for president. It would take me three months to bring myself to blog about Trump in any concentrated way—the main political science view was that the party would eventually decide, or the voters would move on, and Trump would go the way of Herman Cain, Ross Perot (who did have some staying power, I guess) or other outsider candidates who seemed fascinating initially but held little lasting appeal. I assured friends who were alarmed by Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants that his candidacy wouldn’t get very far.

      And a decade later, here we are. Not only is Trump serving his second term as president, he’s been the focal point of our politics for most of that decade. This is pretty astounding for a politician who has never been very popular or represented a lot of popular issue positions….

[This is an excerpt of a column by the Marquette University political science professor Julia Azari in the Substack GoodPolitics/BadPolitics.]

      So, here’s the question, really the essential question: How could our fellow Americans have done this? How could they have elected this man? This conniving psychopath?

      Because, they knew, didn’t they? They absolutely had to know. It was inescapable, wasn’t it?

      There was, after all:

      The botched pandemic response and the bleach recommendation. The outright bribing of foreign officials. The violent coup he provoked and watched placidly on TV. There were, of course, the endless obvious lies and then the photos of classified documents tossed around the toilet. And the felony convictions and the accumulation of other legal accusations.

      And so much, so much more.

      And yet 77 million of my fellow Americans voted him in, voted to install a seriously disturbed man, a sociopath, a psychopath, to the most powerful job in the world.

      I’ve heard and read a number of explanations. …

      I spent four summers right before and during college working either in or right outside the entrances of our national parks. At 18, a new high school graduate, I pumped gas at Flagg Ranch, located a few miles south of Yellowstone National Park and just north of the Grand Tetons. At 19 and 21, I worked as a bellhop and desk clerk at Grand Lake Lodge, on the western slope of Rocky Mountain National Park. And at 20, I worked at Many Glacier Hotel in the heart of Glacier National Park, rotating between day and night shifts as a desk clerk and night watchman.

      These were life-shaping experiences.

      For one thing, in 1968 in Colorado, I met the girl who would become my wife of nearly 54 years. During these summers I also climbed the Grand Teton and rafted on the Snake River in Wyoming, climbed Longs Peak and Snowmass Mountain in the high Colorado range and hiked miles of trails on multi-day treks in Glacier, making noise in wooded areas to let the bear know we were coming. There were steak rides, mini-golf soirees, poker games and trips to Frontier Days and the Calgary Stampede, rodeos where cowboys would hone their craft and show their skills.

      But what has stayed with me most so many decades later is the natural beauty of the parks, their lakes, forests, pristine streams and snow-covered mountains, all under big western skies that seem to stretch forever.

      Sadly, America’s National Parks are endangered these days…

      I don't share (at least any longer) Mitch Stephens' desire to "see" those many countries.

      I do, however, really cherish the extended time I was able to spend in the past (an academic year in France in 1966-67 (I missed being a part of the 1968 movement), two years in Latin America (1971-72 in Uruguay and 1972-1973 in Argentina where I was exposed to the Tupamaro movement and the return of Juan Perón, respectively) and Japan (Tokyo 1973-1976).

      During those long term stays I was also able to see large parts of Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia. However, those long term stays also made the idea of the "If this is Tuesday, we must be in Belgium" kind of travel not particularly compelling. . . .

      With Iran, our terroristic, mad fanatic nemesis for the past four decades, the sudden unilateral act of war by Donald Trump to destroy that country’s nuclear capability, and with that its current ruling regime, means only one thing: 

      The end game must be—and one hopes will be—the toppling of the current Iranian regime and its nuclear-weaponized belief in a radical Muslim hegemony over not just the middle east, but the entire world. 

      Imminent ceasefire or not, there’s no going back. We are all in. …

WANDERLUST: A Video in Two Voices

The insistent, uncontrollable, disturbing urge to travel. It’s glories and it’s discontents. Featuring scenes of Paris and efforts to go hither, yon and God knows where.

Click image above for video

This is an installment in our series on “What I Still Want to Accomplish” — see earlier essays on this subject by: Neil Offen and Melinda Moulton.

      In the immortal words of that great political philosopher, Yogi Berra, it’s déjà vu all over again.

      That is, our generation has seen this kind of preemptive military action before … and before … and before:

·       1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the U.S. preemptively implemented a naval blockade of Cuba to prevent Soviet nuclear missiles from becoming operational. It may have been the closest we have come to full-on nuclear war.

·       1964, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, passed by Congress, authorized President Johnson to use military force in Southeast Asia without a formal declaration of war. It was a direct response to alleged attacks on U.S. destroyers by North Vietnamese forces in the Gulf of Tonkin. There is, however, some evidence suggesting the alleged attacks may not have happened and were simply a pretext for getting us more deeply involved in an internal civil war thousands of miles away. …

      I don’t have to tell you how bad it is. If you’re like me, you approach each day’s news with a knot in your stomach. The question I keep asking myself (and others) is how will this Trumpian daymare end? Where will we be, say, four years from now?

      Let me give you a few scenarios … of the likeliest outcome four years from now.

      1. America will have elected a strong, charismatic progressive. He or she will have ridden to major victory on the backlash against Trump’s disastrous economy and attacks on our democracy. Congress will also be progressive. … our system prevailed and we’re on the road to remedying years of bullying and cruelty, and coming out stronger for it.

      2. Trump will be gone and we’ll have a Democratic president, but the majority will continue to be angry and distrustful of most institutions. . . .

(This is an excerpt from the Substack of Robert Reich, a professor at UC Berkeley and a former secretary of labor.)

      The band did not look or sound like any other contemporary group. Live audiences were often shocked to see that the propulsive music, a mixture of rock and funk which some called “psychedelic soul,” was coming out of a band that featured women on trumpet and keyboards, white musicians on drums and sax, and four distinct singers who often traded vocals during the same song. Unlike other soul music groups, whose members usually wore matching suits, the members of Sly and the Family Stone each wore their own style of loud clothing. 

      Sly’s personal appearance was the most eye-catching, with his large Afro, sometimes covered by big hats, his clothes featuring spangles and sequins, and his jewelry including a gold Star of David around his neck. … 

This is the first work of fiction we have published on WritingAboutOurGeneration.com. We’re open to publishing more—if they shed light, as we believe this story does, on aging today after younging in an earlier century.

     . . . I hate bullshit.  Always have.  Yet, whether from loneliness or some unrecognized ache, here I was giving in to one of the most specious forms of bullshit.  The bumptious fantasy of some ditzy social director, conceived and printed in huge letters even my beclouded eyescould read—printed in ersatz, cheerful script on canvas tied to chain linkage walling the senior center off from the polluted inky river slinking off to the sea:

Seniors Dance the Night Away!

Every Saturday!

Live Music!

Golden Oldies for Goldens!

Senior Center—7 p.m. till Midnight . . . .

This week, Brad Lander, New York City’s top financial officer and a Democratic candidate for mayor, was roughed up, handcuffed and arrested by what appeared to be federal agents at an immigration court in lower Manhattan.

      Oh, and last week, Melissa Hortman, a Democratic Minnesota state legislator, was assassinated allegedly by a right-wing Christian zealot, and John Hoffman, also a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota, was shot by the same man.

      In case you’ve been wondering, this is indeed what fascism looks like. …

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.

• “What I Learned About Getting a Hearing Aid,” Katherine Roth, AP News, June 4, 2025.

• “Can a robot help you age better?” The Conversation, Daniele Magistro, June 6, 2025.

• “How Old Is Too Old For Video Games?” Sam Hallahan, The Gamer, Apr 29, 2025.

• “You’re Retired. What’s the Best Way to Withdraw Your Savings?” Brian J. O’Connor, New York Times, Dec. 28, 2024.

• “90-Something Women Share the Secrets for a Long, Happy Life,” Laura Sturza, The Ethel, Sept. 26, 2024.

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

Click for more

      In a victory for constitutional rights, due process and community action, Milford, Mass., teenager Marcelo Gomes da Silva was released from ICE detention after spending five days in captivity, first in Burlington in a bedless cell, the Boston Globe reports.

      During his bail hearing, more than 100 people gathered outside, including dozens of his teammates on the school’s volleyball team. Gomes spoke to reporters after his release and said he had been kept in handcuffs the entire time he was detained, The Globe reported. He is an 18-year-old junior in high school with no criminal record.

      Below describes what happened to Gomes, but centers on the importance of community action in the face of arbitrary ICE arrests across the country and other civil liberties infractions by the Trump Administration. . . .