Twenty years ago this month, the late Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt published his seminal work On Bullshit, which argued that bullshit was worse than lying. His point was that a liar knows the truth and deliberately tries to hide or distort it, while a bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all — they care only about the impression they make.

When Donald Trump emerged on the political stage in 2015, Frankfurt wrote in Time magazine that Trump was the epitome of the bullshit artist he had identified a decade earlier.

“Trump freely offers extravagant claims about his own talents and accomplishments,” Frankfurt said. “He maintains, for example, that he has the greatest memory in the world. This is farcically unalloyed bullshit.”

When I managed “The Fact Checker” for the Washington Post, readers constantly asked: Why rely only on Pinocchio ratings? Why don’t you call Trump a liar? . . .

As a bullshitter, Trump doesn’t care whether what he says reflects reality. He says whatever serves his momentary purpose, often contradicting himself without hesitation or shame. This indifference to truth makes Trump’s bullshit more insidious than lies. . . .

Glenn Kessler was editor and chief writer of “The Fact Checker” for the Washington Post from 2011 to 2025. This is an excerpt from his Substack.

      Here is the story, perhaps you caught it, as it appeared in the New York Times this week:

Researchers from University College London and the University of Florida examined national data from 2003 to 2023 and found that the share of people who reported reading for pleasure on a given day fell to 16 percent in 2023 from a peak of 28 percent in 2004 — a drop of about 40 percent. 

      That may sound like the end of civilization as we know it. But let’s think about it a bit.

    The fact that you are reading this now is evidence that you are not among the about 84 percent of Americans who are not reading for pleasure today. But perhaps you are among those people who now read for pleasure less.

      I am. . . .

      Let's face it—English is a crazy language, as noted previously by Neil Offen. After all, there is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.

      And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, two geese. So, one moose, two meese? One index, two indices?

      And then there’s pronunciation. Let me just add the following to the already stated difficulties of learning English. Here is some English weirdness in pronunciation which can't be explained, but poor foreigners have to suffer with it:
      - The bandage was wound around the wound.
      - The farm was used to produce produce.
      - The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

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 do I feel so much worse after a nap–and how can I avoid it?,” Jillian Pretzel, The Guardian, Aug. 11, 2025.

• “‘Jerry is rolling in his grave’: The Deadheads boycotting SF’s anniversary shows,” Carly Schwartz, San Francisco Standard, July 28, 2025.

• “Pumping Iron Is Their Secret to Aging Well,” Chris Cohen, New York Times,July 29, 2025.

• “Research on reversing Alzheimer’s reveals lithium as potential key,” Mark Johnson, Washington Post, Aug. 6, 2025.

• “How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It,” Tad Friend, The New Yorker, Aug. 4, 2025.

• “A Common Assumption About Aging May Be Wrong,” Study Suggests, Mohana Racindranath, New York Times, June 30, 2025.

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      What?

      It’s what we say, what we have to say, again and again because neither of us hears very well. My wife took steps to change, or at least improve, that situation several years ago. Now I am about to. I’m about to get hearing aids.

      Hearing loss seems, at our age, like an unpleasant rite of passage, sort of like needing to cut down on red meat and taking afternoon naps. According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, more than 65 percent of people aged 71 or above suffer from some degree of hearing loss (by age 85, almost all adults have hearing loss). Yet, according to the study, only 29 percent of those with hearing loss used hearing aids, although 55 to 65 percent would benefit from what the authors delicately call amplification.

      I’ve been one of those who have contributed to the “usage gap.”. . .

      People ask me almost daily: “Can he really do this?”

      My answer: He’ll do anything he can get away with.

      He believes he can get away with anything as long as his Republican lapdogs remain in control of Congress, as long as congressional Democrats remain wimpy and disunited, as long as the Supreme Court immunizes him from prosecution and as long as he feels he can disregard lower-court rulings with impunity.

      This is why it’s so urgent that We the People are rising up—making a ruckus at Republican town halls, phoning our senators and representatives so often we’re jamming congressional switchboards, joining our local Indivisible resistance groups, demonstrating, forming sanctuary communities, and boycotting corporations (such as Tesla and Target) that are caving to Trump. . . .

An excerpt from Robert Reich’s Substack

      After tirelessly shaking and manipulating an enormous container of a dietary supplement that had lasted for months, I’d managed to eke out a few remaining grains into the dosing cup. It represented maybe one percent of the container and barely a third of my daily dose. Just toss it out and start fresh with the new container, right?

      Wrong. I just couldn’t do it. It gets harder the older I get.

      Whether it’s a dietary supplement, a toothpaste tube or hand lotion too low for the pump to reach, I don’t give up without a fight, especially now. I’ll be damned if I’m going to buy a new item when I know there’s more usable product in there just taunting me!

      I credit—some might say blame—my own parents. . . .

      We often bitch and moan about social media and how it’s taken over the minds and bodies of today’s young people.

      But let’s agree on two things:

1)    We, the boomers, overuse our phones and other electronics constantly.

2)    They can do some pretty wonderful things for us as we age.

      Since the orange-one-whom-I-will-not-name came back into the White House, turning its Rose Garden into a Florida parking lot, I’ve written a Substack once or twice a week (uncreatively called JerryLanson’s Substack should you want to read it). Some pieces have appeared on Writing About Our Generation.

      I put these out on Facebook as well and, as a result, have reconnected with some regularity with Haverford College classmates who weren’t even among my fairly large network of friends 55 years ago when I went to college there. . . .

      Lunch is having a moment.

      The New Yorker recently ran a piece touting lunch as the best meal of the day, because, “unlike breakfast, lunch offers variety, but, in contrast to dinner, it tolerates repetition.” The New York Times recently chimed in with a piece on super-agers, and how they have been able to retain their cognitive abilities by, among other things, getting together for lunch.

      Let me say here, then, I’ve known the benefits of lunch for a long time. I’m an early adopter. I’m a long-time believer in lunch and have devoted much of my retirement to it.

      I eat lunch out with a different friend two or three times a week. . . .

This is the unobvious version of my faves: No “Jumping Jack Flash. No “Like a Rolling Stone.” No “Born to Run.” Not even “Hard Day’s Night.” Instead:

17. “Old Brown Shoe,” The Beatles. A George song, a seeming throwaway but catchy as catchy can…be.

16. “Sweet Old World,” Emmylou Harris (Lucinda Williams song): The argument for staying alive seems inarguable. Here it is also beautiful.

15.  “Brilliant Disguise,” Bruce Springsteen. Maybe not precisely the adult, psychological, when-you-said-this-did-you-mean-to-imply-that…? dissection of a relationship pop music mostly has lacked: The song does have recourse, at one point, to a gypsy fortune-teller. But the insistent carny music combined with Bruce’s paranoid musings have perhaps altered, for some, the experience of looking into a love-object’s eyes.

14. “Birds of a Feather,” Billie Eilish. One occasionally tries to keep up just a bit. One rarely is this well rewarded for one’s efforts. And hey, you can now say, “You’re so full of shit,” in a love song. . . .

      Twiggy was a sensation when I turned 16. She looked androgynous. She was a tall, super skinny waif with huge eyes, short hair and perfect bone structure. She was the world’s most famous face and model, and girls all over the world wanted to be her.

      People often commented that I looked like Twiggy, and I considered that a wonderful compliment. Little did they know that I looked like her because I had anorexia.

      Back in 1966 people didn’t know what anorexia was, so at the age of 13 after my mother died and I stopped eating, there was little concern. No one really noticed or cared that I only weighed 90 pounds. I was a great student, a star basketball player and gymnast. Twiggy had nothing to do with my stopping eating, but she sure supported the way I looked. Twiggy was the “go to look” of the 1960s and, really, the next three decades. Tall, emaciated, wide eyed, hungry, sad and revered. . . .

Part of a series on “What I Still Want to Accomplish.” For previous installments, this and this.

       The very long title of the memoir I want to write could be “Tales and Stories of a Non-Traditional Woman Growing Up and Living in a Traditional World.” This was the situation I found myself in as a mid-period baby boomer.

      I want to share my personal story with my millennial daughters and their contemporaries. I want them to know and appreciate their mothers and others who blazed the trails to gender equality in the workplace and elsewhere. . . .

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, who escaped Germany as 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

. . . 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 . . .