Jess Lahitou

During last Wednesday night’s CNN Republican Presidential Debate, moderator Jake Tapper gave the ultimate softball question: What woman would you put on the ten-dollar bill? Instead, answers ranged from decent to head-scratching to laughable to flat-out embarrassing.

Everyone but Michael Moore underestimated the level of economic angst and cultural upheaval occurring in the Rust Belt, that collection of states forming a sloped capital “E” along the Great Lakes: Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania.

On Oct.

We talk about having debate-watching parties, popping popcorn, making bets… it’s all a little weird, and probably not good for democracy.

So I’m writing today from Elevation 8,080 ft., here in Avon, Colorado.

The most recent issue of Time features a cover with twenty-one shadowed question marks scattered under the headline: “Is Monogamy Over?”

So Michael Moore is known as a provocateur.

That’s what Syria is — our morally bankrupt foreign policy, impossible to escape, impossible to fix.

Nothing about his sexism is complicated. Right? According to election results, wrong.

As the headline article (“Anxiety, Depression and the American Adolescent”) points out, depression has been replaced with anxiety as the leading mental health struggle of today’s adolescent. The one possible cause that stood out to me most was the impact of social media. With smartphone in hand, teens can be reading harmless texts, or – as was the case for one young female interviewed – they could be viewing disturbing Instagram posts, or reading about distant tragedies, or scrolling through hateful Facebook comments. Maybe even comments about them.