Jess Lahitou

As Tom Nichols puts it, ignorance has now become a "virtue." And it takes a whole lot of it to claim you can learn 'everything' about a complex subject - like, say, nuclear weapons - in roughly 90 minutes.

This is the first time I’ve seen a sitting president “spin” a clear military defeat to save his own ego, and use a bereft and heartbroken wife in order to get away with it. Disgust is not the right word. Horror, maybe. Disbelief and revulsion crashing into each other.

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.

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

To her own admitted surprise, Fessler discovered that meaningless, detached hookups were emphatically not bringing any kind of bliss to college women.

If you’ve heard recent Internet claims that The Salvation Army doesn’t deserve your money, and you are now wondering whether or not to toss a few coins in the red can on your way to stock up on Christmas goodies, here’s a thought experiment:

The 2016 election has, for a while now, felt eerily akin to 1984 (lots ‘o doublespeak coming out of Trump and his supporters). Or The Hunger Games, to take a more recent example of dystopian genre fiction. Wherein, government becomes solely about politics and the media spectacle, rather than actual policies and ideas.

Students at the University of Missouri and Yale have recently grabbed media attention for their protests against administrators and professors who fail to create a safe space for them on campus. In the latter, an email questioning the prudence of restricting Halloween costumes stirred uproar, causing this video of a student publicly berating her professor to go viral.

The five 2016 Democratic candidates for President met in Las Vegas for their first debate last night, and this writer’s prediction is that the field will be down to three for the next matchup. (Barring Joe Biden’s entry into the race, which remains a distant possibility).

Trump’s stratospheric rise in public polls has got me thinking about the possibility of him actually being elected and what that would mean for American women. And I can’t help but be reminded of the similarities between Trump and the former Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi.