In the wake of such things as the grifter’s even more erratic than usual behavior and Mitch McConnell’s carefully managed return to the Senate, my social media produced another deluge of demands for putting upper age limits on public office. I just flew home through the San Francisco Airport, noticed they’d named the international terminal after Dianne Feinstein, and couldn’t help thinking how embarrassing and disastrous her last years were.
It is certainly true that some people who should have retired from their jobs much earlier keep hanging on. But I’m still opposed to age limits on most jobs, for one very basic reason: Human beings don’t age uniformly.
Nancy Pelosi was the most effective Speaker of the House the US has seen in decades. She pulled back from leadership posts and is now retiring from Congress, but she was very effective throughout her years in office. I don’t always agree with her, but I cannot deny her ability.
Nancy Pelosi is 86, two years older than Mitch McConnell.
The NY Times had a piece this week about the composer Thea Musgrave, whose opera Orlando, based on the Virginia Woolf novel, will premiere next year. The article starts with her working with a bassoonist on another piece and commenting that she is still learning.
Musgrave is 98.
I’ve just been at a writers retreat where the members ranged in age from 50s to 80s, with most of us in our 70s. All of us are still writing, all of us still smart. With the exception of the youngest of us, all have a few health issues that we pay close attention to, but none of them keep us from writing.
Of course, again with the exception of our youngest member, none of us have day jobs anymore. None of us want day jobs, but all of us want to write and publish our work.
In general, we are now producing the best work of our lives, because we are smart and have a lot of experience and both understand how to write and why we want to do it. What we do now is valuable whether it ever wins a prize or makes the best seller list.
I know people in their 50s who are old and stuck in their ways, people in their 60s with enough health issues to prevent them from doing a full time job. I know people in their 80s and 90s whose judgment is impeccable and who have fresh ideas. We don’t all age at the same pace.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, the biggest problem in politics isn’t that we have lot of old people in Congress; it’s that we have a lot of bad people there. Age limits won’t solve that problem.
So it’s been 25 years since September 11, and we’re awash in retrospectives, some of them even useful.
As someone then living in Washington, DC, with relatives in New York City who lived a few blocks from the World Trade Center, I was stunned and horrified, but I also had what turned out to be legitimate concerns about how our country would respond.
Which was, to put it in one word, badly.
We started unnecessary wars. We underplayed the dangers of the toxic air quality in New York, which has led to more people dying from the effects of the attack than died in the attack (and that’s not including those who died in the unnecessary wars).
And we undermined the civil liberties of the people of the United States. The New York Times has a good op-ed on that this week. I remember that happening in real time, remember feeling very angry about it.
The Department of Homeland Security – an Orwellian name if there ever was one – dates from that time. You have only to read today’s news to see how that turned out.
A month after the attacks I flew to Texas to visit family, traveling through a Baltimore airport that was crawling with armed members of the National Guard and being subjected to an absurdly long line for security. On that trip, I re-read two books: Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (also very relevant right now, though I find I can’t face it at this point) and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
I wrote a major paper on Catch-22 in college. I’ve always thought that the major theme of the book was that Yossarian and his comrades were in more danger from what the powerful in our country were doing to get “value” from the war than from the war itself. That’s what I saw happen after September 11.
What I took from the attacks was that we needed groups on the neighborhood level ready to deal with problems in the community when disaster happens, whether that disaster is a terrorist attack, mass shooting, a “natural” disaster, or something else. I kept looking for government support for organizing such things – a way to get supplies, tools, training – but found nothing.
My desire to do something intensified with the Anthrax attacks that killed postal workers in Washington, but again, there was nothing in the way of support.
A lot of young people enlisted in the military only to get sacrificed in the unnecessary wars instead of defending the country. But there was nothing for civilians to do except “go shopping” (Junior Bush was such a fool). Continue reading “25 Years After September 11”…
Public opinion on abortion has shifted 4 years after Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade
People gather in front of the Supreme Court building following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling on June 24, 2022, in Washington, D.C. Nathan Howard/Getty Images
But four years later, one of the most impactful developments has been less visible: a significant, sustained and politically consequential shift in public opinion. In the wake of Dobbs, the debate over abortion rights did not simply return to the states. It fundamentally altered how many Americans think about the issue and how they vote.
In our recently published book, “Not Going Back: Public Opinion on Abortion in Post-Dobbs America,” we examined how and why these changes have occurred, and what they mean for U.S. politics. We believe the shift could have real consequences for the November 2026 midterms.
Post-Roe stability
Drawing on several nationally representative surveys conducted before and after Dobbs, we examined how Americans’ abortion attitudes, political priorities and voting behavior have changed in response to the most significant shift in abortion policy in half a century.
For nearly 50 years after Roe, public opinion on abortion was remarkably stable. In 1975, Gallup found support for legal abortion in certain circumstances at 54% and support for a ban in all circumstances at 22%. In 2021 – the year before the Dobbs decision – these figures were virtually the same: 48% and 19%, respectively.
Despite heated political rhetoric, most Americans held nuanced views. They were neither fully anti-abortion nor fully pro-abortion. Instead, they supported legal abortion in some circumstances and not in others.
That underlying stability shaped both policy and politics for decades. Republicans were able to rally a committed core of supporters around opposition to Roe, while the underlying constitutional right to access abortion remained unchanged.
As states moved quickly after the Dobbs decision to enact abortion bans and strict gestational limits, public opinion moved in the opposite direction.
Today, more Americans identify as pro-choice than they did before Dobbs. And, as we document in our book, more Americans are now taking absolutist positions. They support legal access to abortion in all or most cases and oppose government regulation altogether.
How Dobbs shattered the equilibrium
One of the most striking changes in the post-Dobbs era concerns who cares most about abortion. For decades, abortion was a higher priority for Republicans and those identifying as pro-life.
That dynamic has now flipped. In both 2022 and 2024, Democrats and pro-choice Americans were more likely than Republicans to say abortion was a top political issue shaping their vote. In our book, we document how in both 2022 and 2024, pro-choice Democrats were especially motivated to vote and remained highly loyal to Democratic candidates.
At the same time, the considerable minority of Republicans who support legal abortion found themselves politically cross-pressured, meaning they experienced conflicting political influences.
Drawing on multiple nationally representative data sets, our book reveals that roughly one-third of Republicans hold views on abortion that do not align with the official pro-life position embraced by their party. They either identify as pro-choice or support legal abortion in at least some cases.
It was one thing to identify as a pro-choice Republican when Roe guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion. After Dobbs, however, Republican electoral victories could directly result in abortion bans and other restrictions. That makes partisan choices far more consequential.
We found that cross-pressured Republicans had lower turnout rates and were more willing to cross party lines, reflecting the growing tension between their abortion views and their party’s position. Given the size of this group, that presents a serious challenge for GOP candidates.
A group of abortion-rights supporters gather in front of the Supreme Court on June 28, 2022, in Washington, D.C. Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Reshaping US politics
At the same time, efforts to find a middle ground on abortion have proven difficult. Republican legislators in North Carolina and Virginia, for example, have sought to position policies such as 12- or 15-week bans as a reasonable compromise.
That might have worked in 1990. But public opinion has shifted in ways that make this strategy increasingly untenable. Our research shows that most Americans, including Republicans, do not see these “moderate” policies as meaningfully different from more restrictive bans.
One reason may be that, in the wake of Dobbs, abortion restrictions have become concrete rather than abstract. Extensive media coverage of women denied care during miscarriages, severe pregnancy complications and other medical emergencies has highlighted the consequences of gestational limits. This leads many Americans to judge these policies by their practical effects rather than the specific week at which abortion is prohibited.
In addition, our original survey data reveals that many Americans have only a limited understanding of how pregnancy is dated. That makes distinctions between six-, 12- and 15-week bans less meaningful than policymakers often assume.
Another major change is the emergence of a gender gap in abortion attitudes. For decades, men and women held remarkably similar views on abortion. That is no longer the case.
Since Dobbs, women have become significantly more supportive of abortion rights than men. For example, 56% of women say abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, compared to 41% of men.
This new gender gap reflects both women’s experiences with pregnancy and abortion and the changed policy environment following Dobbs. After the ruling, the consequences of abortion restrictions became far more immediate and tangible.
Rather than accepting these new restrictions, many women reacted against them. As abortion policy moved sharply to the right in many states, women’s attitudes moved in the opposite direction. This has resulted in substantially greater support for abortion rights.
Our survey research further finds that a better understanding of human reproduction, including how pregnancies are dated, is associated with greater support for legal access to abortion.
Taken together, these changes have reshaped American politics in ways that advantage Democrats. Abortion rights played a key role in the 2022 midterms, contributing to stronger-than-expected Democratic performance nationwide.
And it continues to shape voter motivation and turnout patterns heading into future elections.
‘Not going back’
That said, abortion is not the only issue that matters in modern U.S. politics. In the 2026 midterm elections, the economy and partisanship – especially in an era dominated by President Donald Trump – will remain central to electoral outcomes.
Abortion alone is unlikely to determine any single race. But it has altered the political landscape in ways that will matter this November and beyond.
The phrase that gives our book its title – “Not Going Back” – captures this moment. The changes we document are not temporary reactions to a single Supreme Court decision.
The stability that defined abortion politics for half a century is gone. The new normal is a political landscape in which abortion rights have become both more widely supported and more politically consequential. They are motivating Democratic voters while creating new tensions within the Republican coalition.
Perhaps most importantly, Dobbs transformed abortion from a constitutional question into an electoral one. As abortion laws became substantially more restrictive, public opinion moved toward greater support for abortion access. The 2026 elections will offer another test of how the U.S. responds when public policy and public preferences move in opposite directions.
This story was produced in collaboration with Rewire News Group, an independent nonprofit media outlet that covers reproductive health.
So last weekend I was trying to get a Covid vaccine and came up against a frightening development in our society. And no, it wasn’t the fact that after six years and change we are still dealing with this damn virus.
I have major travel plans in September, so I wanted to get the vaccine a couple of weeks before my trip so I’ll be at peak protection when I get on a plane. Travel plans have generally dictated how I schedule my shots, which I get every six months.
I checked the CVS website, but couldn’t find any appointments at the one nearest me. Then I checked Walgreens, and they had appointments through August 23, but not afterwards. The new vaccine drops in mid-September – while I’m traveling – so I assumed they weren’t going to order any more vaccines if they ran out.
So I made an appointment for August 22 at the closest Walgreens. Walgreens sent me 9 messages via text and email confirming my appointment and reminding me of it.
I showed up right on time, only to be informed that they didn’t have it. “But I have an appointment,” I said. The pharmacist looked at me like I was crazy for assuming I could get a vaccine when I had an appointment. He didn’t apologize, but told me I could complain to “corporate.”
I got a cancellation text 10 minutes after I left the drugstore.
I was furious, of course. Fortunately, a friend mentioned that a major grocery chain in her area still had vaccines, so I decided to check with Safeway.
Their website said they did and that they took walk-ins, so I walked over on Sunday afternoon to get one, only to discover that they don’t do vaccines in the last hour the pharmacy is open (no, the website doesn’t mention that).
But the clerk confirmed they still had the vaccine in stock. I asked if they would still have it Tuesday – I had plans on Monday – and she said maybe, but “corporate” might decide to have all the vaccines shipped back at any moment.
And that’s when it hit me, with that second reference to “corporate,” that big companies control a large part of our lives these days without us having any right to push back at how they do it.
I took the Safeway clerk at her word, changed my Monday plans, showed up when they started doing vaccines at 10 am, and got my shot from a very nice pharmacist. But “corporate” was still pinging in my head. Continue reading “Under “Corporate’s” Thumb”…
This is so important to those affected by LGBTQ+ stigma and those who love them, I am reprinting it in its entirety (under Creative Commons license).
Childhood experiences of LGBTQ+ stigma can harm romantic relationships decades later – psychologists explain how to reconnect with yourself and your partner
Childhood rejection, discrimination and bullying can affect your well-being as an adult. If your friends, family or community pushed you away because of your sexuality or gender, these childhood experiences of prejudice can also affect your future relationships.
We found that a factor called internalized stigma can notably affect the romantic relationships of LGBTQ+ people. Internalized stigma refers to when society’s negative views and biases toward a part of your identity shapes how you think and feel about yourself. This can influence how you view romantic relationships and how you interact with your romantic partners.
People with higher levels of internalized stigma report more conflicts and less satisfaction in their relationships. Research suggests that internalized stigma can negatively affect key aspects of romantic relationships that keep people satisfied with their partners, including trust, connection and intimacy.
Internalized stigma can also shape how secure you feel in romantic relationships. For some, these negative self-views can lead to difficulties with commitment and more conflict between partners.
In our study of 80 LGBTQ+ couples, we found that childhood emotional wounds tied to sexuality or gender can carry into adulthood, shaping a person’s relationships in their 20s and 30s.
Specifically, LGBTQ+ adults with more childhood anti-LGBTQ+ experiences reported less trust in their partner and reduced emotional and sexual intimacy – key ingredients in a healthy and satisfying romantic relationship.
Overcoming childhood trauma
It’s worth remembering that these negative beliefs about yourself don’t develop overnight. It also takes time to recognize and change how you react to them.
Exploring whether your symptoms of guilt, shame and low self-esteem are related to internalized stigma is a critical part of beginning to navigate it. Recognizing and pinpointing where these beliefs came from, which may include negative messages from society or your family, is an important first step.
Show yourself patience and acceptance after difficult moments, such as when you’re feeling undervalued, alone or ashamed because of your sexuality or gender. Adopting mantras such as “I am enough,” “I can overcome hard things” and “May I be kind to myself and give myself compassion in this moment” is one way to practice self-affirmation.
You may also want to explore how shame and guilt around your sexual or gender identities can show up in your relationships. Intentionally carving out ways to support and connect with your partner can create emotional safety by building intimacy and closeness.
Importantly, stigma and shame don’t have to become the only thing you and your partner talk about. Strengthening positive aspects of your relationship can help you continue finding ways to bond.
Finding and giving support
Talking with your partner or other community members who have had similar experiences may provide a sense of connection.
Online self-directed relationship programs that are tailored for LGBTQ+ relationships may be more approachable. Find trained providers who are LGBTQ+ friendly, affirming and willing to advocate for your needs.
Lastly, recognize that the onus for change is not solely on you and your partner. Change also needs to come at a societal level. You can empower yourself and others by connecting with other people in the LGBTQ+ community, including mentoring LGBTQ+ youth. Many face similar experiences, and you are not alone.
I did a podcast last weekend that focused on how the broligarchs miss the point when it comes to most science fiction, including the stuff they cite as influencing them. This was BCube Press podcast hosted by Cliff Winnig with myself and Wendy Shaffer as guests. You can watch it here on YouTube.
We had a great discussion, but there’s so much to be said on this topic, plus right now I’m reading Gil Duran’s new book The Nerd Reich, so I’m thinking a lot about what these technofeudalists are doing to undermine democracy based on their half-baked philosophy and complete misunderstanding of both science and science fiction.
(I’ll write about The Nerd Reich when I finish the book, but I can already tell you it’s worth your time even if you, like me, are obsessed with the subject and already know a lot of this. Duran is a journalist by training, so he marshals his facts and writes with clarity.)
Back when I was in college – an absurdly long time ago – there were four SF/F books (or series of books) that pretty much everybody read: the Foundation trilogy, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dune, and the Lord of the Rings. Those books didn’t get me into SF/F – that came later when I discovered the great feminist SF of the 70s – but they were part of the overall 60s-70s culture.
What gets me is that the broligarch crowd pretty much read the same books – and clearly missed the point of most of them – even though the oldest of those tech-adjacent guys is probably a generation younger than I am and many of them are millennials. And of course, Foundation and Lord of the Rings had been around quite awhile before my generation found them.
Now I’m not dissing those books. I embroidered a quote from Foundation on the backpack I carried when I went hitch-hiking across the country (“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”) I worked as a children’s book buyer for Grok Books (which didn’t have a great SF section, but did have that particular novel).
And I re-read the entire Lord of the Rings during law school finals every semester.
Dune was fun if you were smoking a lot of dope.
But you know, all those books were written before any of these guys were born. And there’s been a hell of a lot of good science fiction written since then. Yet these books still seem to attract their interest. Continue reading “The Broligarch Misreading of Science Fiction”…
The New York Timeshas an interview with Morgan Freeman, who is 89 – he in fact says “pushing 90” – and still working. At the moment he’s got a regular role on a streaming series.
I am a sucker for all reports about people who are older than I am and still pursuing their art or their career or doing something else that we’re all told is “unusual” for old people. I want to be reminded that getting old doesn’t mean you have to stop doing stuff and just wait around to die.
But there’s a hell of a lot of ageism out there right now and it’s really starting to get on my nerves. The other day I saw a social media post excoriating James Carville’s ideas about what Democrats should do and then saying something that I read as “oh, well, he’s 81 and gonna die soon anyway.”
I got the impression that the person who wrote just thought 81 was horribly old, not that they knew anything about Carville’s health.
Now I despise Carville. His ideas about what Democrats should do are awful; he’s the original “compromise with the Republicans no matter how extreme they get” person. I actually go to the trouble of cancelling political solicitations that mention his name, instead of just ignoring them. The Democrats made a major mistake by listening to him in the first place.
But he’s been wrong for at least 30 years, and probably longer. He thinks politics is a fucking game. After all, he’s married to a Republican consultant. Obviously he doesn’t think any of this is really vital – he just wants to win a game.
The problem isn’t that he’s old. It’s that he’s wrong. He’s always been wrong.
This week the Australian Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is a mixed bag, but it’s all very close to home. The Royal Commission is talking about learning and educational resources today, for example, so I have to watch. I need to know how what I do (or did when I had lots of teaching and do on the rare instance I’m back teaching) fits into good practice. I also need to be critical of what everyone else is doing. Not bad-critical, but aware-critical. Today then, is an in-service for education outside the tertiary sector.
Then there are three days of things I know but need to understand better. Learning and education require this, and just because I’ve been excluded from much of the education I used to give, doesn’t absolve me from learning and updating. It’s ironic that I’m updating my understanding of why I’ve been excluded, but that’s only a small slice of a vast pie about education in Australia and how it fits with being Jewish in Australian.
Friday, as I told everyone on Facebook, is my personal hellscape, because it’s about antisemitism in the Arts and Creative sector. It’s not my once-life and hope-to-be life: it’s my current everyday. I say “hope-to-be” but the silencing and how Jewish creatives now live in a different world to most others hasn’t yet been tackled and may not be tackled. The focus here is on the hate, not the side effects of hate. The introduction for this week (by counsel assisting) has already noted how many of us are isolated and drifting thanks to the antisemitism, which is a big advance.
Outside the Royal Commission, people are blaming Jews for all kinds of things still. The new thing they (those who hate) have is an assessment of the Royal Commission while not paying any attention to what everyone says in it. The investigation into antisemitism itself becomes an excuse for antisemitism. I read something that suggests that people who do this enjoy hating. I wish they were wrong.
I asked my Facebook followers to consider. “Anyone who has political opinions on these subjects, listen to the evidence at the RC first and maybe think on how things affect me and other Australian Jews in your vicinity. Is your opinion on my page more important than my safety or emotional stability? Your choice, of course, but I’d rather you made it an educated choice.”
None of this was going to be today’s post. I had completely different ideas. But in the background, I’m hearing a rabbi talking about healing the staff at Bankstown Hospital, which is known to be antisemitic. So many people are taking their religion off their hospital record, for their own safety. There was discussion in Sydney about even finding alternates to hospitals because of safety. The State government is now talking about what to do. Healing is going to take a long time. Safety is still an issue. At least, however, more people are now talking about this.
I wrote a rant on Facebook. I want to copy it here because the cause of it affects so many people and I think it would be good to find it again. Let me explain first, though.
My ethnohistorian self looks at what happens in the world around us as evidence of human lives. I’m always looking for patterns. Right now, finding patterns and interpreting them well is more important than it’s ever been for me, because of the level and nature of antisemitism in Australia. I keep an eye on what our Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is doing, and I find it has its own patterns and, at this point, it doesn’t see the rest of Australia clearly. It only sees what it’s shown, and some of the interpretation is done through the lens of groups who are part of the problem. Cross-questioning should not be up to 66% led by groups that are known for their antisemitism, but on some days it is. That affects the picture we all see. I make my own analyses, then, to keep what the RC does in perspective. I keep my own analysis in perspective using a truckload of tools. I watch some of the top ten shows on TV so that I’m in tune with the stories others see and hear. I keep an eye on social media. I make sure I’m part of events when I can. Last Saturday I was on a stall at Geek Expo. I wore nothing to indicate I’m Jewish (I don’t like tempting fate) but I watched and listened and I talked to many people. I’m beginning to learn the pattern and shape of antisemitism in this country.
What I wrote on FB just now was about one of the trails of hate spread so liberally across social media. I used several search terms to bring up people talking specifically about that topic, and I also looked at the new and at commentaries on the news, on the timelines of people who are known to be Jewish (eg a certain film director), and also with some of the major figures who talk politics in Australia. One thing I didn’t do this time was look at commentary by noted Jewish social media folks, so this doesn’t include the comments on their posts.
As much as anything, today’s post is about how I see the world, which is always as a writer (everything contains stories) and as an historian (everything contains evidence). it’s also an insight into what it’s like being a Jewish Australian at the place where 5 different branches of Australian antisemitism hit, but that’s not something to talk about today.
There is a pattern. If it’s Monday evening in east coast Australia, then the new wave of antisemitism hits social media. Sometimes it lasts until the weekend and sometimes it fades in a couple of days. Today’s wave is fairly precise. It’s an old one, revisited, and it riffs on one of last week’s waves.
That wave said, “If Israel was only completely obliterated, there would be no problems in the Middle East.” None of those pushing this line asked what would happen to Jews in Israel, but I asked a couple of people (who do not know to block me yet, obviously) and they explained that, since no-one in the Arab world hates Jews or has ever killed a Jew, they do not know why it’s even a question.
Some of them also say that there’s no antisemitism in Australia. I followed a little thread where someone asked how Bondi fitted into the ‘no antisemitism in Australia’ notion, and the person who asked was blocked, but the ‘no antisemitism’ person took that same thought elsewhere. They know there is antisemitism, but they’re in denial for their own reasons. Others (who I didn’t talk to because… not so safe) said that the world would be better with no Jews. That’s the old thread. It is not simple and it is unkind.
The new one (which is also an old one, but present in so many places this evening) is more polite. The new wave of hate says that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism. It’s an evil thing that touts supremacy and includes murder. The actual history of Zionism is irrelevant here (though the history of carefully cultivated antisemitism is not) – and if you want to see the range of definitions of Zionism from a snapshot I did a while back, let me know and I’ll share the links again.
The big thing is that I don’t know anyone Jewish who uses this definition. I know a couple of people who might, but they’re not people who talk to me. Those couple of people are both quite far left.
Why is the use by Jews so important? Because the same people who have this curious definition of Zionism also have a potted definition of Judaism. We’re a religion, simply, with no links to the ancient Levant and only modern culture. Excuse me while I take a break to sing Shir Ha’Maalot, which is appropriate at this point for so many reasons.
I’m finished singing.
How do most of these people use those definitions? They find comments made by obvious Jews (especially famous ones) and correct their self descriptions.
It’s very Orwellian. Reshape everyone’s thoughts on a subject by using the same words and phrases and correcting people over and over again. It’s Jewsplaining, but with intent to create 1984.
I am going to strongly suggest that if you don’t know how a Jewish friend sees themselves and describes themselves, you ask them. You’ll get our answers, not a single standard ‘this is the only way of saying it’ except from those of us who like shaping the world with straightforward constructions. This comes down to how a person sees themselves in the world, so that is what you should put ahead of most other things if you want to actually talk to Jews and defend our right to exist as Jews. You don’t have to like any given person’s self-definition. But you do need to accept it as their self-definition ahead of the carefully crafted definitions applied by bigots.
Within Jewish culture, each self-definition plays a part. There are concepts we share, and concepts we craft by creating a complex composition. We’re all voices in a choir. Some choirs walk a little bit to the side and create their own mix, but they’re still part of Am Yisrael.
The thing about Judaism is that it doesn’t force one simple view. We argue and discuss and even have an approved rabbinic method of shelving impossible arguments so that we can move on to possible ones.
Redefinition by someone imbued with Jew hate is not just going to change the public way others see Jews, it’s going to chip at who we are by not letting us be ourselves outside closed communities. The choir is being pelted with rocks for not singing the right song in the right way… and that song and that right way may not have anything to do with what the choir was singing or why the choir was singing or who the choir was singing for.
This is an old trick. It shuts down Jewish voices. Every time someone tells someone else who they are without checking with them first, to find out how they see themselves, they’re saying “Who you are is unimportant. You are a lesser human being than I am.”
An addendum:
Miss Manners needs to intervene. If you’ve been shouting politics, your politics might have made your Jewish friends aware that you are not safe to speak with about certain subjects. Check with them before you ask them questions. They may not want to answer because they may not be as trusting (or as safe) as they were a few years ago.
I understand that everyone’s politics is important, but left wing politics in Australia have led to a lot of Jew hate. Otherwise good people are being treated with caution, even if they don’t know it, because they shouted “Globalise the intifada” but never asked Aussie Jewish friends whether we were OK after Bondi. I dropped many hints about ‘talking to your friends’ in the last 3 years, but most people didn’t. If you didn’t (thought nice thoughts but never called or had a cuppa) then think twice before suddenly invading a friend’s life with “How do you self-define.” Explain why you didn’t talk to them, perhaps, then ask if it’s possible to talk?
During several recent conversations, people have told me that they’ve stopped checking their phones in the morning. Not because nothing was happening, but because everything was. They described the feeling as standing under a waterfall of perpetual bad news.
Globally, 40 per cent report they at least sometimes or often do the same, the highest figure ever recorded. People shared consistent reasons for this: the news put them in a bad mood, they felt overwhelmed and powerless to act.
As a researcher in developmental psychology, focusing on social development and psychological well-being, I argue that news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It’s the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.
Wired for bad news
Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.
The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived.
This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer.
A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset. The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive.
Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then. We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What’s changed is the size of the world it’s asked to scan for threats.
Scanning the whole world
For most of human history, the threats our nervous system processed were local. A neighbouring tribe. A drought. The illness of a child we personally knew. Information about distant places would barely arrive, and if it did, it was mainly irrelevant.
In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.
A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviourexamined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.
Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant.
Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17 per cent of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61 per cent reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with six per cent of those who didn’t.
For minority populations, news fatigue may be even more consequential.
Repeatedly witnessing harm directed at our own groups, even when we’re not the immediate target, can have a significant psychological impact on people from the same group affiliation. For racialized communities, such as immigrants, the cognitive load could be even heavier, and the option to simply stop watching is much harder to exercise when the news is about their country of origin.
Looking away is not the fix
What’s the solution to news fatigue? Well, it’s not avoidance. A democracy depends on informed citizens.
Many adults already cite the spread of misleading information as a major source of stress. Withdrawing from accurate, trustworthy information only deepens the problem. We’re wired to pay more attention to bad news, and that kind of content will find its way to us one way or another.
The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources.
Several approaches can help manage news fatigue and protect mental health. Containing news consumption to defined windows of time reduces the sense of being overwhelmed. Choosing depth over volume also matters: one carefully reported long-form article will inform you better than bursts of random, unreliable and emotionally loaded posts on Instagram.
There is also value in distinguishing between information and action — research on perceived control and stress consistently shows that the gap between awareness and agency is one of the strongest predictors of psychological distress. Identifying what you can actually do about what you read in the news, however small, regulates that response.
Finally, be wary of “rage bait” — intentionally provocative messages or content designed to boost engagement on social media platforms by eliciting negative reactions. Recognizing that certain content creators want to provoke rather than reflect reality creates useful cognitive distance.
The news will not become less “heavy.” But our relationship with it can become more deliberate. Our brains were not built for this scale of input. They were, however, built to learn to adapt.
