Remembering

Yesterday I wrote about breaking things. I could just as well have written about forgetting things, which is another of those irritations that often accompanies aging.

But instead I think I’ll focus on all the things we remember. People my age can summon images from the 1950s, when rock ‘n roll was young and so were we. We remember the 1970s, when our careers took off and we started having kids of our own.

We remember the 1990s, when many of us saw our lives blow up and we tried to start over. 

After that has been 30 years, frankly, of chaos. Personally, I was excited by the coming of the Internet. For an information junkie, it seemed like a dream come true.

But with the arrival of social media in the 2000s, that dream started to turn into a nightmare, in the worst-case scenario with the emergence of Donald Trump. He is the man who is breaking things and who wants us to forget all that is dear to us.

But we old folks, we remember.

We remember what matters.

(Note: Painting can help with stress. Maybe it can help with memory?)

HEADLINES:

• Is Donald Trump Creating the Conditions for Another World War? (New Yorker)

• ICE and Border Patrol shootings spark hundreds of weekend vigils and protests (Axios)

• Cell phone footage raises new questions about ICE agent’s tactics before fatal shooting (CNN)

• ICE Agent Jonathan Ross and the Killing of Renée Good: A Legal Breakdown of Potential Crimes (Substack)

• An ICE Killing Puts Minneapolis on the Brink (New Yorker)

• Judge Bars Trump From Withholding Election Funds to States (NYT)

• How the US could take over Greenland and the potential challenges (AP)

• Greenlanders ‘don’t want to be Americans’, say political leaders amid Trump threats (Guardian)

• Trump’s Venezuela attack was a message for the rest of the world. (Reveal)

• Venezuela looks risky to Republicans (Reuters)

• Big Oil Knows That Trump’s Venezuela Plans Are Delusional (Atlantic)

• Exxon CEO calls Venezuela ‘uninvestable’ without significant changes (WP)

• Trump, Venezuela and the doctrine that wouldn’t die (Financial Times)

• Iran protests flare, Revolutionary Guards try to quell unrest (Reuters)

• Why the once loyal bazaar merchants are now protesting in Iran (Al Jazeera)

• How Trump’s tariffs are hitting business owners (Reuters)

• South Carolina reports 99 new measles cases (ABC)

• “We’re Too Close to the Debris” (ProPublica)

• Total legal immunity for dangerous pesticides? Stop Big Ag’s scheme now. (The Hill)

• We tried to get humanoid robots to do the laundry (Verge)

• AI models were given four weeks of therapy: the results worried researchers (Nature)

• Elon Musk’s A.I. Is Generating Sexualized Images of Real People, Fueling Outrage (NYT)

• Kristi Noem Calls Fatal Minneapolis Shooting Cathartic (Onion)