Category Archives: Political

Good Riddance

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Has it been only a year since the Times Square ball last dropped? It feels like a decade, one characterized more by wrecking balls both literal and figurative. To top off a hard year, Tatiana Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy’s 35-year-old daughter, succumbed to terminal cancer just yesterday, although not without leaving us the gift of her grace and her final essay.

But that heartbreak notwithstanding, at last it’s time to turn the page on 2025.

It’s been quite something perusing the commentary this year. Hope is necessary for carrying on, but it’s sometimes been hard to keep despair at bay. First came gentle encouragement to breathe, step back, take care of yourself, but not give up. Then, with apparently too many people following the first three but not the last pieces of advice, sterner exhortations about the treachery of disengagement emerged. Always, there was the cheer brought by brave resisters, small victories, federal judges not part of the US Supreme Court majority, and the good feelings of solidarity that came with the massive No Kings protests throughout the year. Many times, I found solace in schadenfreude, such as the end of the Trump/Musk bromance and MAGA infighting at this year’s Turning Point conference.

Then, after one too many tacky gilt pieces were affixed to the Oval Office and Trump and his enablers did everything in their power not only to strip healthcare but also food from millions of Americans, solid evidence emerged that the tide was turning. Following a promising string of special-election overperformance, in November, we saw stunning widespread electoral victories for Democrats (apparently still hated, but preferred). Finally, Trump’s “plummeting” poll numbers, which declined in infinitesimally tiny increments for months, fell below 40%. I find it alarming that anyone supports this regime, but still, I’ll take it. Just as I’ll take having complicated instead of merely contemptuous feelings toward Marjorie Taylor Green.

It’s been a hard year to sum up, to assess the damage while still finding reasons for optimism. Mainstream commentators are valiantly trying. Just last week in the New York Times, I read back-to-back opinion pieces. One, by UC Professor David G. Victor, began, “On its face, 2025 looks like a year of relentless backsliding in the fight against climate change.” You don’t say. Through some unconvincing jujitsu, Victor attempts to make a case for optimism. Commenters raked him over the coals, which are at least easier to come by with Trump’s avowed resurrection of the deservedly dying industry.

Nicholas Kristof was more honest in proving that he understood his year-end assignment of offering hope without delusion. In Which I Valiantly Try to Cheer You Up took the long view, acknowledging the massive damage wrought by the first year of Trump 2.0 but urging perspective that in the arc of human history, things aren’t so bad and will likely get better.

All in all, it seems everyone is ready to bid adieu to 2025. Although personally I experienced many joys this year—a new granddaughter, loving and happily married children, several nice trips, and the good fortune not to be in the direct line of fire for any of the atrocities befalling our country, I can’t wait to turn the page. Usually, I like to let the good feelings of the holidays linger after January 1, but this year we hurried to dismantle Christmas.

Into the recycling bin of history you go, 2025. Good riddance.

Onward to 2026!

The Cruelty is the Point

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“The problem,” said my friend, “is that Republicans are willing to let people die, and Democrats are not.”

You might think we had this conversation just a few days ago, after a group of eight Senate moderates brokered a deal with their Republican counterparts to end the government shutdown.

But my friend and I actually discussed this a good fifteen years ago, during another chapter in the long saga of asymmetrical political battle between Democrats, who believe that the purpose of government is to improve people’s lives, versus Republicans, who want to shrink government down small enough so it can be drowned in the bathtub, as anti-tax Republican Grover Norquist famously put it.

Here we are again. This time, starving government isn’t enough. Trump and his GOP enablers have literally been starving people, depriving 42 million of SNAP benefits. Trump wasted no time in exploiting the shutdown to further the rampage he’s enthusiastically executed from the jump of his second term, vowing to use it to “get rid of a lot of the things we didn’t want,” targeting, of course, “Democrat things.”

Apparently, one of those Democrat things is food.

Turns out, plenty of non-Democrats also need food. Who knew?

Unmoved by this reality, Trump refused to utilize an emergency fund expressly meant to feed people during crises, defied federal courts ordering him to do so, appealed their attempts to make him comply with the law not once but twice to the Supreme Court, and threatened to punish states who had made alternative arrangements to keep their residents from going hungry. As a New York Times reader commented, “The past few weeks have been eye-opening. I have never seen anyone work so hard to deny food to those who need help getting it. That will not be forgotten.”

The cruelty is the point. Whatever your feelings about how a few Democrats helped end the shutdown with a whimper instead of a bang, this essential truth remains.  Trump, showman that he is, has merely escalated a long-standing GOP tendency to hurt vulnerable people with his brazen relish for causing harm.

Before Trump was even re-elected, Russ Vought, the Project 2025 architect whom Trump pretended not to know, said about federal workers, “We want to put them in trauma.” Right after the election, Trump rewarded Vought with the powerful directorship of the Office of Management and Budget. Many consider Vought, along with fellow-sadist Stephen Miller, to actually be calling the shots in Washington.

In February, DOGE head Elon Musk wielded a chainsaw signaling the destruction in store for federal workers soon after bragging about “feeding USAID through the woodchipper.” A recent New Yorker article cites a respected estimate that 600,000 people—two-thirds of them children—have already died since the demise of USAID.

For months, Trump and his cronies have been firing federal workers, terrorizing immigrant communities, slashing funding for programs that help ordinary people so billionaires can have bigger tax cuts, and blowing people to bits in international waters, apparently just to get their manly rocks off. But these guys aren’t just dicking around. They’re gleefully taking a wrecking ball to the economy, the rule of law, and, in the metaphor of the century, the East Wing of the White House:

Busy destroying things, blaming others, filing appeals, increasing and decreasing tariffs on a whim, and feasting on the empty praise of world leaders, Trump naturally couldn’t be expected to sit down with congressional leaders to address problems behind the shutdown, like hunger and skyrocketing healthcare costs. He did, however, find the time to brag about his new marble bathroom and 90,000 square-foot gilded ballroom, and to host a Great-Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago:

The grotesque optics only magnify the callous cruelty. Melania’s jacket from Trump 1.0 (at the top of this post) says it all: They really don’t care who gets hurt.

That’s the very problem my friend pointed out so long ago. Ezra Klein, commenting on what led Democrats to end the shutdown, said the same thing, but more nicely:

Trump himself has shown no interest in a deal. Rather than negotiating over health care spending, Trump has been ratcheting up the pain the shutdown is causing . . . More than anything else, this is what led some Senate Democrats to cut a deal: Trump’s willingness to hurt people exceeds their willingness to see people get hurt.

Democrats did not succeed in getting Republicans to extend healthcare premium subsidies as a condition for ending the shutdown (if they had, as Ezra Klein and others have pointed out, they would have saved Republicans from themselves and taken Democrats’ best electoral issue off the table for the mid-terms). But they did succeed in elevating to prolonged national attention the fact that Republicans could care less about the well-being of ordinary Americans and are responsible for skyrocketing healthcare premiums. There’s a whole lot more that can and should be hung around Republicans’ necks, but this was the ticket, and it worked surprisingly well and quite probably for as long as it could. Republicans were never going to capitulate, and had the shutdown and the increasing suffering it caused continued, public opinion on who’s to blame would have switched on a dime from Republicans to Democrats. As it stands, Republicans own the shutdown, the escalating cost of living, the chaos, greed, and indifference to suffering. They own the cruelty.

That’s a message we can and should take all the way to the mid-terms. It’s time for Democrats to step away from the circular firing squad and get to work. We have lots more elections to win.

Signs of Solidarity

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There are so many horrors perpetrated by the Trump Administration, it can be difficult to choose which to focus on. Right now the hair-on-fire moment is Trump’s and his minions’ weaponization of government against everyone they dislike, including rich and powerful people like Jimmy Kimmel and James Comey. This is indeed an alarming escalation.

But the assault on the most vulnerable people also continues; the reign of terror visited upon immigrants may have dropped from the headlines, but not from reality. We’ve witnessed masked agents abducting brown people off the streets and sending them to foreign gulags, gardeners who have lived here for over 20 years chased down, citizens and legal residents detained, American-born children terrified they’ll come home to vanished parents after a day at school. The Guardian reports that immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group in ICE detention. So much for prioritizing deporting “the worst of the worst.”

That’s why I’ve joined Signs of Solidarity (SoS), a campaign devised by Indivisible to help immigrants feel safe and welcome in our communities, to educate workers and their employers about their rights, and most importantly to communicate that we see and condemn what’s going on. As an SoS volunteer, I’ve been going around to local businesses offering free, public-facing signs in support of immigrants as well as signs designating a private space that ICE and other immigration enforcement can’t legally enter without a signed judicial warrant:

The response has been overwhelmingly positive. Even when someone doesn’t want a sign because of a blanket policy against posting anything in their windows, they almost always appreciate the cause. One restaurant manager in a shopping center that doesn’t allow posting proudly put up a big flyer by the front door anyway. His neighbor, born in America but raised in Iran until the war there caused his parents to send him back to the US alone at the age of 14, was nervous about crossing his landlord, but prominently displayed a flyer on the inside counter. Customers standing in line while the cashier explained to me that she’d need to run it by the owners called out, “Thank you so much for what you’re doing.” One customer coming in for her treatment at a high-end beauty salon asked for signs to post in her own business a few towns over. A pizzeria owner, taping a sign to her window, handed me her staple gun saying, “Here, you’ll need this to make sure your other sign is secure on the outside bulletin board.”

I should say that my small town has not been a hotbed of immigration enforcement. I live in an affluent, mostly white community in one of the deepest blue counties in the country. Signs proclaiming “No Human is Illegal” bloom in people’s yards. The warm reception I’ve encountered is hardly surprising here. Possibly it would be different in a more conservative part of the country, particularly if business owners feared antagonizing a broader swath of their customer base than is likely here. There’s a natural tendency to not want to stick your neck out in dangerous times.

But if I, a mild-mannered, 70-year-old white citizen not the least bit in the direct line of fire when it comes to the more sadistic oppressions of the current administration, is unwilling to do something simple to stand up to the abuses of power all around us, then what hope do we have? We’ve seen how corporate leaders, media, universities, and law firms who capitulate to Trump only embolden him further.

I’ve been heartened by the conversations I’ve had, cheered by the growing number of signs popping up in windows downtown.

They help people feel less alone, less hopeless. They give people courage. The more we stand in solidarity, the sooner we can bring this nightmare to an end.

Fight Fire with Fire

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Full disclosure: I’m the type of person who would bring an NPR bookbag to a gunfight. Actually, I wouldn’t knowingly go anywhere featuring guns, so most likely I’d just stay home and read a book.

But suppose somebody burst into my house, threatening everything and everyone I hold dear, while I sat reading? I’d fight back however I could. An attack on my house calls for self-defense.

That’s what’s happening now with a literal attack on the House of Representatives. Republicans know that they are likely to lose control of the US House in the 2026 midterms. That’s why Donald Trump and his enablers, in an unprecedented power grab, have redrawn Congressional district maps in Texas to try to snatch five more House seats from Democrats in the 2026 mid-terms.

To counter Texas, California is fighting fire with fire with the Election Rigging Response Act, aka Proposition 50, a thoughtful counter to the Republicans’ bad-faith maneuvers. It asks voters to allow temporarily replacing maps approved by the independent Citizens Redistricting Commission with new maps favoring Democrats, reverting back to CRC-drawn maps following the 2030 census. Additionally, the temporary maps would only take effect if and only if a Republican-led state redraws their maps first.

That’s the trigger Texas just pulled, with other red states soon to follow.

So it’s time to put down that NPR bookbag and fight back by voting for and spreading the word about Proposition 50, on the ballot in California’s special election on November 4. It’s the best way to stop the steal of the US House in the 2026 midterms.

Yet there’s well-funded opposition to Proposition 50: Before the ink was even dry on the state legislature’s approval for placing it on the ballot, I received three glossy mailers warning against it as a dire threat to democracy. Opponents misleadingly gave the impression that the widely respected League of Women Voters opposes this bill by quoting the League’s California President out of context. Her remarks against mid-cycle redistricting and for independent commissions were made in response to Texas’s plans to redraw their maps. In fact, California’s LVW has forcefully repudiated the unauthorized misuse of their President’s words, and has made clear that they are not taking a position on Proposition 50 in keeping with their non-partisan stance.

Californians are rightly proud of their independent Citizens Redistricting Commission (whose maps will be temporarily replaced if Proposition 50 passes). It pains many of us that the scorched-earth fanaticism and/or cowardice of today’s Republican Party has led to this point. Yet here we are.

In discussing this with friends, most see a “Yes” vote as a no-brainer. But not all (I know a lot of people with NPR bookbags). I’ve heard worries about hypocrisy, “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” and other slippery-slope concerns. Some are mad at Democrats for not doing enough to fight Trump, and now appear equally mad that the party of extremely limited power is exercising one of the few options of power they actually possess. One friend is mulling over the choice between “pragmatism vs. principle,” and is leaning toward principle. I understand all of these impulses.

But there is nothing principled about letting the unpopular, destructive, and often lawless policies of the current administration continue when we have the power to thwart it. We did not ask for this fight, but since it’s been foisted upon us, we have two choices: Do nothing and let Republicans continue their assault on America, or stand up and fight.

Vote YES on Proposition 50 in the special election on November 4.

*

Make sure you are registered to vote (and tell your friends and family, too)!

Want to volunteer to help pass Proposition 50?

–Bay Area Coalition is my home base, and we’ve been movers and shakers in key elections nationwide for many years

–Stop Election Rigging

-Most importantly, talk up the importance of voting in this and other elections among your friends, neighbors, co-workers, and everybody you can think of.

Mayday, May Day

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What we’re experiencing under Trump 2.0 certainly qualifies for the universally recognized signal for distress. The first day of May is also International Worker’s Day, so what better time for a robust rally? My husband Jonathan and I happen to be retired, so we took our non-working selves up California’s North Coast for a few days of R&R, where we were lucky enough to join the tiny town of Fort Bragg’s May Day protest. My unofficial count was that well over 200 people lined Main Street, with almost all passing cars honking in loud support. Not bad for a population of 6,919, especially when you consider that the economically decimated white working class town is ripe for MAGA’s siren call.

Luckily, I had packed my portable sign, which matches my mood most days:

Several people nodded approvingly. One man told me The Scream was being used in protests all over the world. A woman remarked, “I finally understand what that painting means.” The meaning of the May Day protests–several hundred thousand participants in over 1,000 American cities and towns, large and small–is clear: People are fed up with Trump and his GOP enablers’ War on America, and the discontent is growing.

This sign was my favorite:

Happy to oblige!

Caste

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The ambiguity of whether or not the Equal Rights Amendment has actually been ratified perfectly captures the status of women in today’s America. On the one hand, women have made huge strides in the last few decades. On the other hand, the US Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobb’s decision overturning Roe v Wade effectively relegated women to second-class citizens by stripping away their bodily autonomy. Oh, and did I mention that Kamala Harris lost the election to a man whose campaign Tim Walz characterized as the “He-Man Women-Haters Club?”

The recent news about the ERA brought me back not just to the election, but to this summer, when I happened to be listening to the audiobook of Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents right after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate. Caste refers to artificial hierarchy that helps determine standing and respect and shapes the infrastructure of our divisions and ranking. It encompasses sex as well as race.

As Democrats hotly debated whether or not Biden should step aside, and who should replace him, I listened to the section toward the end of the book in which Wilkerson predicts to a friend well before the 2016 presidential nominations were sewn up that Donald Trump will beat Hillary Clinton. She was sure that the conscious and unconscious pull of caste would be just too powerful to overcome.

Listening, I thought to myself, “There’s no way Kamala Harris will be elected President.” 

I had thought the same thing about Barack Obama in 2008. Talking myself through my fears took some doing. Eventually I came to realize that not voting for Obama because I believed America wouldn’t elect a Black man meant I was participating in the very racism that stood in his—and our country’s—way. 

Obama won. He even won twice, making what could have been a fluke seem more solid, hopeful. Obama’s victories added to the rare examples Wilkerson cites when people stand strong against the headwinds of caste. Arguably, though, the rise of Trump as his immediate successor demonstrates the powerful backlash against daring to defy caste’s strictures.

This time around, eight years later, there was a lot of talk about how many Americans feared that the country was not yet ready to elect a Black woman (often from Black women themselves, who carry first-hand knowledge in their bones). There was just as much talk urging people to work hard to elect Harris rather than succumbing to and thereby entrenching the iron rule of caste.

And so we did—millions of us, with wild joy and enthusiasm. It wasn’t enough.

Although I believe Kamala Harris lost primarily because people were upset about the cost of living, that does not negate the existence of racism and sexism. I never shook my fear that Isabel Wilkerson was right. As a Black woman, Kamala Harris faced a deep and double reservoir of bias, conscious and unconscious.

Trump’s constant degradation of women and non-Whites certainly granted a permission structure for outright sexism and racism to flourish openly. It’s not for nothing that the GOP’s first reactions to Harris’s candidacy were to call her a DEI hire and accuse her of sleeping her way to the top. Trump’s pronouncement that Harris had only recently decided to “turn Black” was a ludicrous insult, but also an effective dog-whistle signaling untrustworthiness and opportunism.

Still, the impact of racism and sexism is hard to quantify. Most people know better than to say to a pollster or a reporter what an older White man cheerfully told Jennifer Egan when she was canvassing for Harris in Pennsylvania: “I would never vote for a Black, and I would never vote for a woman.” Yet that’s exactly what I suspected people meant as the chorus of “I don’t know, I just need more specifics” grew every time Harris rolled out another concrete proposal.

Mentioning the possibility of racism and misogyny as factors in Harris’s defeat in the early days after the election generated such an intense reaction that you’d think the women of America had risen en masse to force spoonfuls of Skippy down the throats of men with severe peanut allergies. Per usual, women were blamed for Harris’s loss, although the candidate herself almost never talked about her race or sex. As New York Times columnist Jessica Grose pointed out, Democratic strategist James Carville often opined that “preachy females” are the problem and Democratic messaging comes across as “too feminine.” Grose wrote her essay as Trump was floating his fellow sexual predators Matt Gaetz and Pete Hegseth for Cabinet heads, and as the post-election slogan, “Your body, my choice,” became a taunt many boys flung at their female classmates on school yards across America. No wonder Grose acidly wrote, “But I guess I should stop talking about it” in response to the outrage common if someone dared suggest that sexism may have played a role in the election outcome

So here we are. Trump will be inaugurated again tomorrow, making what could have been a first-time fluke seem more solid, uglier than ever. As Ezra Klein notes, “the present feels decidedly male,” an even more amped-up version of Trump’s “gaudily masculine” campaign. I can think of less diplomatic adverbs, but I guess I should stop talking about it, too.

Caste has not yet loosened its grip. Equal Rights Amendment or not, we are going back. There’s no ambiguity to the diminished status of women and that sexism played a role in Trump 2.0.

One Conversation at a Time

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Phone banking can be tedious: Hang ups, wrong numbers, people who are angry because they’re inundated with calls.

There are also plenty of people who affirm they’re voting the way you hope they are, or need a bit of help with voting information, or thank you for your work despite the fact that they’re inundated.

Then there are the nuggets that make it all worthwhile. The other day, the father of the woman I was trying to reach in Pennsylvania said she was at work, but could he help? I said I was a volunteer calling about the presidential election. He replied, “I am a 67-year-old lifelong Republican who is voting for Kamala Harris and other Democrats all the way down the ticket.” His immediate family of five—a mix from both parties—were all voting the same way.

Last week I spoke with a woman I’ll call Kay in Wisconsin who told me that she and her husband had decided not to vote this year. When I asked her to tell me more, it was clear how overwhelmed she felt, not knowing who or what to believe. It just felt easier and wiser to lay low and sit this one out.

Immigration was one of Kay’s top concerns. She didn’t like that so many resources were going to immigrants. “It’s a complicated issue,” I said, mentioning that Kamala Harris would sign the border bill that Trump had torpedoed. Did she have any personal experience with immigrants in her community. No—she’d just read about it. Kay also mentioned that she was unhappy about the Dobbs decision.

Kay had watched the debate, and thought that Trump was a liar and Kamala was great. I noted that what disturbed me most was how Trump constantly sowed chaos and division. Our conversation then turned to Springfield, Ohio; we agreed that Trump’s and Vance’s lies about pet-eating Haitians had brought harm to the city’s immigrant and native residents alike. We talked about lots of things, including our fondness for President Obama.

Still, Kay seemed discouraged. “Does voting matter?” she asked. “Do they even count the votes?” Yes and yes. Especially in Wisconsin!

“If you were to vote,” I asked, “Who would you vote for?”

“Oh, Kamala!” Kay replied without hesitation. So would her husband.

I said, “It breaks my heart that you feel like your voice doesn’t matter, and that you’re voluntarily letting louder people drown it out.” Kay took this in. I told her how moved I was by our conversation, that it would stay with me long after we finished talking, and I hoped she felt the same way.

“You’ve given me a lot to think about,” Kay said. “Thank you for helping me see the light.”

I do not know for sure if Kay and her husband will vote this year. But I do know that this conversation mattered, and that tens of thousands of us are making these connections, unearthing these nuggets, turning non-voters into voters every day.

Happy Birthday, Mom(ala)

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My mother and Kamala Harris share a birthday. Kamala turns 60 today, and my mother would be 101 had she not died in 1995. (No Jimmy-Carter-like hanging on to cast a vote for her, alas!)

I think of my mother a lot, and especially during momentous political times. How she would have loved to mark her ballot for Kamala! On the other hand, the prospect of Trump as president once, let alone possibly twice, would have killed my mother. Although she died far too young, I am grateful she was spared having to live in an America with him as cause and symptom. Still, I wish she were here to guide me through these times.

I think back to 1972, when I was a senior in high school and highly aware of the presidential election for the first time. I found it impossible to believe that anyone could vote for Richard Nixon, and fervently believed that George McGovern would win. Did my mother share the same delusion? Or simply not want to disturb my beautiful, naive idealism? Was she as crushed as I was? How did she keep on going? Because I know she did. We all did. Less than two years later, we broke open the champagne when Nixon was forced to resign.

I miss my beautiful, naive idealism, and I miss my mother, but of course I’ve kept on going, too. I would like to put champagne in the fridge to celebrate Kamala’s victory. I find it impossible to believe that anyone could vote for Donald Trump. But the traumas of 2016 and the MAGA-fication of the Republican Party have taught me otherwise.

Still, I am cautiously optimistic. Not delusional, but hopeful. I would love to compare notes with my mother about keeping the faith through dire times. I would love for both of us to be able to bask together in the joy and fortitude that Kamala exemplifies, to celebrate her victory.

Happy Birthday, Mom. Wish you were here, though I’m glad you are not. I will work and vote with all my heart for Kamala in honor of you.

And thank you, Kamala. Happy Birthday to you, too!

Election Countdown

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Soon after Joe Biden was declared the winner in November 2020, my husband said, “I thought we’d at least get a mental health break, but I guess not.” Trump and his allies, who’d sowed chaos and seeds of doubt about fair elections long before any votes were cast, wasted no time in spreading the Big Lie and passing lots of laws to make voting harder in swing states. Although personally and even sometimes politically we’ve had many bright spots in the last four years—2 weddings, no funerals, and no red wave in 2022!—it’s been quite a psychological slog.

My mental health improved greatly on July 21, the day President Biden announced he was stepping aside and endorsing Kamala Harris to take his place as the 2024 nominee. Before then, and especially after his disastrous debate performance, I had pretty much felt on a glide path to doom. “At least there won’t be another insurrection,” I consoled myself at the thought of Trump’s re-election.

With the coming of Kamala, hope and joy returned, along with a fighting chance. I have reveled in cat memes, rising poll numbers, a pitch-perfect convention, Taylor Swift’s endorsement, Michelle Obama, Tim Walz, Doug Emhoff, and all the Every-Identity-Group-Under-the-Sun-for-Kamala fundraisers. And whose mood didn’t improve watching an unraveling Donald Trump swallow the bait every single time in their September 10 debate?

And yet, here we are at essentially a coin toss. I feel cautiously optimistic, and also increasingly anxious. It all depends on the day’s vibes, my wish-casting, whether a new Times/Siena poll has dropped, and the number of undecided people who complain that they still don’t know enough about Kamala Harris’s plans, which I fear is a way of saying There’s no way I’ll vote for a Black woman. I feel good about reports of Harris-Walz signs in deep red towns, somebody’s ancient, rock-ribbed Republican uncle voting for Kamala. Then, on a phone bank to Michigan, a guy answers, “Are you planning to vote for Harris or Trump?” with “I would not piss on her if she were on fire. Have a good day!” At least he was polite.

So I’m pretty anxious, but living by the axiom, “Do more, worry less.” I volunteer a lot for Airlift, which raises money to support grassroots groups who excel at turning non-voters into voters in battleground states. I know a lot of people who are responding to Michelle Obama’s call to “Do Something.”

We’re doing what we can for our future. And for our mental health. Let’s bring it home in the next 35 days.

Paper of Record

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My husband and I just watched She Said, the film based on New York Times reporters Megan Twohey’s and Jodi Kantor’s investigation that brought down Harvey Weinstein and turbocharged the #MeToo Movement. We happened to see it on the same day that we’d contemplated canceling our Times subscription at least three times.

The first came when I listened to The Daily’s podcast coverage of the recent discovery of Joe Biden’s classified documents in all the wrong places. The sequel to the 2016 smash hit, “Oh, But Her Emails!,” “Documents!” is part of the breathless reporting that is one-tenth spelling out the differences between Biden’s and Trump’s behavior and nine-tenths implying nefarious intent with far, far more disturbing revelations to come. I suppose the one-tenth part counts among the Lessons Learned by responsible journalists whose hyperbolic coverage of the drip-drip-drip of Hillary’s misused server surely contributed to the mess we’re in now. Unfortunately, the greater Lesson Learned about stoking conflict to gain eyeballs, plus a misguided allegiance to “Fair and Balanced,” still triumphs. At least when Fox touted the “F&B” tagline, they knew it was ironic.

Later that day, I moved onto the Times Opinion section, only to be confronted with a column by Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s notorious campaign manager, counselor, and coiner of “alternative facts.” Why the Times would give over precious inches to a known liar and political hack was beyond me, though I shouldn’t have been surprised since that’s a fair description of what has happened to our political discourse in general over the last many years. But I would not let Kellyanne off the hook: “How’s your marriage? And your daughter?” I unkindly asked her in my mind.

As I complained to my husband about these journalistic outrages over lunch, he added a third reason to quit the Times: “They’re going after us because we both use the same log-in to read the paper. I’ve explained that we’re in the same household, but they say ‘It’s just one user per subscription.’”

That evening, which was Takeout and Movie Night, we streamed She Said. It’s a good, though not great, movie, and one well worth seeing for the importance of the story alone. And also for the décor of the New York Times: chic red walls, bright and airy workspaces, a stunning cafeteria with floor to ceiling windows.

But the aesthetics are nothing compared to the paper’s unlimited resources, including sending the intrepid reporters overnight to London. Given that no expense was spared, I couldn’t help but wonder why the Times never sprang for a couple sets of Bluetooth headphones so the reporters were not constantly on speaker phone as they walked down streets or made dinner while passersby, husbands, and kids freely listened in. (Then I realized that this was a cinematic device designed to allow the audience to hear all, not half, of the conversations with vital sources. Duh!)

Best of all was the unstinting support of everyone at the Times. While poor Ronan Farrow had to go, beggar-like, to the New Yorker, after NBC News squelched his simultaneously exploding bombshell investigation, Twohey and Kantor had a whole army of senior staff behind them. Their editor, Rebecca Corbett, not only dispensed hugs, keen advice, and chocolate almonds freely throughout; she also knew that the pursuit of a good story could cure post-partum depression. Executive Editor Dean Baquet personally and hilariously ran interference with Harvey Weinstein himself. In contrast to the workplace Weinstein turned into a house of horrors, the New York Times came off as the best employer in the world. It was hard to even recall that just last month, labor unrest roiled the Times, and those sympathetic to the workers were encouraged to eschew their Wordle addiction for the day in solidarity.

Still, the Times did good, does good, and no doubt will continue to do good, especially if they ever get over their fetish for interviewing MAGA enthusiasts in diners. We’re likely never to quit them (of course, they may boot us off first if we continue to share one subscription in our household of two). In honor of this exasperating, brilliant paper of record, I even played Wordle for the first time ever yesterday.

As for Weinstein? Well, RIP Harvey–rot in prison.