Donna Ashworth is a Sunday Times best-selling Scottish poet. She came to prominence in 2020 when her poetry about the UK’s COVID-19 lockdown was read in a viral video to raise money for the NHS. She has subsequently been credited with helping poetry sales reach record levels in the UK. You can learn more about her work on her website. Source
If the Colts win this game, I will get a tattoo of Phillip Rivers on my neck! I cannot believe this game hasn’t been flexed to Sunday Night Football. This is the MOST EXCITED I’ve been for a football game in years. Phillip Rivers is 44 years old, has 44 kids and 44 is also the over / under.
This game is the stuff movies will be made of, the old legend comes out of retirement, for ONE LAST JOB. Except this one is a horror movie with blood and guts. It would be less embarrassing to forfeit. Seahawks by 1 million points.
Phil has kids older than 8 Seahawks players.
A sack will be flagged as elder abuse.
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When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America. It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “[t]he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “[t]he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”
“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”
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Kate Nagle-Caraluzzo, Executive Director, Town Hall Seattle (thanks to Mary M.)
It’s been two years since Wier Harman, our friend and former Executive Director of 17 years, passed away, and I’ve been thinking about the ways his presence still lives in this building and with me. Grief changes with time. Some memories stay close — like the things he said or the way he moved through a room — even as smaller details begin to fade. But what remains is the imprint he left on all of us, and on Town Hall.
I often picture him stepping onto the stage to introduce a speaker (too many times to count) or to moderate a conversation, always taking deep joy in being part of the exchange. And I remember how often he greeted people with a laugh, a smile, or a hug. Wier knew so many in the community, and people felt known by him in return.
His presence in the room was matched by his belief in what our historic building could become. During his 17 years of leadership, Wier shepherded the vision that ultimately became our 2017-2019 renovation — a transformation he knew would change Town Hall’s trajectory. That $35.5 million capital investment reshaped the building: greater accessibility, better sound, a structurally reinforced space to gather in, and so much more. To complete the work, we ultimately had to take a $2.5 million bridge loan we hadn’t planned on, a loan that allowed us to finish construction and reopen our doors but limited how boldly we could plan for the future.
The capital campaign was something Wier championed and carried forward for so many years. And in the last year, we’ve nearly retired the loan. We extend our deep gratitude to the donors whose generosity made the retirement of our renovation loan possible. Closing out this final piece of the campaign feels like a way to honor what Wier imagined for Town Hall’s next chapter. It strengthens our path to financial sustainability and closes a chapter so we can fully turn toward what comes next.
As part of retiring the loan, we chose a meaningful way to honor the leadership that shaped Town Hall. In the spring, we’ll name the Great Hall stage for Wier, and the iconic Oculus for our founder, David Brewster. It marks this milestone moment while paying tribute to the visionaries who shaped Town Hall and honors what comes next — new voices, new audiences, and the ideas that will define our future. If you’re interested in being part of the naming, you can learn more here.
I hope you see Wier’s legacy on stage and in our programming and feel the energy he instilled in Town Hall. I think Wier would be proud of where we are. And I hope you’re proud, too.
Ed note from AI: “Groaning types of jokes” typically refer to jokes that are so bad, obvious, or unoriginal that the listener’s response is an audible groan rather than a laugh. These are generally known as dad jokes, puns, corny jokes, or cheesy jokes.
Puns/Wordplay: These jokes rely heavily on a play on words, often forcing a connection between two different meanings of a word or between similarly sounding words. The structure is often a setup followed by a “contrived line that the punster twisted to make it fit”.
Example: “Why don’t some couples go to the gym? Because some relationships don’t work out.”
Dad Jokes: This category overlaps significantly with puns and corny jokes. They are known for being universally inoffensive, mild-mannered, and predictable, making them a staple for family gatherings where the goal is an “affiliative joke” that brings a group together through shared, mock-despair.
Example: “When does a joke turn into a dad joke? When it becomes apparent.”
Corny/Cheesy Jokes: These terms are general descriptors for jokes that are considered old-fashioned, simple, or overly sentimental, lacking originality or sophisticated humor.
Example: “I have a joke about pizza, but it’s too cheesy.”
One-Liners: While some one-liners can be great, others are considered “hacky” or groan-inducing when they rely solely on simple wordplay without any deeper narrative or clever twist.
The physical groan itself is part of the shared experience, a sign of mock disapproval that actually indicates the joke’s intended effect was achieved.
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The star of “Mary Poppins” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” still hits the gym and touches his toes.
By Jancee Dunn in the NYT (thanks to Mary Jane F.)
When I learned that Dick Van Dyke — the singing, dancing star of classic films like “Mary Poppins” — would be 100 years old next month, I knew I had to get him on the phone.
I grew up watching his movies on repeat, and I wanted to hear how he felt about hitting the century mark.
Van Dyke was born during the Coolidge administration and still remembers the ice man from his childhood who made his deliveries in a horse-drawn wagon. “I’m a super-old,” he joked.
How did he make it this far? While genetics have most likely helped, he also practices evidence-based longevity habits. He details them in his new book, “100 Rules for Living to 100: An Optimist’s Guide to a Happy Life.”
Some aspects of aging have been difficult, the Emmy, Tony and Grammy winner told me. He wears a hearing aid, and his eyesight is dimming. “When you reach 100, a lot of things don’t work too well,” he said. But “sometimes I feel like I’m 15 again,” he added.
He shared his secrets while relaxing in his Los Angeles bedroom, sipping a cup of coffee with his customary five lumps of sugar.
“Yes, you heard that right,” he said.
He stays active.
It’s well documented that regular exercise increases your chances of a long life and Van Dyke tries to move every single day. He goes to the gym three days a week to do circuit training, he said, and sometimes, as he moves from one machine to the next, he busts out a soft-shoe dance.
If he needs extra motivation to hit the gym, he said that he’ll promise himself he can have a power nap as a reward.
In between gym days, he does yoga and stretching. “The doctors can’t believe it when I touch my toes,” he said.
He commits to being playful.
Van Dyke’s approach to aging, he said, “is that I try to avoid being the ‘get off my lawn’ guy.” Instead, he taps into his sense of playfulness, which “keeps me connected to the child inside me,” he writes.
Playfulness, he told me, “gives you a sense of fun and freedom,” no matter how you feel physically. And research suggests that it lowers stress and improves well-being. Van Dyke looks for moments during the day to be playful, whether it’s chances to crack jokes or to make a toddler laugh in the supermarket line.
He also has three cats and a dog. “Pets just lift your spirits,” he said, which is a claim backed by evidence.
And he adds levity to his life by singing every day, which has been shown to reduce stress. “I hum, too,” he said. “It does everything for my mental health.”
He says yes.
Being open to new experiences as an older adult may be good for your brain health and emotional well-being. For Van Dyke, that means saying yes to things as often as you can.
When a local theater asked him to direct grade-school children, he immediately accepted. Last year he agreed to dance — nimbly, and barefoot — in a Coldplay video called “All My Love,” directed by Spike Jonze and Mary Wigmore.
It can be tempting to dwell in the past, he explained, but saying yes keeps him firmly in the present and the future.
So does having an open mind, he said. Van Dyke’s assistant uses the pronouns “they” and “them.” This “took some getting used to,” Van Dyke writes, but he said he embraced it.
It’s tempting to resist change, he added, “but you do really have to keep your mind open as you get older, especially to new ideas.”
He maintains his connections.
Keeping your social ties strong is a key to aging well, and Van Dyke makes an effort to sustain his relationships.
He told me that he’s constantly “scheming” to get his grandchildren and great-grandchildren over to his house, and that he wants his backyard to feel like a theme park. His next projects: a rope swing and a zip-line.
“Just hearing them all out there squealing gives me such joy,” he writes.
And for 25 years, Van Dyke has sung in an a cappella group called the Vantastix. The other guys are all decades younger, “which has a rejuvenating effect,” Van Dyke said.
He works hard to sustain his friendships, although he doesn’t have any pals his age. Attention, centenarians: “I’m in the market for some 100-year-old friends,” Van Dyke said.
Fortunately, his friend Mel Brooks, the director, is turning 100 next year.
And Sir David Attenborough, the British naturalist, turns 100 in May. Dick, maybe you should reach out.
“Charity (love for others) is like springtime or summertime warmth, which makes grain, grasses, and trees grow. Without charity, or spiritual warmth, nothing grows.” from Emanuel Swedenborg
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Abraham Lincoln wanted a “rebuke … to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” Sarah Josepha Hale’s suggestion for a national day of Thanksgiving provided a solution.
Though the Thanksgiving story is typically associated with the harvest feast of Pilgrims and Wampanoags in Plymouth, Mass., 404 years ago this fall, the national holiday Americans celebrate every fourth Thursday of November only began thanks to a presidential proclamation from Abraham Lincoln in 1863, the same year he delivered the Gettysburg Address.
That’s not just historical trivia. What we are meant to commemorate on Thanksgiving isn’t merely a mythologized version of our origins. It’s a celebration of American rebirth — and of the possibilities, personal and political, that go with it.
The idea for a national Thanksgiving holiday was not Lincoln’s own. It came from Sarah Josepha Hale, among the most influential Americans you’ve probably never heard of. “A partial list of Hale’s achievements on behalf of women,” wrote Melanie Kirkpatrick, Hale’s biographer, “includes leading the fight for property rights for married women, campaigning for women to be welcome as teachers in public schools, supporting medical education for women, creating the first day care center for small children and the first public playground, founding a society dedicated to increasing the wages of working women, and helping to found Vassar College,” one of the nation’s first colleges for women.
That wasn’t all Hale did. She wrote a best-selling antislavery novel. She spent decades as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the most widely circulated magazine in the United States before the Civil War. She wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” And, beginning in the 1840s, she petitioned president after president to make Thanksgiving a national holiday.
Why was Hale obsessed with setting a national date for Thanksgiving? “There is a deep moral influence in these periodical seasons of rejoicing in which a whole community participates,” she wrote in 1835. But her purposes were also political: a national holiday, she argued, could help preserve the Union. Among her fiercest opponents, unsurprisingly, were Southerners who thought that designating a holiday was an issue for the states to decide.
In September 1863, following the Union’s victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Hale again petitioned the president for an “annual Thanksgiving” to have “a National and fixed Union Festival.” In Lincoln and William Seward, his secretary of state, she found receptive ears. On Oct. 3, Lincoln proclaimed “a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.”
The proclamation, drafted by Seward, is somewhat verbose. It extols American plenty even amid the carnage of war. “Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the shuttle or the ship.” But there are also unmistakably Lincolnian touches. It speaks of “our national perverseness and disobedience,” implores “the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation,” and commends “to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers.”
Those lines would echo, more poetically and profoundly, in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. They are also of a piece with Lincoln’s larger political project, which went beyond saving the Union or even abolishing slavery.
It was about the perpetuation of our political institutions — the subject of Lincoln’s first significant political speech, at the age of 28, in Springfield, Ill., in 1838. How does one keep faith with the spirit that animated the founding of a liberal republic once the founders are long dead? How does one establish a “rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression,” as he put it in an 1859 letter in honor of Thomas Jefferson?
Part of the answer, Lincoln believed, lay in ritual. In 1838 he had spoken of the need to create a “political religion of the nation,” to which “the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.” In 1863, Hale supplied him with an ingenious solution: a festival in which everyone could — and would want to — participate, not from a sense of obligation but with a feeling of joy.
That’s the genius of the holiday. Nobody — except your uncle — likes to talk about politics at the Thanksgiving table. Nobody should need to, either, because the occasion itself is inherently political. It’s an opportunity for families and friends and, by extension, communities, states and the country itself, to have a national reset. It’s when we remember that we can still be capable of setting everyday arguments aside, of recalling common bonds, of indulging a soft patriotism that’s also potent because it’s so unobjectionable. Thanksgiving, far more than the star-spangled Fourth of July, is what makes us Americans all over again.
That was also the spirit of the Gettysburg Address, another purported act of remembrance of the dead that is, in fact, an opportunity for rededication by the living — a “new birth of freedom.” The question for successive generations of Americans is: What kind of freedom should it be?
For Lincoln, the new birth meant saving government of, by, and for the people, and a nation where all are equal. For Hale, it meant extending the boundaries of opportunity for women. For Thomas Edison, it was about advancing the reach of science: In 1877, just 14 years after the first national Thanksgiving and while Hale was still alive, he read “Mary Had a Little Lamb” for the first-ever phonograph recording.
Down the generations, what we can most give thanks for isn’t just abundance. It’s the abundance of freedom, created by people for whom possibility and renewal, even in a world of bitterness, was theirs — and ours — to seize.
Since six lawmakers released a video last week reminding servicemembers that they must refuse to carry out unlawful orders, Trump and his loyalists have continued to insist that such a reminder is “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR… punishable by DEATH!”
Their argument appears to be that by reiterating the law, the lawmakers implied that Trump has issued unlawful orders and therefore that they made troops question their orders and thus directly attacked the chain of command. It’s a convoluted argument, one that administration officials are using to claim that the lawmakers’ reminder that troops must not obey an unlawful order is actually encouragement not to obey lawful orders.
Administration officials insist that the lawmakers’ video is an attack on Trump because all of his orders have been lawful, although lawyers, lawmakers, and military personnel have expressed concerns about the legality of the administration’s deadly strikes on civilians in small boats near Venezuela.
This morning, the administration escalated its attacks on the lawmakers. The social media account of the “Department of War” posted that the department is investigating Captain Mark Kelly, a retired Navy officer who is now a Democratic senator from Arizona and who participated in the video, after “serious allegations of misconduct.” It suggested that Kelly, a retired Navy officer, could be recalled to active duty “for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures.”
Turning to military tribunals harks back to QAnon, a conspiracy theory that took off in 2017. It maintained Trump was leading a fight against an international ring of pedophiles that he would bring to justice through military tribunals. As recently as during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump called for those he perceives to be his enemies to be prosecuted in military tribunals, saying, for example, that former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) was “guilty of treason” because she participated in the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump’s social media page has been reposting QAnon sayings.
Attacking Kelly appeals to Trump’s base, but it was impetuous. As law professor John Pfaff noted: “There’s clearly no adult in the room to say ‘wait, maybe don’t go after the charismatic war hero turned literal astronaut who ran [for office] after his wife was a victim of political violence.’” On social media, a post circulated showing a picture of Kelly in his dress uniform juxtaposed with a photograph of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth guzzling from a bottle; the caption compared Kelly’s “shirt covered with medals” with Hegseth’s “shirt covered with booze.”
Kelly punched back. He posted on Facebook: “When I was 22 years old, I commissioned as an Ensign in the United States Navy and swore an oath to the Constitution. I upheld that oath through flight school, multiple deployments on the USS Midway, 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm, test pilot school, four space shuttle flights at NASA, and every day since I retired—which I did after my wife Gabby was shot in the head while serving her constituents.
“In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much.
“Secretary Hegseth’s tweet is the first I heard of this. I also saw the President’s posts saying I should be arrested, hanged, and put to death.
“If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work. I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”
In a conversation with MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow, Kelly was less formal: “I’ve had a missile blow up next to my airplane,” he told her. “I’ve been…nearly shot down multiple times. I’ve flown a rocket ship into space four times, built by the lowest bidder, and my wife Gabby Giffords, meeting with her constituents, shot in the head. Six people killed around her. A horrific thing. She spent six months in the hospital. We know what political violence is, and we know what causes it, too…. The statements that Donald Trump made… incite others…. He should be careful with his words. But I’m not going to be silenced here…. I’m going to show up for work every day, support the Constitution, do my job, hold this administration accountable, hold this president accountable when he is out of line. That’s the responsibility of every U.S. senator and every member of Congress. He’s not going to silence us.”
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Thanksgiving is here—that magical week of joy, chaos, and family members who can somehow turn small talk into a UN summit.
Here are a few things that might help you survive the holiday: viral updates, food safety tips (yes, bird flu is hitting turkeys), navigating tricky conversations, and a poll for the most important debate of the season: store-bought or homemade cranberry sauce.
We also touch on the opioid settlement, which sends $7 billion to communities, the Department of Education removing public health degrees from “professional” status, and, as always, some great scientific news.
Infectious disease “weather report”
Colds, fevers, and coughs(also known as influenza-like illnesses, or ILI) are just getting started and haven’t reached the epidemic threshold. That’s great news heading into Thanksgiving, as there’s simply less circulating illness than in previous years, which means a lower chance of getting sick and fewer last-minute cancellations at your table.
Covid-19 levels remain very low nationally. I expect activity to pick up soon and peak around January. (continued on Page 2 or here)
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