Boomers vs millennials, vaccinations and gratitude

I listened to an interesting podcast by Ezra Klein (who works for the New York Times), in which he talked to Jill Filipovic (a left leaning lawyer and activist) and Helen Andrews (a right leaning journalist) about the generational fissure that has developed between the “boomers” (born in the 1950s and the early 60s) and the “millennials” (born in the 1980s to the mid 90s). There is a great millennial rage in America today that can be summarized as “Ok boomer, let’s talk about how your generation’s self-obsession and narcissism left my generation behind.”

Are the boomers leaving the world better than they found it? Are the millennials a self-pitying lot who want to blame everything on everyone else? Here’s a summary of what I heard.

Boomers are possibly the most intellectually and politically polarized generation. They have always stayed split down the middle between the left and the right. So, the argument heard from boomers (especially the left liberal ones) is that “Hold on. No generation is perfect. There were political forces in our generational cohort who didn’t do the right thing for America and the future generations. So, let’s not blame the entire generation.” There is some fairness to this defensiveness. As things turned out in America over the last five or six decades, the liberals won the culture battles and the conservatives won the political wars. Even so, it’s a stretch to say that the boomers have left things better than they found it. The fact is we are now living on a planet that is flooding and burning.

The great mistake, if we can call it that, of the liberal boomer politicians was their transformation from being champions of the working class to becoming warriors in identity battles. The old left became the new left in the 1970s, and it left the American middle class at the mercy of the libertarian and conservative decision makers, who used the opportunity to systematically hollow out the working class during the Reagan years, and then performed a volte face by claiming to be the working class champions during the Trump years. The clashes between the boomers and the millennials have somehow led us to Joe Biden, who’s a pre-boomer and from the old left, as the POTUS, an astonishing turn of events.

The other reality is that America is a much more diverse society than it was when the boomers were growing up and watching “Leave it to Beaver.” We have more immigrants from more countries. We are much more racially diverse. We are now in fertile territory to be more creative than ever. Technology has played a huge role in fostering this creativity. The millennials are taking to new forms of expression on social media like ducks to water, and using it to educate the boomers who grew up amidst comfort and in a monoculture. This is indeed a positive offshoot of technology.

It is important to note that the leaders of movements in the 60s and 70s were not boomers. Martin Luther King Jr was not a boomer. Neither were Gloria Steinem or Malcolm X. Boomers were the foot soldiers in their movements. They showed up. They put their bodies on the line. But, they did not come up with the intellectual underpinnings of such great movements, which changed America profoundly.

The boomers, as a generation, may have committed their most egregious faults when it came to higher education. They were that generation in which college educated Americans went from under 10% to over 30% and yet on their watch, college education costs have skyrocketed. It’s almost as if the boomers have climbed to the top and pulled the ladder up behind them. We now face a situation where the millennials are destined to be less affluent than their parents and even their grandparents. The millennials who are relatively lucky – folks who graduated from college, members of a professional class, etc – are going to be okay. The problem is that there are so many members of the millennial generation who are Black and Brown who are going to do much worse than the previous generations.

The boomers are accused of dismantling the church and shredding the concepts of marriage and families. Personally, I don’t see these as problems. These institutions are old, imperfect and not all of them are beloved anyway. Surveys show that the millennials view marriage differently from previous generations. They marry in their thirties but have had the stablest marriages in half a century. They tend to have happy marriages. They view marriage as a capstone rather than as a cornerstone. Marriage isn’t a place from which millennials build life. Rather, it is something that arrives when they’ve put the other pieces in place. This approach has unleashed a tidal wave of women participating in the workforce. At the same time, millennial women are on track to have 25 percent of them be childless. They have been left to handle this biological reality largely on their own, without much help. As people like to point out, there are more dogs than children in San Francisco now.

The real failure of the boomer generation was not in that they weakened institutions, but in that they did not replace these older institutions with something different and something that would support those who followed them, especially when it came to things like race and gender. The work of building a country that hosts a variety of viewpoints and people who want different things, and strains to meet their aspirations remains an unfinished business.

In other news, I got vaccinated today 🙂 We took the Johnson and Johnson shot, a single dose vaccine. All good so far, other than a feeling of low key simmering and mild internal heat (not quite a fever). I guess I’m done with the vaccine until they tell us that we will need to do this again. It feels incredible even now when I look back on the last 12 months. Back in April last year, I watched the numbers at work crater and the business fall off a cliff. There was a moment I thought that everything was about to go under. A year later, we are still here, standing on our feet, a little shaken, but most things are okay, even stronger in many ways. Not to mention, the providential escape we had last November when Biden won the election. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have Trump in charge of distributing vaccines and restoring normalcy. More miraculously, we now have several vaccines, all of which are showing that they can reduce hospitalization and death rates to nearly zero. It’s like we narrowly escaped being struck by a meteor. Now more than ever, as we see the light emerging at the end of the tunnel, it’s a time to be grateful and humble and get vaccinated and find our way out of danger.

Stay safe. Please get vaccinated as soon as you can. Have a wonderful week ahead.

Friedman, Hemingway, and Happy Easter!

No popular idea ever has a single origin. But the idea that the sole purpose of a corporation is to make money for its shareholders got going in a big way when Milton Friedman authored an Op-Ed in the New York Times on September 13, 1970. Friedman was a Nobel Prize winning economist from the Chicago school of economics, and has been celebrated as “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century, and possibly all of it.” In that ferocious Times piece, Friedman argued that any business executive who pursued any goal other than making money for the corporation’s shareholders was an “unwitting puppet of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of free society these past decades.” You could choose either equality or freedom, but not both, he argued.

Friedman has a lot to answer for. His idea may be the most injurious one to have seized America’s imagination in a long while. The story of a corporation with responsibilities to its employees and the community in which it operates became fiction. The real owners are the shareholders, he said. If an ordinary person said that he bore no responsibility to his family or his neighbors or the town in which he lived, he would be (rightly) described as a sociopath. Friedman’s idea had the effect of turning companies into sociopathic, toxic money making bodies with no souls. His ideas deeply influenced Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who, arguably, were more responsible for the destruction of the middle class and urban communities in their countries than any other leader in the modern era.

Last week, Joe Biden sounded the beginning of a new era. On top of the already gargantuan three trillion dollars in stimulus spending over the last year plus four trillion dollars that will be spent by the Fed on buying back government debt, Biden announced his plan to spend another two trillion dollars on infrastructure. Nancy Pelosi has promised to get it through Congress by the Fourth of July. In many ways, America stands at the crossroads of history now, with tough choices ahead. Are we really going to have to choose between freedom and equality, like Friedman said? Nah, I don’t think so. In fact, our choice is increasingly between a socialist democracy and autocracy. Any approach that doesn’t address the festering inequality in American society today will surely and directly lead the country back into the arms of Trump and Trump clones. Biden’s plan is smart. It is grand. It is exciting. It will create jobs, inject much needed pride back into America, and save us from falling prey to demagogues. It is exactly what the doctor ordered to cure the malaise that has gripped America over the last two decades. Biden may well go down in history as one of the great Presidents. Who’d have thunk this, even a short six months ago?

Nearly twenty percent of US dollars ever created in the history of America were created in 2020! Which brings me to this question: Is it really possible to spend our way into equality, freedom and prosperity? This question will be posed in many different ways and forms by our Republican friends on Capitol Hill in the months to come. It is the defining economic question of our times. The answer is lengthy and complex. The short answer, or at least my opinion, is: As long as the US dollar maintains its status as the global currency of choice, America should be in a position to fund itself for a very long time.

But, as powerful as the US government is, there is only so long they can keep the spending going before interest rates rise and make it too burdensome to pull it off. At some point, inflation may spike, leading to political headaches for the government. However, the rise of technology is a powerful deflationary force and will likely keep inflation in check for a long time. For example, a taxi ride to the airport costs way less today than it did 20 years back, thanks to Uber and Lyft. It will cost even less 20 years from now. Some day, it may even be free.

Yes, we are passing the bills onto future generations. But, look on the bright side. With interest rates this low, the bill isn’t as big as it could have been. In any case, the alternative – not doing the fiscal stimulus to keep society afloat during crises, restart the economy by investing in infrastructure and clean energy, and address inequality by generating jobs, helping underprivileged communities, etc – would likely sock future generations with far worse consequences.

We are on our way to Universal Basic Income. No, the people are not going to stop working when it becomes mainstream. Most of us want to be valued and we will find ways to be useful. And no, not all of us will become entrepreneurs. Most of us are risk averse and that won’t change overnight. But, it will free up time for us, and free time is a key driver of innovation. We may see society wide benefits from a few more geniuses having more free time, even if more of us use it to play video games.

In a letter from January 1926, Ernest Hemingway reflected on his conversion to Catholicism. Although he was clear that he was “not what is called a good Catholic,” and loathed being labeled a “Catholic writer,” he could not “imagine taking any other religion seriously.” Hemingway had a famously dichotomous relationship with Catholicism. He was flippant about the church and piety, yet attended Mass, made pilgrimages and venerated saints. A few months after that letter, Hemingway wrote a little known story (in the form of a play) called “Today is Friday.” It is his most explicitly Catholic work, and in many ways the story of his own faith. The characteristically punchy and pithy narrative is about three soldiers drinking in a bar, drinking after Christ’s crucifixion. One soldier wonders why Christ didn’t save himself. And another replies, “He didn’t want to. That’s not his play.” As with Hemingway’s characters, they are dark, troubled and ambivalent. The first soldier, now heavily drunk, muses that the cross isn’t bad when they (including Jesus) are lifted upright. “When the weight starts to pull on ‘em, that’s when it gets ‘em.” The soldier is talking about physical pain. But Hemingway might as well be talking about despair and depression. Of all the Biblical stories he could have written about, this one seems apt. Hemingway was a writer of suffering, despair and the feelings we hold deep in our hearts away from the gaze of the world.

Happy Easter! Stay safe and have a great week ahead.

Storytelling, Marshall Plan for moms, self-actualization

We are, as a species, addicted to stories. We tell stories all the time to ourselves and anyone else who will listen. Even when we go to sleep, our mind stays up, telling stories to itself. Storytelling is, in a fundamental sense, our raison d’etre. It is part of human design and it is what makes living bearable. Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It is an ancient past time. It’s not hard to visualize the first men and women sitting around a fire, gazing at the stars, wondering where it all came from, and telling each other stories to comfort themselves.

Over the years, I’ve collecting advice on the art and the science of storytelling. Yes, while great stories come from the heart, they are crafted in the mind. I figured I’d share a nugget each week from my learnings on ‘how to tell a story.’ Who knows, this may inspire you to write a story yourself. Since this is the first of its kind today, I’ll start with ‘How to prepare to tell a story.’

Storytelling, like life, involves making a lot of choices. The first one is between having a structured plot line and winging it and making it up as the story evolves. You could work it all out ahead of time or simply surrender to the moment and see where it goes. Regardless of whether you decide to flesh the plot out or not, there are essential questions you must answer before you can put pen to paper. Who is the protagonist? Who is the narrator? The interesting thing about stories is that these two are not always the same. In life, we like to think of ourselves as the protagonists and the narrators. But, we have to wonder. Is it me who is narrating my story or is it the world that is telling a piece of its story through me? As is the case with such questions, the answer is both.

Once you’ve answered the ‘Who’ question, then come the rest of the 5 Ws: What, When, Where and Why. What is it about? When does it take place? Where does it happen? Chronologically, where does the story start? In the middle and goes backwards? Or, is it linear with a beginning, a middle and an end? Why do the things that happen in the story happen? Is there a guiding principle, a moral arc or an invisible hand that guides the events? Is anyone in charge? Storytelling is creation itself; creating order from chaos and something from nothing. It is diving into a sea of meaninglessness and emerging with pearls of meaning. It is the greatest metaphor for life itself. There are really no rules. There are only choices. You do not have to start from the beginning. You can start anywhere you like. But, remember: all stories always start in the middle. There is always a backstory. Even the story of your life doesn’t start with your birth. It comes in the middle of the stories of your parents, and theirs in the middle of their parents, and so it goes. There is only one rule: The story must be evocative. There is nothing more tragic than a story that is either unfinished or forgotten or both. Next week, I’ll get into ‘characters’ and what it takes to introduce them and bring them to life.

Reshma Saujani is angry, frustrated, tired and determined. Angry at the enormous damage the pandemic has done to women. Frustrated that the pandemic has set back progress of the last thirty years. Tired from her own struggles to balance life and work and determined to continue her mission to close the gender gap in tech. She’s spent the past year engaged in the same epic juggling of millions of single moms across America – trying to work a fulltime job while managing remote learning for a young child while trying to cook a meal everyone will eat while helping her aged parents. She’s also one of the fortunate women with more resources and support than most. She is the CEO of Women Who Code. And she has a radical idea that she calls the Marshall Plan for Moms. A central feature of the plan, and also its most controversial aspect, is a call to provide monthly payments of $2,400 to moms in need. The daughter of Indian refugees from Uganda (who escaped when Idi Amin unleashed genocide), her proposal caught the attention of the Biden administration and some aspects have already made it into the two trillion dollar stimulus plan that passed recently. These are the stories of our times.

I’ve been mulling the general problem of why being creative gets harder as we age. The short version of the answer I’ve arrived at is “baggage.” Beyond a certain age (the mid forties), we become enmeshed in a vicious loop. To be creative and valuable so we can make money and have time, we need to clear the baggage we’ve accumulated till then. But, we need to accumulate enough money and time first before we can clear the decks. Very few escape this loop. This loop is a fundamentally hard problem to solve. Aggressively insisting on beliefs like ‘you’re never too old’ for this or that, or that ‘you’re only as old as you feel’ can feel tediously delusional. Yes, with the right mindset, you can stay mentally alive and (say) learn a new language or musical instrument or acquire new athletic prowess. But, you’ll likely do no more than improve your mental and physical health, while producing some outcomes that will, at best, cause younger people in their prime to politely applaud. “Look, this middle aged dude ran a marathon. How sweet.” Mere mindset shifts are just ways to buy graceful aging and not eternal youth or immortality, which are even more dubious things to purchase anyway.

What if I am bored with or not interested in immortality and eternal youth, but want to do more than just age gracefully? What if I don’t want to repeat or level-up whatever I have already done in my 20s and 30s? What if I want to do something that explores the interesting-ness potential of my accumulated experiences? What if I don’t want to throw everything away and start afresh? A clean sheet condition is too boring, frankly. A case of throwing the old man out with the bathwater.

George Lucas was so successful in his 30s that he described his Act 2 as being able to “afford to make bad movies for the rest of my life.” I have neither succeeded spectacularly like Lucas, nor have I failed miserably that it’s an easy call to toss it all aside. I’m interested in an approach that makes the baggage an asset that is neither good nor bad. In what sense can my baggage be an asset that allows me to craft an Act 2 that nobody else can take on, instead of turning into a sad old bore endlessly trying to top my Act 1? I don’t have clear answers yet but I have a sense for what it might be about.

We tend to view the first acts of our lives as about acquiring “experience.” But, that’s not quite it. Most experience is useless. What we call ‘becoming more experienced’ is really about getting used up or worn down. We get to bank unique but unremarkable memories that make us feel increasingly different from everyone else, even though we are actually becoming indistinguishable from everyone else. Our experiences put us in a black hole in which we are actually in close proximity with others and yet feel deeply disconnected. A hell in which you’re unique just like everyone else. This leads to alienation. The only experiences that actually count in our lives are those that fork us away from others but teach us about how we are actually like everyone else. This leads to self actualization or self awareness or some localized state of nirvana. Awareness arises from our common humanity and not from our freak show talents. We are alone in both awareness and alienation, but feel lonely only in the latter.

Stay safe and have a wonderful week ahead.

Blue Bloods, Pain avoidance and happiness seeking

We’ve been watching “Blue Bloods,” a CBS show about cops, for a while. Frank Reagan (played by Tom Selleck) is the patriarch of the Reagans and the police commissioner of New York city, who presides over a Sunday dinner attended by his two sons, one who’s a beat cop and another who’s a detective, his daughter the assistant district attorney, their children, and Frank’s dad, the former commish of NYC. Each family member brings their experience of the week and opinions to the table and that makes for interesting dinner conversation (and eventually a lecture from Frank 🙂 ). Kinda like the Cosby show in some ways and everyone is a cop in the family. Sure, the show can be a tad smug (“You bleeding hearts have no idea how hard it is be a cop out there and put yourself in harm’s way”), casually dismissive of complex issues such as racism (“If you won’t let the cops help you, don’t blame the cops for your problems”), but it is touching in the way the family bands together in spite of all that is said and done in the heat of the moment. If I had guessed a year back that a Republican leaning show about a New York city cop family would be the one show we’d regularly watch together as a family, I’d have dismissed it as crazy. It’s a far cry from “The Great British Baking Show,” an old favorite at home. And yet, here we are.

I am at the stage in life when I have actually and seriously been thinking about retirement and planning for it and such. One could argue that I should have been planning for it ten or twenty years ago, but that never came about. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t plan to hang up the boots anytime soon, but I can see that I am clearly on the runway now. Naturally, money is a big piece of the retirement puzzle. So, I’ve been thinking about money in general of late.

There are all kinds of ideas about money.

There’s the utilitarian idea of money as “a problem to be solved.” By this, I mean that what we really want is a full tank of gas and money happens to be the thing we need to make a full tank of gas happen. There are probably other clever ways of getting the gas tank filled but the least convoluted one involves paying money for it. In other words, we have a number of problems we’d like solved, and a straightforward way to solve those problems is to solve the problem of getting money into our bank accounts.

There’s the classic sales and marketing idea of “People use money to buy only two things – happiness and pain relief.” People are looking for all kinds of ways and means to avoid their pain. Marketing is all about getting people to part with their money on the promise that you’ll alleviate their pain at least temporarily. Sales and marketing are hard jobs to do because no one likes to be reminded of their pain and problems. So you have to do this whole song and dance routine where you’re trying to keep their minds off problems and getting them to envision a state that comes after the pain has been avoided but really telling them that there is no other way to avoid pain than to throw some cash your way. The relief of having avoided pain morphs into what passes off as happiness.

If you’re paying money for something, there is a fair chance you’re seeking to avoid some pain or the other. It’s hard to find pure, unadulterated examples to support the old adages, “money doesn’t buy happiness” and “the greatest pleasures in life are free.” Sure, gorgeous sunsets are free but someone somewhere had to suffer some pain in getting you to the beach on time and into the right spot. There’s always some money throwing connected to pain avoidance going around.

There’s the idea from economics of money simply being debt. The US national debt is about 16 trillion dollars or thereabouts. It represents in many ways the “net amount of accrued national pain” we have experienced and continue to bear. We print money every year commensurate with the pain we collectively experience. The bad news is that pain and aversion to pain inflate if we allow them to inflate. The national debt rises steadily without pause each year. But there is hope. They also deflate. If we can tame our aversions a bit, perhaps we can spend a little less money each year. Sort of like a low-cash diet, which eventually helps conquer the sugar-highs of spending. If each of us did this, perhaps we could free up enough money so we can give it to the right people so they can aim it at the right pains and they too could be rid of pain someday.

Money is the currency of pain, not happiness. When we act from desires that cannot be re-characterized as pain avoidance in any obvious way, it tends to result in happiness that is achieved without any recourse to money. So, we have a currency problem here. That which we have been told to diligently accumulate over our lives, as much as we can, turns out to be ultimately currency that can procure only pain pills. But, happiness is, in many ways, how others experience the wealth you helped create that relieves pain for them. The natural forms of happiness experienced by people who you helped avoid pain are trust, gratitude, loyalty and other relationship outcomes. These are the currencies of happiness. They cannot be encashed. They can only be reinvested and they must be.

Pain relief is no doubt an important part of happiness seeking. But, there’s much more to happiness that lies beyond mere relief. Most of us, who are in a position to, plan for a comfortable retirement. But, which of us is planning for a happy one?

As always, stay safe. Have a wonderful week ahead.

The Queen’s Ambit, Paul Dirac, and the Trek

This week last year, the world changed.

This week this year, the world may have changed for the English monarchy.

Walter Bagehot, the Victorian era journalist, divided the English constitution into two parts, the dignified and the efficient. The House of Lords and the monarchy were the dignified parts, designed to serve as reminders of a once glorious past and to impress upon the unsophisticated populace with the authority and the importance of the state. The cabinet and the House of Commons were the efficient parts, where the affairs of the state were transacted by ordinary businessmen using the authority granted to them by the dignified parts. The ceremonial and the political parts of the English government are antitheses of each other and exist in a strange equilibrium. The one is opposed to the other as pleasure is to business, as emptiness is to substance, as illusion to reality, and as diplomacy to plain speaking. Royal ceremonies – coronations, jubilees, weddings – are pleasant and extravagant but essentially ephemeral, devoid of anything meaningful other than that which is sentimental, colorful and evocative. They are so far away from the world of politics and governance and other serious business that they have never been subject to much scrutiny. All that might have changed last week with Harry and Meghan, aka the Sussexes, sitting down with Oprah Winfrey to spill some tea on the inner workings of the English royalty.

As it turns out (and not all that surprisingly), the English royalty and their staff comprise deeply flawed people with rigid and regressive attitudes. If Harry and Meghan are to be believed (which I do), racism is well and alive inside the halls of the Buckingham Palace. In the interview, Harry mentioned that there was even concern expressed at one point about what had to be done if the couple’s baby was born with “a darker skin.” His wife, Meghan Markle, is an American of mixed ancestry. The young couple’s outpouring to Oprah was extraordinary and breathtaking in that it seems that none of us (not even a prince born in a royal family) is immune from being subjected to bigotry and malice.

Later in the week, Buckingham Palace responded to the allegations tersely, saying that they will be “addressed by the family privately.” Bagehot said of the monarchy, “Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.” Well, the daylight is in. The issues could not have been raised in a more public manner than in an interview with one of America’s biggest stars, Oprah Winfrey. I don’t know who needs to hear this but there are queens and there is the one and the only real Queen on this planet. Her name is Oprah.

All this daylight has illuminated a monarchy that is finding the modern world to be a difficult place and a Britain struggling to find its way between right and wrong. I am sure that it must have been hard for Harry and Meghan to avoid getting into this situation in the first place. No one likes to snitch on their families. It is one of those things we learn when we are young. Also, we must remember that we have heard only one side of the story. But, the palace’s insistence on handling this explosive matter “privately” suggests a lack of awareness that times have changed. When Princess Diana, Harry’s mother, died in 1997, the royal response was seen as muted, insensitive and uncaring. Although this is quite a different situation, the lessons learned from the challenges of an independent minded young woman like Diana joining a family (a royal one, nonetheless), should have been applied. Indeed, that vexing blindness of “the Firm,” as the monarchy is called, forms the crux of Harry’s grievances.

The latest polls show that the interview has had little impact on public opinion. This means that we’re not likely to hear calls for the end of the monarchy anytime soon. Republicanism never really took roots in the UK and has always been a bridge too far for the Brits. On the other hand, more than half of those aged between 18 and 24 feel sympathy for H & M. That is telling and doesn’t bode well for the longer term future of the monarchy. I wonder how the colored peoples of the Commonwealth countries, which provide some sustenance and much prestige to the English royalty, feel about all of this.

I am inexplicably reminded of the Bristol-born physicist Paul Dirac, about whom I read this anecdote in Paul Halpern’s delightful “The Quantum Labyrinth,” a book on physicists and their lives. Dirac was notoriously (or, famously?) reticent. He was most likely to answer yes or no, no matter what questions were posed to him. One story of his reluctance to speak full sentences involved his wife, Manci, who also happened to be the sister of Eugene Wigner, another physicist. At a gathering, Dirac introduced his wife as the “sister of Wigner,” implying that he didn’t know her otherwise. Luckily, brevity and simplicity are friends in physics and mathematics. But not so much in royalty and the affairs of the state. If Her Majesty keeps up this “dignified part” that Bagehot neatly described, we might as well christen her Elizabeth the Silent.

I’ve been watching a fair amount of Star Trek in the last few months. The last series I watched, back in the early 1990s when I was still new to America, was Deep Space Nine (the best Trek till date, in my book). CBS has added two series in the last few years – Star Trek: Discovery, and Star Trek: Picard, both of which are riveting and worth watching. The Star Trek franchise has always struck a deeper chord within me, much more so than the Star Wars one. For the longest time, I thought of Star Trek and Star Wars as America’s mythologies, the aspirational fantasies of a fledgling society. The more I’ve thought through them, the more I’m inclined to look on them as the exact opposite, sort of “anti-mythologies,” if you will. Gene Rodenberry, the show’s creator, had a vision that was created from the post-Atomic horror of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the World War. It illustrates that if mankind is to survive, we must unite in a very fundamental way. The latest series – Discovery and Picard – are extensions of that vision. Though a little more histrionic and melodramatic than usual Treks, they reach for profundity with confidence. They are Treks that take place, for the first time, in broken worlds. No more are there benign bureaucracies of yore waiting to be saved from invaders, bad apples and disasters. They explore the ideas of salvage and redemption. The idea that we must make the most of what we have in a world in which there is increasingly less to be found. Commander Data muses (in a memorable cameo), “Peace, love, friendship. These are precious, because we know they cannot endure.”

Live long and prosper, my friends. Stay safe and have a great week ahead.