Acouple of months ago, I wrote an op-ed for The Progressive magazine about why President Joe Biden needs to build a bridge with young Americans. The nationally syndicated piece drew hundreds of responses from strangers agreeing with my sentiments. But I heard nothing from the one place that mattered most: the White House.

A move in Congress to require young women to register for the draft as young men are required to do has riled conservatives like Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. The issue is, for the moment at least, a theoretical one. America hasn’t drafted anyone in half a century, relying entirely on a volunteer military since 1973.

Lots of people hate Jeff Bezos because, you know, he is the richest man in the world, but I love the guy because, to begin with, I am a bibliophile and he started this incredible online bookstore where you could buy just about any work you wanted pretty darned cheap.

“Peace, Love &Ice Cream” is the motto of Ben &Jerry’s. All was sweet and good when they stuck to flavors like Phish Food and sponsored Free Cone Day. Happy cows and all that. Even conservatives could still love Chunky Monkey despite Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield having long mixed in their hippy-dippy Vermont lefty politics supporting this or opposing that. After all, even ice cream salesmen have free speech.

The U.S. economic recovery is being threatened by the COVID-19 delta variant. Increasing vaccination rates is the most important thing the U.S. can do to sustain the economy over the next few months. Beyond that, however, full recovery might require creating new vaccines against delta and other emerging variants.

The summer isn’t even halfway through and it’s already proved to be a season of deadly extremes.

We’re barely a month out from the Colonial Pipeline hacking, perpetrated by the Russian-speaking hacking group DarkSide, which left thousands of Americans without gas, preventing many from accessing food or medicine. Not long after that was the attack on JBS, the world’s largest meat supplier, which shut down multiple processing plants, perpetrated by Russian cybercriminal group REvil.

Saying no to babysitting your grandchildren might be one of the most distressing and complicated refusals in human relationships. But it’s something more retirees should do instead of serving as primary child-care givers while parents are at work.

The web of commercial ties spun between the world’s two largest economies over the past two decades is fraying. Early in the U.S. Democratic primary, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris came across as two of the least confrontational candidates on China issues. Their administration, however, is offering not so much a break with Trump-era trade tensions, as continuity and escalation.

In much of America, vaccine hesitancy has turned into vaccine defiance. Several states have banned or are considering banning demands by businesses that people show proof of vaccination. Tennessee — where only 38% of adults are fully inoculated and the COVID-19 caseload is growing fast — has gone so far as to cancel public schools’ efforts to encourage eligible children to get their shots (including flu shots). For good measure, the state has fired its medical director for vaccine programs.