What’s happening in New York — and is being replicated at the federal level and in Georgia in the 2020 election cases — is law as blood lust. It is a rejection of the Anglo-American legal tradition as it has developed over the centuries to enshrine neutrality and fair play in favor of something that is more personalized and illiberal.

If you are old, you remember countless other falling-outs, other miserable patches with people you love, where peace was restored. I believe in the resiliency of relationships, even if I struggle not to be initially devastated every time I disappoint someone.

It doesn’t take a law degree to know that the appearance of impropriety can be just as damaging as the real thing. Sometimes worse.

Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine began in 2004 with a covert attempt to subvert Ukraine’s 2004 national election and install a Putin puppet. Putin failed. Suddenly, the Russian despot had a czarist nightmare on his border — a food-exporting Slavic state with democratic aspirations and high-tech expertise.

In the aftermath of “from the river to the sea” anti-Israel protests on many college campuses and in the streets comes a perfectly timed book by Johns Hopkins University Professor Benjamin Ginsberg, titled “The New American Anti-Semitism: The Left, The Right, and the Jews.”

The current presidential campaign is becoming a grand drama of dueling versions of reality, with us, the voters, sitting in the jury box, hoping to witness some semblance of justice.

It’s difficult to predict how a Ukrainian defeat would reverberate. Abandoning allies in a humiliating fashion has unpredictable consequences. When we cut lose South Vietnam in the 1970s, it catalyzed an anti-Western offensive around the world, and Joe Biden’s botched pull-out from Afghanistan may have tempted Putin into Ukraine.

Ukraine’s desire to be a sovereign state of its own and, in particular, to align itself with the hated West is intolerable for Putin. He’s explained at great length why he believes Ukraine has no legitimacy as an independent nation, and his model of a neo-tsarism where elections are fake and opposition leaders die in Arctic prisons would be threatened by a Ukraine that successfully embraced a version of the Western model.

In this age of individualism, just saying no at the start may help a lot of us avoid another addiction, this one to the blue glow of the computer, or “device,” as techies call it. Unlike many addictive drugs, the blue light is legal. And it may be as addictive as opioids.