There’s nothing wrong with skepticism. Skepticism can be healthy, can even save your life. But skepticism can also make you blind. So this is me begging my sons and all our sons and daughters: Just take the damn shot.

We must not be a city where everyone wants things to be different, but no one wants anything to change. Our city has to be brave enough, and confident enough, to embrace new ways of thinking and new visions of what we can be.

Unless Congress takes action, a second Arctic Refuge lease sale is mandated by the 2017 Tax Act. We urge Sen. Collins to continue leading bi-partisan efforts to protect, as she said, “these treasures for future generations.” We need her to prevent the destruction of this wildlife refuge by restoring protections now through legislative means and by encouraging her colleagues to join her.

Selectively imparting information to the public, including misinformation, while ignoring information that contradicts a desired political outcome is the stuff of cults. It also leads to a further reduction in the credibility of government and “experts” in the eyes of people they most hope to influence.

Land ownership today is considered to consist of a bundle of rights: the right to occupy, build on, log, mine, subdivide, sell, bequeath, mortgage and, above all, deny anyone else access to, a tract of earth. The complete bundle is known in Anglo-American real estate law as ownership in “fee simple.” At a national level, it’s known as sovereignty.

To his credit, President Biden is stepping up to play bad cop. He has already told federal employees to get vaccinated or undergo weekly testing and wear masks at work. He is reported to be considering setting vaccination requirements beyond the federal payroll.

What can you say about star American athletes who had no medical reason to avoid the shots and knew that the authorities in Tokyo wouldn’t let them play if they were infected?

You can say they were knuckleheads. And if their refusal to protect themselves smashed their Olympic dreams, well, my eyes are dry.

The sheer numbers here are jaw dropping. Including the $1.9 trillion so-called COVID-19 relief bill from earlier this year, Biden wants to spend nearly $6 trillion in three measures passed within months of each other. In 2019, by point of comparison, the entire federal budget was $4.4 trillion (and at the time, President Trump wasn’t exactly tightening the country’s fiscal belt).

The safety of commercial tankers, freighters and barges matters a great deal. Ships transport natural resources, food and manufactured goods; all told, they move roughly 90% of the world’s annual trade in volume and value.

The need to teach our children well — media literacy and critical thinking, in particular — has never felt more urgent. Indeed, it is not too much to call it a matter of survival. After all, the insurrection crisis threatens our country, the COVID crisis threatens our health and the climate crisis threatens the only planet we’ve got. But the misinformation crisis either caused or exacerbated them all. So the obvious epitaph if we do not survive these challenges would be ignominious, but fair:

Too stupid to live.