My birthday, which was on Monday, typically marks the start of a busy period for me, because I treat it a bit like New Year’s Day. I treat it not in the “It’s a fresh year full of exciting possibilities” sense, but more with an “Oh my god, I’ve gotten nothing accomplished since the last birthday, I need to get my act together and do something” perspective. That isn’t actually true, of course, but it’s motivating to think that way, and so for at least a few days I find myself immersed in organizing and catching up with a number of worthwhile subjects that got set aside for one reason or another during the past year.

That inevitably leaves me with a few days in which I have insufficient time to properly study any one subject in order to produce a useful commentary on it. Ninety percent of writing is, after all, reading and talking to people, and if I am engaged in deciding what things to read and talk to people about in the first place, I tend to have a bit of a temporary material deficit. That being the case today, I’m going to make an exception to the “one column, one subject” rule and share some notes on a couple of issues that I think should be given critical attention in the coming weeks and months.

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