Our brief life on earth

Sam Smith – With my 89^th birthday less than two months away, I’ve been thinking about how many of my life’s experiences are soon to disappear. Fortunately, I’ve been a writer so many will still be somewhere online or in print  but I’ve come to think of life as much like the scores of jazz gigs I played when I was younger but now can’t remember at all.  And I started journalism as a radio reporter often writing nine newscasts a day, telling tales that would within hours no longer considered worth remembering.

It’s a part of life’s story – our temporary nature - that doesn’t get as much attention as it should.  We are all temporary on this earth.

I’m married to a historian so I’ve learned not to ignore this. I go from day to day trying to remember important things that no longer qualify as news but help tell the story of our lives. I’ve also kept account of how many friends, relatives, news makers, or just good folk I knew  who have passed away and the number has passed 200.

Some days, weeks, months or years ahead, I will also have passed away but I’ve at least left some tales and experiences where they can still be found. I feel good about this and urge you to tell your own stories while there is still time.

• Tales from your editor's past
• Multitudes: The unauthorized memoirs of the editor (More in left column)

Environment

Democratic Conservation Alliance - For nearly 50 years, the Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been a nonpartisan, conservation-first effort to save America’s most treasured and vulnerable species — but now Trump has ended ALL protections other than outright physical harm for grizzly bears, bison, sea turtles, and so many more beloved species.  What's that mean? It means habitats that keep these animals alive can be destroyed for profits, their food supplies can be poisoned with hazardous waste, and more. And no one is coming to save these species... unless we act for them.

Mail ballot voting

Newsworthy News - On August 24, 2026, the Supreme Court issued an emergency order that let the administration proceed, for now, with parts of its mail-ballot policy while lawsuits continue. The order did not decide the final legality of the rule. It lifted one block but left other limits in place around the country. The mixed result created a patchwork. Some states faced new steps. Other states continued under injunctions from lower courts that viewed the policy as unlawful.

The administration’s legal theory frames the United States Postal Service as a gatekeeper for secure ballot mail. Supporters say postal rules on lists and barcodes help detect fraud and protect chain of custody. Two justices argued the Postal Service has broad mail security powers that can include ballot handling standards. They said there is a strong interest in enforcing the rule while cases move ahead. That view did not control the Court but signals a serious legal debate. More

Reading scores starting to improve

The Hill -  Reading scores are starting to see an increase across the board after years of stagnation following COVID-19, a new study says, a hopeful sign in the long battle to improve literacy among U.S. students. Reading scores in grades K through 8 cut the gap from pre-pandemic levels by one-third in the past year, according to data from NWEA, an education research group.

While an encouraging sign that experts think can be attributed to some new reading policies implemented at the state level, more progress is needed before students get back to pre-COVID success rates.

….Experts believe the improvements are a sign that efforts by states to implement the science of reading and add more literacy tutoring were not in vain.  Since the pandemic, around half of states have adopted laws or requirements for schools to align their literacy teaching with the science of reading, a practice that focuses on phonics, the ability of students to sound out words and understanding how letters sound together. It also has a greater emphasis on vocabulary and comprehension.

….The NWEA data showed the biggest improvements in the past year were among Black students, Hispanic students and those in high-poverty areas, aligning with the groups that saw the biggest hits to their reading scores during the pandemic… According to the NWEA data, there is still a two-thirds gap between where students are now in reading and where they were before the pandemic.

Things you may not know about the Declaration of Independence

CLICK 

Data Centers

Saturday Wrapup - The Bureau of Land Management is reviewing proposals to build 12 new data centers on federal public land in a half-dozen western states, according to a Friday report from the Washington Sun. The sites are located in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming.

The BLM claims its review process will “protect natural resources while enabling responsible infrastructure development” that delivers benefits like “expanded broadband capacity, improved electrical reliability, and support for growing technology-driven economies.”

Interior Department leadership had given state BLM directors just three days to compile lists of land suitable for the projects. Local leaders said they had no idea the proposals even existed before the story broke.

Mary Jo Rugwell, president of the Public Lands Foundation and a former BLM state director, said that the administration was “bending knee to the tech oligarchs and letting them do whatever they need to do."

Life expectancy

Guide Kiwi - Life expectancy has changed dramatically over time. In 1900, the average American lived only about 47 years. By 2000, this had increased to about 77 years. This improvement came from better sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines, safer working conditions, and improved nutrition. However, life expectancy can also decrease, as happened in the United States between 2014 and 2021, when rates dropped due to factors including drug overdoses, suicide, and disease.

The other problem climate change hit countries face

Inside Climate News - The countries most vulnerable to climate change are spending nearly 25 times more on repaying debt than on climate action, according to a new ActionAid report released Wednesday.  The report, “Debt Fuels the Climate Crisis: How the Finance Flows,” is “really unpacking the narrative about how the climate and debt crises are supercharging each other,” said Teresa Anderson, one of the authors and global lead on climate justice for ActionAid International, a nonprofit global federation focused on poverty eradication and social justice.

Across 65 highly climate-vulnerable countries analyzed, debt servicing is expected to consume 65 percent of government revenue in 2026. “They are only getting to keep one third of the money that they are actually raising, but that’s for climate, healthcare, education and public services,” said Anderson.

The imbalance comes as many of those countries are already struggling with both mounting debt and intensifying climate impacts. More than 93 percent of the climate-vulnerable countries are either in debt crisis or at significant risk of one, according to the report. “A lot of that debt was taken on very unfair, illegitimate terms and shouldn’t really be part of the economic picture today,” said Anderson.

Reporters from MS NOW and CNN banned from White House

The Independent - Reporters for MS NOW and CNN said the White House turned them away Saturday morning, a day after President Donald Trump announced plans to block the network and other news outlets from the complex. “CNN reporter Betsy Klein w as denied access at the White House on Saturday morning and her press pass was seized,” the organization said.

Meanwhile. . .

Alternet - A new Economist/YouGov poll of registered voters that just came out this week found that the top two words that Americans across the board endorse to describe Donald Trump are “corrupt” (53%) and “dangerous” (51%). Not even half of registered Republican voters were willing to call him “honest.” 

This is consistent with Gallup’s finding earlier this month that fully 89 percent of Americans now believe that corruption in our government is widespread, the highest number in the two decades the polling company has been asking, and a higher number than in any other advanced, industrialized democracy.

Appeals Court Restricts Trump Administration Deportation Effort

World Economy Becoming Wary of the U.S.

NY Times - Global investors are balking at U.S. bonds. Talk of the dollar’s dwindling power is getting louder. Foreign governments are hauling their gold out of American vaults. Almost two years into President Trump’s second term, the world economy is increasingly looking for ways to distance itself from America. Concerns about a $40 trillion debt burden, the excessive use of sanctions to solve foreign policy problems and Mr. Trump’s penchant for pushing the limits of the rule of law are raising questions about the appeal of the United States as a haven for global investment.

Despite pledges by foreign companies and nations to invest in the United States — in many cases to curry favor with the White House — capital is starting to seek alternative destinations.

“Geopolitical factors and U.S. weaponization of the dollar through financial sanctions are causing central banks and other official investors to attempt to diversify away from dollar assets,” said Eswar Prasad, the former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division.

Artficial intelligence and jobs

Pew Research - In 34 of 37 countries Pew Research Center surveyed earlier this year, people tend to believe AI will lead to fewer jobs rather than more jobs. …. Worries tend to run particularly high in countries with higher gross domestic product per capita. For example, in some wealthy nations like Australia, South Korea and the United States, around seven-in-ten adults or more say AI will result in job loss over the next 20 years. In the U.S. – the only country where we have asked this question before – the share who hold this view has increased 7 percentage points in two years.

Air improvements help toddlers

The Guardian -  Improvements in air pollution are leading to brighter, smarter toddlers, according to a new study from Columbia University in New York….

Over the course of the study, air pollution in central New York improved massively. Clean-air legislation reduced some pollutants from the city’s yellow taxis by as much as 80%. Heavy fuel oils are being phased out for heating the city’s buildings and cleaner fuels are being used in the city’s buses. Fine particle pollution and levels of nitrogen dioxide halved between 1998 and 2016….

The good news is that the toddlers’ scores improved as the air pollution improved. This was especially clear when the children were two and three years old, and during times of sharper falls in air pollution. The researchers were also able to take into account the effects of other factors that may have affected the children’s development. These included rapid declines in the proportion of children who lived with a tobacco smoker, which fell from 34% to 18%, and increases in maternal education, with a nine percentage-point increase in the proportion of mothers who had successfully graduated from high school.

Singles stats

Study Finds

1. Nearly half of single Americans went on zero dates last year, yet most say they feel happier and less stressed than they did in past relationships.
2. About one in four singles said they would still choose to stay single even if their perfect match appeared tomorrow. 
3. About 47% of respondents say they’ve experienced love at first sight. 
4. Almost 1 in 3 respondents admit they’ve flown solo for at least 5 years

Meanwhile. . . .

Study Finds - 35 percent of U.S. adults can’t name all three branches of government, a figure statistically unchanged from 2024 and 2025.

Decline of word use

BBC - Two academics — Matthias Mehl and Valeria Pfeifer [found] there was a theory that women, on average, spoke more than men. So Matthias and his colleagues strapped listening devices to hundreds of people and found the theory was wrong: men and women both spoke about 16,000 words a day.

But recently, they went back and looked at a bigger pool of recordings over a longer timeframe and found something else: everyone is now speaking less. Between 2005 and 2019, the average person experienced a 28% drop in how many words they spoke in an average day. 

Youth struggle with mental health

New Republic -   Young people became more reliant on social media for connection, as they were prevented from interacting with friends and attending school in person; this was associated with a commensurate uptick in depressive episodes and thoughts of suicide. In December 2021, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory warning of the “devastating” effects of declining youth mental health.

After lockdowns concluded, there was some improvement, evidenced by a decrease in suicidal ideation among adolescents and young adults since 2021. But the situation remains grim, as millions of young Americans struggle with their mental health and a pervasive sense of isolation.

Why rising food prices leave farmers uncertain

The Guardian --  Wheat prices are at their highest level in three years, which means farmer Merrill Nielsen should be getting more for his crops out of his 2,500-acre Kansas farm. Yet even as future prices for bread-type wheat are up 39%, Nielsen is unsure whether increased prices will raise his bottom line. The price of diesel fuel, which he needs to run his tractor, has hit record highs. Then there’s the erratic weather that made him lose his entire wheat crop in the spring, and drought has overtaken the southern Great Plains.

“We’re not looking to plant any more wheat than we probably normally would, or maybe we won’t even plant that much. I don’t know. Really, we’ll have to see what the weather does for us,” Nielsen said.

The combination of high costs, poor weather and geopolitics leave US farmers such as Nielsen with an uncertain growing season despite higher prices for their yields. It also leaves consumers, from millers and bakers to restaurants and grocery shoppers, at risk of feeling the pinch.

The legal status of mail-in voting

Newsworthy - The Supreme Court’s emergency order let parts of a federal mail-ballot screening plan move ahead, then lower courts pulled it back, leaving voters and states in limbo before the midterms.

On August 24, 2026, the Supreme Court issued an emergency order that let the administration proceed, for now, with parts of its mail-ballot policy while lawsuits continue. The order did not decide the final legality of the rule. It lifted one block but left other limits in place around the country. The mixed result created a patchwork. Some states faced new steps. Other states continued under injunctions from lower courts that viewed the policy as unlawful.

The administration’s legal theory frames the United States Postal Service as a gatekeeper for secure ballot mail. Supporters say postal rules on lists and barcodes help detect fraud and protect chain of custody. Two justices argued the Postal Service has broad mail security powers that can include ballot handling standards. They said there is a strong interest in enforcing the rule while cases move ahead. That view did not control the Court but signals a serious legal debate.

The Postal Service rule requires states to submit mail voter lists and use envelopes with unique barcodes tied to each ballot. It also sets up a portal to match ballot mail against those lists. Ballots that do not match could be rejected for delivery under the policy, according to court filings and reporting. These steps amount to a federal screen layered on top of state election systems. That is why lawsuits call the plan an unprecedented shift in ballot processing.  MORE

Polls

Washington Post - A poll conducted in June by the Pew Research Center found 71 percent predicting that AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years, up from 64 percent who said this in 2024. Separately, a poll conducted in August by Gallup found 27 percent of American workers worry that their job “will become obsolete because of technology.” That figure is up from 20 percent last year and from 13 percent in 2017. Fears have risen most sharply among college grads and younger workers in the past few years.

CAP polling, released this week, shows that 63 percent of men under age 35 support policies that make it easier to join a union. A new analysis from the Center for American Progress helps explain why. Unions help young men—especially working-class young men—reach financial stability and afford major life goals:

Student loan debt

WalletHub compared the 50 states and the District of Columbia across 12 key metrics. The data set ranges from the average student loan balance to the unemployment rate among 25- to 34-year-olds to the share of students with past-due loan balances.
 

States With the Most Student Debt	States With the Least Student Debt
1. Mississippi	42. Oregon
2. Delaware	43. District of Columbia
3. Pennsylvania	44. Colorado
4. South Carolina	45. Wyoming
5. West Virginia	46. Alaska
6. South Dakota	47. New Mexico
7. Ohio	48. Washington
8. Louisiana	49. California
9. Kentucky	50. Hawaii
10. Georgia	51. Utah

 
Best vs. Worst

• Utah has the lowest average student debt, which is 2.2 times lower than in New Hampshire, the state with the highest.
   
• Utah has the lowest proportion of students with debt, which is 1.9 times lower than in South Dakota, the state with the highest.
   
• Wisconsin has the lowest share of student loans in past-due or default status, which is 3.1 times lower than in Mississippi, the state with the highest.

To view the full report and your state or the District’s rank

Canada

NPR - The European Union has proposed making Canada its first-ever "associate member." European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the proposal for the new model of membership during her annual speech to the EU Parliament in Strasbourg, France. In his own address to the EU Parliament this morning, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney emphasized how much the EU and Canada have in common and said that “Europe and Canada are stronger together.”

History worth forgetting

American Facts - In 1959, American college students embraced a wonderfully pointless challenge: stuffing as many people as possible into a telephone booth. The fad had already appeared overseas, including a 25-student attempt in Durban, South Africa, before spreading rapidly across U.S. campuses. At Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, 22 students squeezed into one upright booth, producing one of the craze’s most famous photos. Arguments soon broke out over rules: Did feet have to fit? Could the booth lie sideways? By the end of 1959, the fad was already giving way to the next campus novelty.

Health benefits of reading a book

Time - Over the past couple of decades, the share of Americans reading for pleasure has been steadily dropping, with one large study finding that only 16% of people read for pleasure. 

But a new review published in Psychological Medicine suggests that reading for pleasure—sitting down and focusing on a book you actually look forward to cracking open—can have significant impacts on your brain and wellbeing. 

Reading has an effect from a very young age, says Barbara Sahakian, an emeritus professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. and an author of the new paper. In one study of about 10,000 children in the U.S., she and her colleagues found that kids who started to read for pleasure early in life were better adjusted later, regardless of their socioeconomic background. “They had better cognition, they had reduced symptoms of mental-health problems, they had better attention,” she says. They also spent less time on screens and slept longer.

Artificial intelligence

NBC News - Concerns about artificial intelligence and the pace of its development have exploded in recent days. Now, tech executives — including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Open AI CEO Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis — are coalescing around the idea that their industry needs to come up with its own rules and standards.

Tech companies have shown some willingness to make changes — but without regulation, they’re also able to undo those changes whenever they want. Litigation has also moved companies to change, like Meta’s recent $18 billion settlement, which included an agreement to place limits on how teens use Instagram. 

The House yesterday overwhelmingly passed a bill that would shield consumers from higher energy costs from new data centers in their communities. But the bill doesn’t address recent safety concerns, and it’s uncertain what will happen to the bill in the Senate. 

Meanwhile, people across the political spectrum, from Steve Bannon to Sen. Bernie Sanders, have called for a “pro-human” future for AI (more on that in today’s Staff Pick, below). Where things stand with AI self-regulation.

Jared Perlo, NBC News - For years, I’ve chatted and met with people skeptical of the speed of AI development — some of them award-winning physicists who worry that a super intelligence could supplant human ingenuity, others activists who have railed against the growing concentration of wealth and power for a select few tech oligarchs.

 Those factions, and more, convened for the first Pro-Human Assembly in Washington, D.C., this week. Faith leaders, A(ish)- list actors, computer scientists, nonprofit activists and more advocated for a more human approach to AI development. The conference had an incredible buzz, especially coming off the heels of last week’s firestorm of headlines about how AI researchers think the technology is moving too fast. There was also a table of free merchandise — I don’t know the next time I’ll be able to nab a free baseball hat that proclaims the benefits of being “pro-human.”

 Despite the camaraderie, attendees seemed to disagree on what “pro-human” actually meant. Steve Bannon railed against China, while Sen. Bernie Sanders advocated for people to have a democratic say in the technology’s direction. The event’s organizers called for the tech to “amplify rather than diminish human potential.” What exactly that means, I have no idea — and I think the 500-plus attendees might have 500-plus different ideas.

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Are you cleaning your cat litter box correctly?

Soap recall

NOTE

Sam Smith - The end of November  will mark my 89th years on this planet, most of which had me involved as a journalist. A recent incident, that included temporary suspension of service, made me realize  that it was time for me to retire from controversial news coverage. So, for the indefinite future, Undernews will still be operating but covering non-controversial matters.

The end of it

Sam Smith – On Wednesday, Microsoft suspended our service because of an improper intrusion into our programming. It was something I had worried about increasingly as I realized that that technology was a process that, besides organizing our lives better, also made it easier for others to interfere. l

And so the notice that my computer had been intruded and was about to be out of service confirmed my fears yet also made it clear that I was in no way prepared for this, a condition further emphasized when my wife came home and found to whom I was talking and why.  

I am now 88 years old, 69 years after my first radio news broadcast as a college student in Boston. it was time to close down, after all.  

There will be no more issues dealing with political matters.  Instead I will, on no set schedule, send stories about our being as humans and  our daily lives.