■ Changes in technology and in language have long caused problems with transmitting information. The quest to unlock the mysterious corners of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or to recover or reconstitute lost literary works from history both speak to the enormous frustration that results from knowing that content once existed but has escaped our present reach.

■ Most of human history (and our documentation of it) predates the Internet, and yet the ease of accessing digital content means we spend enormous amounts of time engaging with screens and much less with print. The result means that many people are almost exclusively immersed in contemporary content, with almost no exposure to anything even modestly old. (It doesn’t help that streaming services often ignore classic content entirely.)

■ The result tends to make people insufferably myopic, a little like the college freshman who reads Karl Marx or Ayn Rand for the first time and thinks they’re the first to ever really “get it”. Yet, to borrow a line from Ecclesiastes, “Nothing is new under the sun!”. Bringing older texts across the digital bridge to where they are accessible now on equal footing with social media, websites, and streaming media platforms really is a work of enormous public good.

■ Project Gutenberg, The Internet Archive, and like-minded digital archivists deserve thunderous applause and generous funding. Circumstances may vary from age to age, but most aspects of human nature don’t. That’s not a curse, either: It’s reassuring that none of us are really exploring life alone, as long as we’re aware of the resources left behind by so many others across the generations.

■ Written language has been with us since sometime in the realm of 3200 BC -- which means something like 175 to 200 generations’ worth of knowledge has been documented somewhere. The more of it we can find, dust off, and make available to our contemporaries, the better.

■ The world is dynamic like that. Big changes generally don’t happen overnight (with the exceptions of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attacks of 9/11), but a lot more of them happen in a much more compressed span of history than our instincts would suggest. Nations like South Korea and Ireland have surged from lower-income to top-tier within the time some incumbent United States Senators have been in office.

■ Circumstances change so much that fidelity to principle is more than a nicety. It’s the only way for a big power like the United States to bid for some kind of order in the world. Individual leaders may come and go, power dynamics may shift, and local hegemonies may rise and fall. But if we appear to have a stable and credible commitment to principles, then others can act accordingly by taking us seriously.

■ Therein lies the problem with the decision not to impose sanctions on Russia for what it is doing to Ukraine. If we are not on the side of those unjustly besieged, then what good are we?

■ Data centers are now infrastructure, and we should assume that they will become targets for heavy ordnance in all future armed conflicts. Bridges and power plants will continue to matter, but data centers are now on the list, too.

■ Furthermore, many people are now aware that inauthentic characters on social media are being propped up by geopolitical adversaries who gain from having misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and general mayhem introduced to the currents of public opinion. This awareness is good insofar as it causes people to recognize that not everything is as it seems online.

■ Regrettably, the other side to that coin is that people are still voluntarily exposing themselves to the platforms where those bad actors appear. It’s a lot of media and it’s being consumed in heavy doses.

■ There certainly are pro-social ways these tools can be used, but even looking past the harm done by truly malicious actors, we really need to think about the customs that are taking hold. Normalizing frequent and heavy media consumption is risky business, a matter unwittingly presaged by Florence Nightingale even before the Civil War, when she wrote: “I have never known persons who exposed themselves for years to constant interruption who did not muddle away their intellects by it at last.” The malicious content is bad enough, but we need new habits responsive to modern realities to spread just as quickly as the propaganda.

■ Some costs in the short run are inescapable as investments in long-run peace and security. As Kaja Kallas, the former Estonian prime minister and current chief diplomat for the EU noted, “Suspending sanctions on Russian diesel provides Moscow with more revenues to wage war. This is not the time to ease pressure on Russia, and Europe won’t.”

■ High fuel prices are of course partially the result of effective targeting of Russian refineries by Ukraine’s impressive drone operations. It’s not the only factor, but it matters. To the extent that diesel prices today are higher because of those operations, the only rational way to view the picture is that Ukraine is simply doing to Russia what the Baltic countries would have done to the Soviet Union in 1940, had they the technology or the knowledge of what was to come.

■ A ceasefire under the present status quo needs to be evaluated as if it sets up a 50-year Russian occupation of some Ukrainian territory, because that’s the only relevant historical precedent. That’s not a just or fair deal, and anyone making the claim that such a deal should prevail is a dupe or an ally of evil.

■ Plenty of leaders know that vigorous solidarity with Ukraine is the only option for long-term peace in Europe. High diesel prices hurt right now. But 50-year occupations hurt much more, and for far longer.

■ College, it has been well-established, isn’t the right path for everyone. But other paths require follow-through, as well. The attrition rate through training for the skilled trades is huge: A majority who start will not complete their programs. Sometimes a weed-out process is a good thing; if a career path isn’t the right fit for a person, it’s easier to learn that and make a course correction at age 19 than at age 39.

■ But it’s useful to recognize that sometimes outcomes reflect habits of character more than anything about intelligence or ability. Sometimes, you just have to stick with things in order to succeed. Not that this is a new observation. In an essay specifically titled “The College Graduate and Public Life”, Theodore Roosevelt said, “He will meet with checks and will make many mistakes; but if he perseveres, he will achieve a measure of success and will do a measure of good such as is never possible to the refined, cultivated, intellectual men who shrink aside from the actual fray.”

■ There are many good reasons why a person might quit one pursuit or another. But there have to be just as many good reasons to stick with things, even when rewards seem fuzzy or far away. Lots of people are getting the messages about starting education and vocational training. But maybe we need to focus more attention on building the habits that will keep more of them from quitting. Personal habits aren’t the only factor involved, but they’re indisputably part of the story.

■ The Soviet command economy learned less from day-to-day encounters with consumers and competitors, so it committed a fair amount of state resources to science and technology research. The US did, too, but it helped a lot to have an economy that rewarded innovation.

■ To this day, Russia’s export economy is far less sophisticated than it ought to be. It’s mostly an extraction-based export market, with petroleum far out in the lead.

■ That’s what makes the news of a special deal to let Russia sell diesel so frustrating. Restricting the flow of money into the country by restricting its exports of petroleum products is a bloodless way of discouraging further attacks on Ukraine. No incoming money means it’s harder to make war.

■ Take away the restrictions, though -- even if nominally to make life easier on the US domestic public -- and you make it easier for the bad guys to create pain. Ukraine deserves better allies who will do more of what is within their own power to help hasten peace. Sometimes peace costs a little more.

■ It’s a good illustration of the kind of thing we should expect computer models to be good at doing: Running lots of simulations based upon lots of past data to develop a probabilistic look at outcomes. Just like natural selection, this kind of model shines when it’s able to run experiments over and over and over again, then compare those experiments with verifiable results from the real world. Repeat more of what works, kill off what doesn’t.

■ It also speaks to the value of institutions like the National Hurricane Center. Some things are worthy public goods, decidedly worth paying for out of the public till, and reliable weather forecasting information is high on that list -- especially where conditions can threaten life or property. Having a country prosperous enough to afford a world-class forecasting agency ought to be a point of significant pride.

■ Accountability is hugely important whenever the public funds public goods, and to its significant credit, the National Hurricane Center publishes verification data showing a very clear and sustained long-term trend towards greater forecast accuracy. That’s what we should be able to expect from responsible adults in all walks of life: Continuous improvement both in the state of the art and in the routine application of professional skill.

■ The arrival of new tools to help with forecasting ought to be welcomed, insofar as those tools can be integrated accountably with the existing profession and its established practices and procedures. As promising new technologies emerge, thoughtful integration, not disruption, ought to be the guiding objective.

■ This promise is nearly a complete mirage. There are, of course, chores in life that offer little in the way of psychological reward: Emptying a dishwasher, for example. It’s monotonous, dreary, and there aren’t many creative ways to do it without shattering some glass. But we’ve already automated dishwashing about as much as we can without introducing Rosie the Robot into every home, and that’s been a pipe dream ever since the debut of “The Jetsons”.

■ In any domain where human ingenuity, creativity, or spirit are involved, “effortless” is the wrong goal altogether. Removing obstacles? Great. Reducing barriers? Desirable! Making dreary tasks more efficient and complicated ones more elegant? Please do.

■ But advertisements that promise to do things like “Make learning effortless“ miss the point entirely. The human brain doesn’t learn anything without trying to go through the learning experience. There is no learning by listening to recordings while you sleep or plugging into The Matrix so you can learn kung-fu. Learning can be made easier, more enjoyable, and less burdened by obstacles. But it cannot effectively be made effortless.

■ The same goes for so much else about human endeavor. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is beautiful, of course, but it’s the artistic creation story that moves the viewer. Nobody boasts about how little work they put into preparing Thanksgiving dinner; the effort itself is an expression of love. People who watched “The Beatles: Get Back” weren’t drawn to nearly eight hours of documentary footage because they were unsure how the songs turned out.

■ The word “effortless” is having quite the boom, and it’s best if we put a stop to it. Effort is too important to throw away, and developing an appreciation for it starts at a very young age. But if we don’t actively hold it in high enough popular regard, it could too easily slip away.

■ Tourism is generally a fantastic industry to be in -- travelers tend to be wired to spend, they stimulate all kinds of service-sector employment, and their money (by definition) comes from the outside of a local economy. Relatively speaking, tourism-related economies are low-pollution (think tour buses rather than smokestacks), capital-light (beyond some basics like hotels and transportation infrastructure), and sustainable over the long term (who doesn’t have a favorite destination they like to revisit again and again?).

■ The things that can screw up a tourism economy tend to be macro-scale factors. Security, for instance: Haiti’s violence problem, for instance, has kneecapped its critical tourism industry. Likewise, fuel costs: Soaring fuel prices are making both highway and air travel much more expensive.

■ Unlike the people making decisions in other industries, tourism decisions rest very little on cold logic or rational evaluations of the numbers. They’re made by people who are swayed by impressions and feelings -- “vibes”, in the slang of our day. A country that undercuts itself with a needlessly hostile posture towards the rest of the world shouldn’t be surprised if it experiences blowback that takes a chunk out of a vital industry like tourism.

■ But once those consequences come home to roost, it’s time to hold people accountable. There’s no good reason to throw away a perfectly good long-term stream of income just because it makes a few ill-tempered people feel good to roll up the welcome mat. Tourism is overwhelmingly good, we should want more of it, and if we’re getting less of it because of bad attitudes, then we need to place the blame squarely where it belongs.

■ This one would be an exercise in frivolity if it weren’t such a bad idea psychologically. Human beings are susceptible to showing deference to authority. It’s a logical fallacy that’s hard to shake, even though there are times when the fallacy has proven deadly.

■ We also tend to find two other observations to be mainly true: First, that doing anything for the first time is also the hardest (in other words, almost everything gets easier with practice). Second, that getting started is often the hardest step.

■ It’s natural to look for guidance when trying something for the first time, just as it’s natural to unwittingly defer to authority in an unfamiliar field. But if we’ve been told that a tool is not just intelligent but “super-intelligent”, then it primes us to defer to its authority even more.

■ In such a situation, we run the very serious risk of never asking critical, analytical, thoughtful, probing, or skeptical questions at the outset of challenging new endeavors -- precisely the time when we most need to ask those questions. Start out on the wrong track, and every other effort risks going to waste.

■ There’s an additional hazard: That this deference to authority is compounded when our tools give us confident answers written in highly polished prose. Thoughtful, critical attitudes need to prevail, but it’s hard to engage that part of the brain when the automatically-generated answers look so complete and free of self-doubt.

■ A simple name change doesn’t always mean much, but sometimes it triggers habits and patterns of thought that we should be careful to detour. Uncovering right answers is great, but avoiding wrong ones is often vastly more important.

■ There’s a principle in journalism that says a reporter should never “bury the lead” (or, in the news parlance perhaps leftover from when type was composed from lead castings, “bury the lede“). If a fact or element of context is important, it should lead the storytelling and come first.

■ About 4,400 words into the speech, it’s noted that “Every major military installation in America is going to generate its own power”, and that “every installation on American soil” will be hardened “against cyber intrusion, sabotage, and drones”. Those announcements are big and timely, if true, with consequences for the communities surrounding those bases -- especially considering that risks and defensive perimeters for those domains can’t just start at the fence line surrounding a base. Domestic military installations are, by necessity, integrated with the rest of the surrounding community.

■ Either the lead got buried about 65% of the way down the text, or the real lead wasn’t about serious responses to real and growing challenges to national security. It’s one thing to provoke fights with domestic media. It’s quite a different one to soberly and forthrightly illuminate the challenges posed by real adversaries in the world we actually inhabit.

■ A lot of stories are missing from most of human history, because they would have been written by or about people who weren’t in the most privileged classes of people. This deprives us today, both of the knowledge of their stories and of the context we should have about their times. If history had been written only by the left-handed or by people with hazel-colored eyes, something would be missing -- the problem is, we wouldn’t really know what. A great deal is missing from our history, and we can only try to claw back a tiny fraction of what that is.

■ This deficit in our knowledge has been problematic for generations, but now we face a truly bizarre turn of events: Generative AI tools make it possible to put words into the mouths of people from the past. “George Washington” can call himself “Bro-mander in Chief” and “Albert Einstein” can “teach” math class.

■ There’s an extremely narrow pathway via which versions of some missing stories could be told through careful reconstruction of the evidence. Down this particular pathway, some of the missing stories could be told -- though they would still need to be carefully labeled as reconstructions based upon limited available evidence.

■ Down another pathway, some of these stories could be told, but badly. Instead of evidence-based reconstructions, we could get hallucinations or confabulations -- the kind that has already prompted dangerous errors in the real world, with grave potential consequences. This could end up contaminating the real historical record if unaccountable knockoffs of important stories like the Narrative of Sojourner Truth find their way into competitive circulation.

■ Most likely of all, though, is the possibility that chat experiences with “George Washington” and other already-prominent figures will crowd out interest in other subjects. It’s a “rich get richer” problem: Those who are already prominent as historical figures left behind the largest records, and those records will make them more attractive as subjects for further content generation. AI “Thomas Jefferson” will probably attract a lot more attention than AI “Sally Hemings” -- even though their stories are conclusively intertwined in the genetic record.

■ Gaps in the historical record are more than just curiosities. They tell us where our understanding of both the past and the present are subject to imbalances. Those imbalances are worth examination and correction, but we have to make profoundly careful and thoughtful choices about how to rectify them.

■ It’s not that France has experienced a sudden outburst of religious fervor; French Mass attendance, like elsewhere in Europe, is a shadow of its past. Nor is it a matter of access; the Vatican is only a 2-hour, $200 flight away.

■ There’s a very good chance that much, if not most of the momentum is simply a reflection of a hunger for continuity. There is a global appetite for certitude, and the Catholic Church is in a rare position to offer an institutional form of it. Whatever might happen to any other trans-national organization, from the Olympic Games to NATO to the International Criminal Court, one thing is completely certain: Someone will be Pope a hundred years from now.

■ And this Pope is a good one, with an unassuming manner, an easy wit, a globetrotting biography, and a quick mind. He has many of the qualities people seek in a leader, and yet of course he wasn’t popularly elected.

■ His very presence conveys a reassuring message that America can produce leaders of good character, peaceful demeanor, and constructive long-term vision. It also says that there are still sources of worldly (or divine) authority to be found away from politics. That message couldn’t be more important in an era of widespread institutional disruption. The world could very eagerly use more charismatic figures like him.

■ It was entirely inappropriate to give President Xi the literal red-carpet treatment for a meeting that had no compelling reason to occur. Nothing in the government’s own account of the meetings was substantial enough to rise beyond what could have been conducted over a telephone call.

■ What point is pageantry for an adversary when so many of our friends and allies are feeling rebuffed and rejected? It’s so bad that Canadians are in love with the idea of taking up “associate membership” with the European Union.

■ Red carpets should line routes like the Gordie Howe Bridge, not the landing path for an authoritarian who uses words to drive wedges between the US and its closest friends.

■ Not in the ghoulish sense, of course, but in a basic act of getting grounded with reality. There are lots of people who seem to be out of touch with not only their own mortality but also with their place in a long, unbroken chain of human existence.

■ It’s easy to fall for the myth of having made oneself from scratch, but every one of us is the lucky product of lots and lots of generations before us, all of whom struggled, all of whom faced difficulties, all of whom faced far more adversity than most any of us will ever see in the modern world. Yet all of them cared about their loved ones, feared death and dying, wanted success, and hoped for a better life just like we moderns do.

■ Having a tangible connection to the meaning of mortality and the essential need to understand gratitude for those who came before us is a grounding sensation. And it’s apparent this sensation is absent from a lot of lives, like the ones who sacrifice living in service of not dying.

■ There’s probably no better cure than a visit to the burial places of one’s own ancestors (the more generations, the better), but even in the absence of that, thoughtfully immersing oneself in the awareness that we are all fortunate simply to be here is a worthy use of time. Nature wiped out billions of other bloodlines all around our own ancestors, so the odds were stacked pretty high against any individual one of us making it here.

■ Lots of people with the very same human essentials as our own came before us. Really grasping that -- sometimes by touching a headstone -- makes a world of difference to how seriously one takes the fleeting distractions of the present.

■ Toledo is a top-100 market by population, which would make it one of the largest American cities to go without a conventional print news source (or even a print/digital hybrid, as so many have gone) dedicated to local coverage. In some other places with newspapers that have either been hollowed out or closed down, digital-only news sites have popped up. No small number of these have been agenda-driven, representing both left-wing and right-wing sentiments. One might call them “gap-filler” sources.

■ Part of the problem that emerges with those sites is that their coverage tends to be intentionally and deeply biased, according to very predictable partisan framing of coverage that often emphasizes localized versions of national debates. Besides being unimaginative and frequently offputting to those who don’t share the outlet’s in-house bias, it tends to be a disservice to the local community.

■ People don’t necessarily want unbiased news coverage, but they do seek objectivity. The problem with many of the gap-filler sources is that even when they don’t explicitly seek to advance an agenda, they often still seek out a narrow and predictable set of boogeymen. The resulting coverage isn’t very organic, and as a result, it usually isn’t all that responsive to local interests.

■ We don’t really want news coverage that is completely neutral; most people actually want news coverage that has a rooting interest for the community. That rooting interest, though, is rarely well-served by reporting that centers on horse-race issues and predictable partisan bickering. Political news often isn’t very civic-minded.

■ Audiences desire objectivity about the facts and fairness in the representation of competing advocates, but they usually want the news outlet to have an interest in the outcome, as it affects the community at large. As conventional newsrooms have shrunk and editorial staffs have dwindled, it’s become harder to find shining examples to follow. But it is important that we find them -- or establish them anew -- because the public interest is ill-served by news deserts and conflict entrepreneurs.

■ There are lots of people who are aware of the news less often than once every 48 hours. Someone in those news habits might have missed the hurricane’s emergence altogether. If rapid intensification is here to stay (and it certainly looks like it is), then on top of all the steps that need to be taken for physical mitigation, we also need an upgrade to how we disseminate emergency information to a public that already largely rejects the citizen-responsibilities of classical news cycles.

■ For now, at least, the hurricane is supposed to menace mostly the open waters west of Mexico. But people are going to have to pay attention to this specific event until the storm loses momentum. We’re also going to need ways to harness psychology and other social sciences to zero in on ways to communicate urgent, authority-dependent messages to a public that wants to follow its own pace and not be told to check in every night at 10:00 for an update. If things can turn this far, this fast, then Nature is presenting a fairly new set of challenges that we ignore only at our own peril.

■ This is really important news for medical research: The ability to conduct research at the cellular level depends on having the right cells, and one of the chief implications of this discovery is that all “brain” cells are not created equal. If we want to make progress on brainstem-related diseases like ALS, making the distinction could be a significant milestone.

■ It’s also another reason we should be skeptical of anyone’s claims about having uncovered anything like artificial general intelligence -- or even a grand unified theory of the human mind. If it’s literally just coming as news to us right now that the “brain” is actually two different organs (with separate evolutionary histories!), then we can hardly say that we know everything there is to know about ourselves.

■ It also means we should give an enormous amount of credence to the understanding that the brain isn’t simply a rational calculating machine that accepts simple inputs and produces logical outputs. It’s an organ engaged in a sort of complex ballet with other organs, and we ought to approach sciences like psychology with an appreciation for the influence of other systems working in and for the body.

■ If we’ve only fairly recently uncovered that the digestive system is in a two-way influence loop with the brain, then we should be looking all over for signs of other sources of unexpected influence. Our brains are what really set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. But now we may be coming to realize that what matters to making the “self” is a systemic concern that reaches far beyond the old model of a single wrinkled organ squished inside the skull.

■ The press corps may not be employed by the government, but they are indispensable to its proper function. Independent verification of the welfare and whereabouts of people like the Constitutional officers alone is a service that no serious government could do without. A press corps that really does its duty is more than just an amplifier for official statements; it’s an independent source of validation that what we are told is true really is.

■ So it is more than a small problem that three reputable news organizations have been denied access to the White House. It’s a decision entirely based in a complaint about editorial content, not some higher moral claim.

■ We are known by the company we keep. We are also known by the company we leave behind. The Army Ranger Creed says, in part, “I will never leave a fallen comrade”, which is a promise of even more gravity than the promise to fight. Who chooses to stay in the room when others are arbitrarily kicked out ought to color their reputations for some time to come.

■ We don’t need preening or self-aggrandizement. Nor do we need self-righteous declarations or exaggerated appeals to solidarity. We simply need to know that the news media has enough self-respect to know that the standards we choose reflect back on us.

■ In the words of Maimonides, “Man is created in such a way that his character traits and actions are influenced by his neighbors and friends, and he follows the custom of the people in his country. Therefore a man needs to associate with the just and be with the wise continually in order to learn [from] their actions, and to keep away from the wicked, who walk in darkness, so that he avoids learning from their actions.”

■ If you properly shuffle a deck of cards, that exact order of cards has never happened before and will never happen again. It’s not even close, either: The odds of predicting any exact order of 52 cards are completely unfathomable. Even if you were to shuffle merely a single suit of cards in that deck, there are more than 6.2 billion ways it could come out, or close to a unique possibility for every single person on Earth. Add in three more suits, and there’s no analogy anywhere in the natural world that our brains can map to those kinds of odds. And it involves a set of inputs and outputs that anyone can easily hold in a single hand.

■ When people serve up hypotheses about the prospects of an AI-driven apocalypse, it’s important to bear in mind that the outcome certainly is possible. But the sequence of events that might deliver us there is long and involves a chain of probabilities that rapidly take the forecast to the realm of the incomprehensible.

■ That sort of uncertainty tends to be paralyzing. But we don’t have to think about the wild scenarios before we give closer thought to the outcomes we can comprehend. Just like a simple deck of cards contains vastly more possibility than we can even remotely grasp, circumstances as they already exist today contain far more than enough possibilities for bad outcomes that we should examine -- soberly and thoughtfully -- without waiting to ponder worst-case “Terminator” scenarios.

■ In fighting one of the worst human foes to ever curse the earth, Dwight Eisenhower observed that “[E]very battle plan comprises merely an orderly commitment of troops to battle under the commander’s calculations of desirable objectives and necessary resources, but always with the certainty that enemy reaction will require constant tactical adjustment to the requirements of the moment.”

■ We need that same limberness of mind today. The worst could come to pass, or so could the best. So could trillions of possibilities in between.

■ But we ought to start with comprehensible battle plans in mind for harms we can be certain will come to pass: Spouses trying to manipulate partners, candidates trying to destroy rivals’ reputations, criminals seeking to fleece victims, and bullies trying to exact pain on classmates. For each of these and many other obvious scenarios, we should be asking, “How could these tools be used for harm, how can the harm be prevented or mitigates, and who is legally or morally responsible for doing something about it?”

■ And we can’t try to solve every problem one-by-one: Like shuffling only a single suit of cards, the number of possibilities are still beyond comprehension. But we do need to start somewhere. Only when we break the big, highly uncertain problems down into smaller, highly likely ones will we start to know if we’ve got what it takes to make Eisenhower’s “tactical adjustments to the requirements of the moment”.