Living in Difficult Times

Daily headlines have been startling and scary: “U.S. Life Expectancy Plunged in 2020, Especially for Black and Hispanic Americans,” reported The New York Times.  “The Pandemic has Made Homelessness More Visible in Many American Cities,” noted The Economist, while The Guardian  announced “The Latest UN Report is Clear: Climate Change is Here, It’s a Crisis, and It’s Caused by Fossil Fuels.”

The pandemic, racist aggression, mass shootings in public schools, domestic politics turned violent, and the war in Ukraine have all contributed to this dispiriting and disorienting era in our personal and collective lives. Meanwhile, half of the population seems to feel the other half is deluded. And while  many had hoped the challenge of the pandemic would unite us, three years later the cumulative cause for alarm seems to be growing.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently suggested “The world is too scary. Politics is too creepy,” and "horror is too real,” while David Brooks wrote of “The rising tide of global sadness.” Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter surely engenders further unease about how an unelected few can control how we live and what we may know.

This Roundtable discussion will consider how those in science, politics, the arts, and everyday life can rally individually and together, to meet the existential challenges and concerns of our epoch.