Jess Lahitou

The workings of Congress are pretty fascinating. If you like The Borgias, The Tudors, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, then following the seemingly innocuous happenings in DC is a fascinating enterprise. You know that this is where the real action happens.

As the headline article (“Anxiety, Depression and the American Adolescent”) points out, depression has been replaced with anxiety as the leading mental health struggle of today’s adolescent. The one possible cause that stood out to me most was the impact of social media. With smartphone in hand, teens can be reading harmless texts, or – as was the case for one young female interviewed – they could be viewing disturbing Instagram posts, or reading about distant tragedies, or scrolling through hateful Facebook comments. Maybe even comments about them.

Wright’s argument is that the way super conservative Texas Republicans have taken control of the political agenda could replicate itself on the national scale.

Digital assistants such as Siri are not people. Yet, the way these female-voiced bots are programmed to react when being sexualized or sexually harassed paints a pretty bleak picture of how Silicon Valley organizes its values.

Rejoicing or weeping will depend on who you are, but let’s look at what happened either way.

Democrats:

Wayne Tracker. When I first came across this made-up alias, it didn’t speak to me like someone’s first and last name.

For the mental health of underprivileged victims of natural disaster, navigating the aftermath can be as much a struggle as surviving the original disaster.

The blatant promise of a career in the spotlight has stripped the Bachelor/Bachelorette of its beautiful, benign lie: that we could watch “regular” people navigate the perils and pitfalls of modern dating, that such a quest was in and of itself enough, and that a happy ending was a real possibility.

This last Friday happened to be the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

If I’m just online screaming, what am I not doing in physical reality?