Yesterday I read an article about the European Space Agency's observatory telescope Gaia, that's run out of its nitrogen fuel and ceased operations as of yesterday. For over a decade, Gaia did marvelous viewing, including research into our Milky Way Galaxy. One example given of Gaia's viewing power was that it was as if a person here on Earth could see a tiny coin on the surface of the moon.  In the news, Jeff Bezos sends a rocket up to the moon. If he next sends up a colonizing team, will Bezos own the moon? No, because,  Christopher Columbus et al, the history of human nations is that an explorer claims his discoveries not as his personal property but as the property of his sponsoring sovereign nation: so the moon will become Jeffsmoonia, our 53rd state, after Canada and Greenland. Then everyone here on Earth will be able to look up at night, see how beautiful we are, and wish they were Americans too.  Best of all, it will be a great place from which to destroy enemies...

All the news isn't good, you know. An article I read yesterday, and blogged about here on +Time but decided not to link on Facebook, went off on society's plunge into individual solitary alonenesses in which, caring not for others around us, we escape into our electronic screens. We've become a civilization of hermits. Life is like finding yourself on a cruise with nobody else on board, some of us find it discouraging about life in general.  This morning I read an essay in The Hechinger Report about a crisis in the deepening shortage of 18 year olds, extending to alarming rates of colleges and universities closing across the country, shortage of young people with college degrees, present and coming changes in our civilization and how it works, and our values.  We've already been seeing the results in the Church, where theological seminaries have been combining and closing for a decade and more as fewer and fewer people are drawn toward a vocation in the Church, which it...

You won't read this, I know that! Essays in The Atlantic go uncommonly long, as do essays and articles in The New Yorker. And I know that both magazines, along with The Guardian and other publications, on line and in print, are seen by some folks as unduly politically biased. But I don't really give a rat's axe about your politics, sometimes sources that I trust have information that might be of interest to anyone of any bent or intellect. This article is such, and spells out what I see and experience throughout life anymore. We no longer really care about each other. Even when we're together with others, we quietly leave by taking out our cellphone and disappearing.  We are the cellphone generation.  Like the author, I also am withdrawn and quiet, the common word is introverted, and I rather like myself the way I am and have always been. Whatever its ups and downs for me through my life, being and knowing myself as an introvert has brought me safe thus far and I'm ...