My dear wife Carla is getting a divorce. Not from me. She is divorcing Gonzaga basketball. We go through this ritual every March when the Zags fall short of the long-sought national basketball championship as they did again Saturday night. “I’m done,” she will say. “Burn the T-shirts.”

George Soros, the wealthy Hungarian-American financier and philanthropist, is the bogey man of the American right wing. They trace whatever they don’t like about liberalism or progressive politics back to Soros’ imaginary machinations. Soros is the puppet-master. George Soros is a Jew. These are antisemitic conspiracy theories.

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its five-year report, “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” two weeks later, response was instant.

I have had a number of conversations recently with people who have said that they are living in “existential angst” because of climate change. I have found those words striking. 

Underneath that capable exterior is a woman who was a drug addict by her late teens. By the time she was 21, she was facing prison — and pregnant. Pressured on all sides to end the pregnancy and told that drug-addicted women couldn’t have healthy babies, she aborted the child.

"The Whale" serves as a heartbreaking depiction of what religious trauma and spiritual abuse do to not only the people afflicted by them, but also what it does to their loved ones.