What Happens After You Die

-- By Tom Phillips 

Back in the day when Walter Cronkite was America's Most Trusted Person, he sat for an interview with talk-show host Dick Cavett.  After a couple of warmup questions, Cavett leaned in with an impish grin, and asked:     

"So Walter, what happens after you die?"   

Cronkite brushed it off as mischievous flattery. He was sixty-something at the time, and lasted a couple more decades.  

At 80, the question is harder to dismiss.  Here's what I'd like to know: Do we have any say in what happens? 

Maybe I do, and you do too.  

Believing in Truth

-- By Tom Phillips 

Rudy Giuliani: "Truth isn't truth"

It’s happening more and more these days – people saying things that just a few years ago would have been considered insane.  At a recent party, a young female stranger – a graduate student – asked me, “What do you think about the post-truth moment?”  My flustered answer: “I’m against it.” 

On the street and even in church, on hearing that I used to write for CBS News, people have cheerfully piped up: “Oh, fake news!”  Absolutely not, I tell them.  I never knowingly wrote a word of fake news.  Oh, they reply, but you’re retired.  How about the people writing now?   

I am a member of two establishments -- the press and the church -- that depend for their existence on the idea of truth.  Both are under siege by a new wave of old politics that values visions over facts, slogans over reason, personality over truthfulness.  The press is in danger of being discredited, the church of being co-opted.  And so far, the press is holding up better, more resistant and resilient.

Pinker's Paradise

-- By Tom Phillips

Harvard professor Steven Pinker is out with another of his weighty books about how the world is getting better all the time. This one's called "Enlightenment Now." Readers should appreciate his contrarianism; his mass of statistics about the world's rising prosperity, improving health, reduced violence and increasing personal satisfaction is a welcome antidote to studies that show humans growing more lonely, pessimistic and frightened.

There's a fly in the cream, though. While Pinker's global stats generally show that happiness rises along with income, here in the United States, the pursuit of happiness has ground to a halt.  In recent decades, Pinker reports, American men have gotten no happier, while women have actually grown less happy. This could simply reflect the stagnation in middle-class incomes since the 1970s.  But happiness is not an isolated phenomenon -- it reflects much broader societal trends.