Syndicated columns

The U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision on the limits of federal authority under the Clean Water Act has been celebrated or condemned, depending on the ideological predilections of the observer. Everyone agrees, however, that the opinions themselves make for rather rough reading. They boil down to a squabble over the words "adjacent" and "adjoining."

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has issued a warning that social media could be harming our kids. His social media advisory is a welcome road map for what everyone – policymakers, tech companies, parents, kids and researchers – should be doing to better understand the impact of platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat on the developing brains of adolescents.

For a long time, people have mistakenly thought of global warming as a sort of zero-sum game with obvious winners and losers. Places with fairly cool climates will remain comfortable, the thinking went, while the rest of the planet cooks. A third Pacific Northwest heat wave in as many years is the latest example of what makes this idea deadly nonsense. We’re all in this together.

Rarely has a government report taken so long – in years and pages – to tell the public so little as Special Counsel John Durham’s report to the Department of Justice this week.

Your doctor's orders for staying healthy might include a daily routine of eating your broccoli, going to the gym and getting a good night's sleep. Now, the U.S. Surgeon General would like to add another action item to the list: Reach out to a friend.In a new report, Vivek Murthy says that the U.S. is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness and isolation that can be as harmful to our health as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. Murthy also offers practical fixes: public policies and spaces that bring people together, as well as simple things like texting a friend or volunteering.If that feels squishy, or so obvious that you wonder why it needed to be spelled out for the public, consider how little the U.S. as a society acknowledges its disconnectedness - and how few people understand its detrimental effects on our physical and mental health. There are very real consequences to living with social isolation, and the U.S. needs to make sweeping changes at a societal and individual level to foster deeper, healthier connections.Just 16% of people in the U.S. said they "felt very attached" to their local community in 2018, according to the report, and about half of adults overall experienced some degree of loneliness - statistics that surely worsened during the pandemic. While young adults and older adults are particularly vulnerable to loneliness as are those struggling financially or experiencing health challenges, "no one is immune," says Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, who was also the senior editor on Murthy's report. "Humans are social beings, so we have social needs."Decades of evidence has made clear the connection between our need to be connected to others and our physical health. The American Heart Association released a scientific statement last year highlighting years of data linking feelings of loneliness to heart disease and strokes. Another recent study showed that social isolation increased the risk of dementia in older adults.Conversely, emerging research suggests people with a strong social network can better manage their diabetes, which in turn can prevent complications from the disease. During the pandemic, fewer people died in U.S. counties with strong social ties. And a sense of community is crucial to the long-term mental health of young people, linked to lower instances of attempted suicide and substance abuse, Kathleen Ethier, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Adolescent and School Health, recently told me.What does it mean to be socially connected? The concept takes on many dimensions in our daily life, from the people who fulfill emotional or intimacy needs to those who simply enhance our well-being. Having a strong network is particularly important in a time of crisis. These are the people who set up the meal train when you have a health emergency, rake the leaves out of the storm drains so your basement doesn't flood, or offer support if you've lost your job.It also includes the person who hands you a coffee every morning at Starbucks or punches your train ticket in the evening. "Even just the small interactions we have with acquaintances or a stranger in our community, being able to smile and say hello, help us feel a part of something," Holt-Lunstad says. Even those so-called loose ties are linked to positive outcomes, she says.Fixing society's loneliness problem won't happen overnight, and will take individual and collective effort.For individuals, the first step is integrating social isolation into our understanding of mental and physical health. Nurturing relationships, new and old, is also crucial. That could mean being more mindful about staying connected to friends - texting or actually picking up the phone - or making the effort to build a deeper network in your community through volunteering or taking a class. And, of course, if you're really struggling, reach out to a professional for help.Murthy's report outlines many practical steps including policies that encourage connectivity such as paid family leave, or establishing physical spaces such as libraries and parks where people can come together. And more physicians need to recognize social isolation as a health risk - and, in turn, be armed with the tools to monitor for it and help their patients address it.Finally, we need more research into the root cause of our social isolation. Cellphones and social media are easy targets for blame, but the body of evidence around their harms vs. benefits is complex, says Holt-Lunstad. They can't account for all our discontent.And if you are reading this and thinking that these feelings of isolation don't describe you, that's wonderful. And also: Your work is not done. You are part of the glue that holds us all together, and can contribute to a happier, healthier society. That can manifest in very simple ways, like smiling and saying hello to your neighbor. It could be resisting the urge to make a negative comment when the grocery line moves too slowly, or your coffee order is wrong.These small gestures matter, Holt-Lunstad says. "Being pleasant, giving someone the benefit of the doubt rather than being short or impatient - those small acts of kindness can go a long way."The pandemic surely deepened our crisis of isolation, but also had many moments that reinforced the value of a connected society. Remember the nightly scenes of people banging pots to show their gratitude to hospital workers? Or taking to the streets to cheer as trucks carrying the first coronavirus vaccines as they left Pfizer's manufacturing site? The emergency has passed, but we need to keep exercising that muscle of inner generosity - after all, it's good for our health.---This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Lisa Jarvis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Previously, she was executive editor of Chemical & Engineering News.

The U.S. has a pitiful vacation policy: It's the only country out of 21 of the richest nations in the world to provide no minimum annual leave, according to the Center for Economic Policy and Research.U.S. workers are generally entitled to 10 public holidays, but even those aren't truly guaranteed. Private-sector employers are often within their rights to schedule employees to work on holidays such as Thanksgiving, July Fourth and - rather ironically - Labor Day, unless it's otherwise stipulated in their employment contracts. And even though most U.S. workers are given paid vacation time, close to half report taking less time off than allowed, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey.With more Americans feeling burned out, one of the easiest and cheapest things employers could do is require their workers to take more of their earned vacation time. And when they're off, do a better job of respecting that time - no emails, no calls, no slacking, or pinging.Look at Chatbooks, a photobook service, where vacation time was switched from unlimited to mandatory after its president realized people weren't actually taking a meaningful amount of time off. Now employees are required to take one continuous week off per quarter. In addition to a set number of vacation days, Amgen has two companywide shutdowns a year (one during the summer and the other during the holiday season), another smart way to force employees to take a break.Millions of Americans failing to take their full amount of vacation days means that billions of dollars in benefits are being left on the table annually. Forgoing flexible spending account dollars or not contributing enough to get a full employer match on a retirement benefit is often shamed, but the same respect is rarely given toward paid time off. An employee is often seen as having a strong work ethic for eschewing taking time off or working through an illness.Failing to provide a proper release valve for the pressure that can be caused by work is blatantly damaging to people's physical and emotional health. Overworking has been tied to increased risk for heart attacks and strokes. Decades of research have linked time off to improved mental and physical health as well as job performance.A 2009 study found that active leisure pursuits and travel is beneficial for mental health and recovery from a stressful job. Vacation specifically was noted as an effective coping resource in reducing depression. A 2018 study found that even a short vacation over a long weekend could improve well-being up to 45 days after an employee's return. Paid time off even edged out better retirement and insurance benefits as a preferred perk in the American Psychology Association's 2021 work and well-being survey.The concept of workplace burnout may provoke older generations to mutter some variation on "we dealt with it, so you need to" but neither of those provide any amount of salve to the root cause. Burnout syndrome is defined by the World Health Organization as workplace stress that has failed to be successfully managed and can result in feelings of energy depletion, increased mental distance from a job, or feelings of cynicism - all of which reduce efficacy at work.In addition, this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. The workplace has evolved in such a way that the employment experience for younger generations is starkly different from what boomers or older Gen Xers experienced in their 20s and 30s. The constant accessibility and general assumption across multiple industries that workers should be reachable beyond a traditional 9-to-5 workday has made it difficult to draw boundaries around home life and work life.The pressure to say yes and be in good standing is even stronger amid worries of a recession, inflation, student loan burdens, an inaccessible housing market and high costs of child care.With more households where two parents work full time, the responsibilities of handling child-care and home duties often falls disproportionately on women. Even those who out-earn their husbands are still more likely to revert to traditional gender norms and handle more of the household labor.I'm not saying that more mandated vacation days would magically ease the stresses women in particular face, but it could be a helpful start. Even better if required paid time off was separated into "personal days" for say, a doctor's appointment or taking your child to the dentist, from actual vacation days.But forcing employees to take time off is pointless if employees aren't able to truly turn off. As long as managers continue to email their employees or the workplace culture is such that employees feel like they have to respond to Slack messages during paid time off, none of the benefits that come from a true disconnect will materialize.Have a company policy for how work will be delegated during time away and under what specific situations someone can be emailed or called while on vacation. Perhaps one of the best ways to provide employees with a necessary release valve is to have higher-ups model the behavior and take their own vacation time free of emails and work calls.---This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Erin Lowry is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering personal finance. She is the author of the three-part "Broke Millennial" series.

The relationship between political campaigns, the news media and the public isn’t exactly an interplay between independent actors. It’s a web of influence.

A federal jury found Donald Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll on Tuesday after less than three hours of deliberation, delivering a quick and devastating verdict on the conduct and character of the former president.

”Because you see the main thing today is – shopping. Years ago a person, he was unhappy, didn’t know what to do with himself – he’d go to church, start a revolution – something. Today you’re unhappy? Can’t figure it out? What is the salvation? Go shopping.” – Solomon, in “The Price” by Arthur Miller

There is no room for Margaret Ann Simon in 2023.This became clear over the weekend, as Gen X and millennial women returned to movie theaters across the country to see the adaptation of one of our childhood librarys' most dog-eared, passed-around, broken-spined books: "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret."I was one of them, going with a friend who also navigated puberty with the help of Judy Blume's field guide to American adolescence.And I went with a little bit of sadness. I always assumed that one day, I'd pass it along to a daughter and we would bond over the rite of motherhood. Nope - two boys for me. My sons got Blume's boy version, "Then Again, Maybe I Won't."So I thought that maybe I should gather a posse of boy moms to go see the movie, so we could bond over the nostalgia of our own journeys into womanhood. But the boy moms were busy. (Baseball season, of course.)So I went with another friend who's always up for an adventure and has children of both genders. On our way there, I asked her the most influential thing she remembered from a book written in 1970."The grandmother, she was so much fun," said my friend. "Nothing like our family."For most American women, this book was all about puberty - the frank talk about menstruation, armpits, training bras and spin-the-bottle.But for the children of immigrants like me and my friend, whose parents are Indian-born, it had the added bonus of giving us a seat at the American family dinner table. We learned about frilly bedspreads and white bedroom sets; birthday parties in the rec room; fun grandparents, roast beef for dinner and department-store shopping; the YMCA and the JCC, and the diversity and complexity of religion in America.It was Sandy Stokes - the sandpaper-voiced empty nester who had white shag carpet in her California living room and an uncanny empathy for the Czechoslovakian immigrants next door - who gave me the book. She was my American auntie.My friend was like many of us, she read the book at her local library, which did not get swept up in the 1980s book bans that yanked it off so many shelves."Did you give the book to your daughter?" I asked her. "So she didn't have to sneak it around in the library?""Ha! She wasn't interested," my friend said. "She was so far beyond Judy Blume at that point."Margaret Ann Simon couldn't really exist today.In her 1970 world, tweens were obsessed with the hunt for knowledge about what growing up entails. All a kid today needs is five minutes alone on a computer or mobile phone and they will see it all. Information, no matter how much the political censors grandstand upon feigned morality, cannot be contained.Nostalgists argue they can recapture Margaret's innocence by trying to keep kids in the dark, by banning books or restricting age-appropriate discussions about gender and sexuality in classrooms. "Are you there, God?" has been the target of book bans since it was published in 1970. Blume gave her kids' school library three copies of the book, but the male principal decided it wasn't appropriate. It never made it onto a shelf there - "never mind how many fifth and sixth grade girls already had their periods," Blume wrote in the foreword of an anthology by censored writers.That went on for years, making Margaret one of America's frequently banned characters. Now, 53 years later, the Florida state legislature considered a bill banning any talk of menstruation or reproductive health in elementary schools.Yet, whipping up political divides over books is easier than dealing with real problems, like the teen mental health epidemic, detailed in a jaw-dropping report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls said they've considered suicide. That's a 60 percent rise in the past decade and twice the number of boys who reported the same thoughts. Almost 14 percent of American girls surveyed had been forced to have sex. And about 57 percent of girls said they feel "persistently sad or hopeless," according to the February report.This isn't because they're reading books about their periods or learning that gay people exist.Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd told The Washington Post that this is about pain. And "girls are more likely to respond to pain in the world by internalizing conflict and stress and fear, and boys are more likely to translate those feelings into anger and aggression," masking their depression.It's not hard to find pain in teens' lives, which have been amplified beyond anything we imagined in 1970.Since 1999, when the shooting at Columbine High School changed American schools forever, there have been 377 school shootings. More than 339,000 American kids have experienced gun violence, according to The Post's database.Today, Margaret would be playacting her own massacre in active shooter drills at school. Her club, The PTS's (Pre Teen Sensations), wouldn't have meetings on private, giggly afternoons in someone's bedroom sharing Oreos - it would have a group chat. Instead of running under sprinklers, she'd spend her afternoons drilling for county championships with her travel soccer team. A rumor circulated among the kids of Room 18 could be an online post that goes viral. And rather than one glimpse of dad's Playboy to inform her of impossible beauty standards, she'd be awash in cartoonish beauty on social media.Yes, Margaret Ann Simon couldn't exist today. But our nostalgia for her is a powerful call to action: to see that our youths are still seeking something, and that it's on us to help them find it.

There are a few reasons to think that President Joe Biden might lose his bid for reelection next year, even if Donald Trump is once more — for the third straight time — the Republican nominee.There’s the Electoral College, which could still favor the Republican Party just enough to give Trump 270 electoral votes, even if he doesn’t win a popular majority. There’s Biden’s overall standing — around 43% of Americans approve of his job performance — which doesn’t compare favorably with past incumbents who did win reelection. There’s the economy, which may hit a downturn between now and next November. And even if it doesn’t, Biden will still have presided over the highest inflation rate since the 1980s. Lastly, there’s Biden himself. The oldest person ever elected president, next year he will be — at 81 — the oldest president to ever stand for reelection. Biden’s age is a real risk that could suddenly become a liability.If Biden has potential weaknesses, however, it is also true that he doesn’t lack for real advantages. Along with low unemployment, there’s been meaningful economic growth, and he can point to significant legislative accomplishments. The Democratic Party is behind him; he has no serious rivals for the nomination.But Biden’s biggest advantage has to do with the opposition — the Republican Party has gotten weird.It’s not just that Republican policies are well outside the mainstream, but that the party itself has tipped over into something very strange.I had this thought while watching a clip of Ron DeSantis speak from a lectern to an audience we can’t see. In the video, which his press team highlighted on Twitter, DeSantis decries the “woke mind virus,” which he calls “a form of cultural Marxism that tries to divide us based on identity politics.”Now, I can follow this as a professional internet user and political observer. I know that “woke mind virus” is a term of art for the (condescending and misguided) idea that progressive views on race and gender are an outside contagion threatening the minds of young people who might otherwise reject structural explanations of racial inequality and embrace a traditional vision of the gender binary. I know that “cultural Marxism” is a right-wing buzzword meant to sound scary and imposing.To a normal person, on the other hand, this language is borderline unintelligible. It doesn’t tell you anything; it doesn’t obviously mean anything; and it’s quite likely to be far afield of your interests and concerns.DeSantis is a regular offender when it comes to speaking in the jargon of culture war-obsessed conservatives, but he’s not the only one. And it’s not just a problem of jargon. Republican politicians — from presidential contenders to anonymous state legislators — are monomaniacally focused on banning books, fighting “wokeness” and harassing transgender people. Some Republicans are even still denying the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, doubling down on the election-related conspiracies that hobbled many Republican candidates in the midterms.Not only do Americans not care about the various Republican obsessions — in a recent Fox News poll 1% of respondents said “wokeness” was “the most important issue facing the country today” — but a large majority say that those obsessions have gone too far. According to Fox, 60% of Americans said “book banning by school boards” was a major problem. Fifty-seven percent said the same for political attacks on families with transgender children.It is not for nothing that in Biden’s first TV ad of the 2024 campaign, he took specific aim at conservative book bans as a threat to freedom and American democracy.And yet there’s no sign that Republicans will relent and shift focus. Just the opposite, in fact; the party is poised to lurch even further down the road of its alienating preoccupations. On abortion, for example, Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, says candidates need to address the issue “head on” in 2024 — that they can’t be “uncomfortable” on the issue and need to say “I’m proud to be pro-life.”But the Republican Party has veered quite far from most Americans on abortion rights, and in a contested race for the presidential nomination, a “head-on” focus will possibly mean a fight over which candidate can claim the most draconian abortion views and policy aims.There’s more: DeSantis is in the midst of a legal battle with Disney, one of the most beloved companies on the planet, and House Republicans are threatening the global economy in order to pass a set of deeply unpopular spending cuts to widely used assistance programs.Taken together, it’s as if the Republican Party has committed itself to being as off-putting as possible to as many Americans as possible. That doesn’t mean the Republican Party is doomed, of course. But as of this moment, it is hard to say it’s on the road to political success.As for Joe Biden? The current state of the Republican Party only strengthens his most important political asset — his normalcy. He promised, in 2020, that he would be a normal president. And he is promising, for 2024, to continue to serve as a normal president. Normal isn’t fun and normal isn’t exciting. But normal has already won one election, and I won’t be surprised if it wins another.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

I have always been interested in the psychology of lynch mobs.

There's a famous 2016 cartoon by Matt Bors, which has since become a meme, in which a medieval peasant says, "We should improve society somewhat." A smug man, trying to catch the peasant in hypocrisy, responds, "Yet you participate in society! Curious!"When it comes to climate change, too many of us have internalized the smug man. Maybe we can't afford to buy an electric car or a heat pump just yet. Maybe we just can't bring ourselves to stop eating meat or to pass on long-distance travel. Maybe sometimes we get lazy about recycling. We may worry about climate change and want to make a difference. But after years of being browbeaten about our "carbon footprints," we may feel we are too hopelessly compromised to do any good.I'm here to tell you not to be too hard on yourself. Yes, it's good to keep your carbon footprint in mind. But it's also important to remember that the very idea of an individual "carbon footprint" was invented by BP, a massive oil company.Focusing on individual carbon footprints distracts from the need to make substantive change where it can have the biggest impact: at the corporate and government levels. A supermajority of the people in this country wants action on climate change, but too many of us are afraid to ask for it."The consumer carbon footprint makes people so anxious and guilty that they feel they don't have a right to express what they think because they think they're directly responsible for climate change," Miranda Massie, founder of the Climate Museum in New York, which tries to inspire people to individual action, said in an interview. "That was a masterstroke of cartoon villainy."Changing consumer behavior does have the potential to carve 5% from global emissions, Semafor's Tim McDonnell noted recently. He published a chart, based on research by Diana Ivanova of Leeds University and others, showing how much individual consumption choices can save carbon. Using her data, I've produced a similar one of my own:A person who:-turns her gas-burning SUV over to the repo man;-stops eating animals and dairy;-gives up her annual vacation in Greece;-installs a heat pump and solar panels; and-sends her dog away to a nice farm upstate, where he can run and playcan save up to six tons of carbon dioxide per year.That's a lot. But then consider, say, Walmart. In 2021, the world's biggest retailer cut carbon emissions under its direct control by 1.94 million tons. To match that impact, you would need 323,333 solar/vegan/car-free converts, or more than the entire population of Lexington, Kentucky.Of course this is an overly reductive way to look at individual carbon choices. The woman who buys an EV and puts solar panels on her roof sends an important signal to her neighbors that it's fine to do such things, making them more inclined to follow suit. The more individuals who make such choices, the more the supply of green products grows to match the rising demand. This will also make them cheaper, putting them in reach of more consumers. Eventually, perhaps, you will have something like that Lexington, Kentucky's worth of people making different choices and a huge impact.It's especially important that people who have the wherewithal to adopt a lower-carbon lifestyle do so. The world's richest 1% of earners emit about 1,000 times the carbon of the poorest 1%, according to the International Energy Agency. The Roy children really didn't need to take that private jet from Santa Monica to Santa Barbara, and neither do you.But if you are someone whose means and carbon impact feel too modest to make a difference, or if you just can't bear to part with the occasional In-N-Out burger, you shouldn't get too discouraged. You can still drive change by talking to friends and family, posting on social media, writing to policymakers, voting for politicians willing to fight global warming and donating to green causes, while changing your lifestyle where you can. Your impact stretches far beyond your carbon footprint.---This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change. A former managing editor of Fortune.com, he ran the HuffPost's business and technology coverage and was a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal.

In the late 1800s, when The Cleveland Gazette, a Black newspaper, published a picture of the acclaimed journalist and lynching opponent Ida B. Wells, the patriarchy kicked into gear to opine on her appearance rather than her craft.Some found the picture unattractive: The Gazette apologized, writing that “the picture, though an accurate likeness, hardly does her justice.” Others took the opposing view: The Indianapolis Freeman, another Black newspaper, chided that Wells “makes the mistake of trying to be pretty as well as smart. She should remember that beauty and genius are not always companions.”Wells, clearly a stylish woman, was also a serious journalist and a genius, and how she looked or dressed should have had no bearing on anyone recognizing that. Yet it’s often the case — now as then — that expressions of personal style among serious people are deemed frivolities. And for men, the sting of that perception can manifest differently, as this purported frivolousness in a boorish society is sometimes regarded as feminine.I’ve slammed up against this all my life, and at every turn I’ve rejected it.I believe that the ways we construct our visual environments, including the ways we present ourselves in the world, are reflections of ourselves. And insisting on bringing beauty into lives that can sometimes feel like an unremitting series of horrors is the only way some of us can survive.I have seen this up close my whole life, growing up in a poor family in a poor community.I saw it in my grandmother, the way she painted the modest house her husband built daffodil yellow and made flower beds from old tires. I saw it in the way her church hats seemed to get bigger and brighter as she got older.I saw it in my mother, who made most of her own clothes so that she could afford to buy most of ours. I saw the way she studied the pattern books and ran her hands across the bolts of fabric. I saw it in the way she considered which buttons to buy and which trim.Her sense of style was never about fashion as we consider it now — the consumption of things, the obnoxious accumulation of conspicuous class markers. It was about honoring the choices we have to make in the everyday, about the irrepressible human need to express creativity and the pride of wanting to demonstrate craft.Even when our clothes wore thin, ripped or got stained, my mother would convert them into quilts, cutting tiny geometric shapes out of the garments and stacking them, grouped by color and kind, into miniature towers, like sleeves of saltines with the packaging removed.It was in that poverty that I first saw how beauty and pride of appearance were used as ways of conveying dignity in a world intent on divesting you of it.It is, I believe, the reason that parties, festivals, family reunions and cookouts are so intensely celebrated in many poorer communities, why people find ways to wear their finest. It is, on some level, an absolute insistence on expressing joy and beauty. Celebration becomes survival.Years ago, I visited an organization in Harlem that provides supportive housing for formerly homeless and low-income individuals and families. The facility was not only immaculate; it was also filled with art and had an art gallery on the top floor.When I asked the administrators why they put so much emphasis on aesthetics, one of them responded: “You don’t just give a person four walls to live in. You give them something to be inspired by.”Well said.I’ve always insisted on maintaining the part of me that embraced beauty. I used to scavenge for antique furniture and restore it myself. I painted with watercolors and drew incessantly. When I lived in Detroit, I started a small clothing company. When I was married, my wife and I spent many weekends combing the fabric stores in Manhattan’s garment district. And I once took a night class at Parsons School of Design, where, after working at the Times all day, I would drape muslin over dress forms.I can make no sense of my life without design being central to it, and it never feels to me like a distraction, waste of time or diminution of gravitas. It feels like an expression of freedom.I have become consumed with the idea of freedom, with running toward it, with embracing it. I want freedom in all things: thinking, working, loving and living.That’s one reason I look forward to becoming one of those men with the quirky suspenders, bow ties and orange socks. I’ve often been delighted by how older men lean into sartorial whimsy when they exit workplace life, when the uniform becomes irrelevant, when the testosterone coursing through their systems slows to a trickle.They become emancipated in this delightful way. I assume it’s the same way some women, often older, will wear all their bracelets at once. They return to that magic that we all enjoyed as children, in which dressing up and donning costumes were the expectation rather than an aberration.So I bide my time, but if the years are kind and life allows, I want one day to be the old man with the orange socks.This article originally appeared in The New York Times.