“I’ve got something I’d like to say.” That’s what I usually offer up as a preamble, as I try to get the attention of my kids and other family members gathered around the Thanksgiving table. It usually takes a couple of attempts, but once we’re all on the same page, I offer words of thanks for my ancestors.

Developmental psychologist Caspar Addyman has the best job ever. He works to answer the age-old question: What makes babies laugh? This means Addyman spends most of his working days listening to, and decoding, the sound of what can only be described as the tittering of angels.

Addyman conducts experiments on human behavior, and his focus is on infants and toddlers.

Do you need to hear a happy story? A “so hundreds of thousands of people have died and large swaths of the country have refused to try to save lives and we’ve seen the Capitol attacked in an attempt to overturn an election but everything isn’t terrible all the time” kind of story?

So my son turned 4 early in this historic, life-altering pandemic, and obviously we had to cancel his birthday party.

Wanda Traczyk-Stawska is an outspoken 94-year-old Polish freedom fighter. She is a veteran of the Warsaw uprising, joining the resistance when she was 17 years old. Her youth and small stature earned her the nickname “Doughnut” within the resistance. She was a hardcore anti-fascist. She still is a hardcore anti-fascist. That fight extends today to the rights of women, migrants, and refugees.

Facebook is a menace. COVID-19 is a menace. Conservatism is a cesspool. Together, those three ingredients have created a toxic stew of malevolent death and devastation. We can talk about all those things in the abstract, look at the numbers and statistics, and catch the occasional whiff of seditionist right-wing rhetoric.

In the news today: A jury found three men guilty of murdering Ahmaud Arbery. Rolling Stone is now reporting that the organizers of the Jan. 6 rally that resulted in violence inside the U.S. Capitol were in contact with Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and with Eric and Lara Trump in the days immediately before the riot—and that organizers bought and used hard-to-trace “burner phones” in an attempt to hide the communications.

The most egregious story I’ve ever heard about Donald Trump—and, granted, there’s an embarrassment of riches to choose from—is the one about his stripping health coverage away from his gravely ill infant nephew … out of spite.

This story was fairly widely reported before the 2016 election, which seriously makes me wonder what people imagined about Hillary Clinton that could have possibly been worse than that.

Presidents are kind of like NFL quarterbacks: They get too much credit when their team wins and too much blame when they lose. Rightly or wrongly, U.S. presidents tend to be the face of whatever’s happening in the country over a given snapshot of time.

It was a rough summer for Joe Biden, and his problems have persisted well into the fall.

News outlets under the First Amendment have a tremendous amount of leeway, and, of course, they should. They should be entitled to print diverse, conflicting, even vehemently oppositional views, and they shouldn’t be concerned about how many people might disagree with any given viewpoint they choose to print. Hell, that’s why we’re all here on Daily Kos.