Book Review: The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II by David Nasaw. This 2025 book popped up in my Kindle (the e-reader) recommendations recently, so I downloaded it, mostly because of my current research project on Lowell residents who died in the military during World War II. I found Wounded Generation to be fascinating and a counterpoint to the “Greatest Generation” theme of previous decades. This book proceeds logically through many issues. Here’s a sampling: The psychological trauma and its after affects suffered by hundreds of thousands of service members was poorly understood and ineffectively treated, if treated at all, which gave rise to alcoholism, domestic violence, and societal difficulties. Casualty rates during the fight across Europe in 1944-45 were so high that very young men and older men with children were shoved into a draft notice to frontline infantry pipeline at rapid speed with tragic consequences. The dread of those who survived the fight in Europe of having to go to the Pacific and endure further combat there led 85% of Americans to support the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. After the war, the military planned to keep large armies in Europe and Asia but public pressure to rapidly demobilize and let servicemembers get on with their lives forced those plans to be scaled down substantially. President Roosevelt wanted a societal-wide social welfare program at the end of the war to ease the transition from a war economy to a strong peacetime one that would not continue the Great Depression, but conservatives in Congress wouldn’t support that and instead mandated that all benefits go solely to those who had served in the military. Furthermore, Congress insisted that those benefits be administered by the states, not by the Federal government, which ensured that existing racial and gender hierarchies were affirmed and strengthened. The most successful portion of the GI bill was the education benefits provided to (white male) veterans. By putting millions in college, it kept them out of the work force which prevented unemployment from becoming an issue, and the monthly cash stipend given to these veterans was sufficiently large to support a family living frugally, so all of that government money was redirected into the economy which helped drive a surge in consumer spending. 

Magazine Article: “My year as a degenerate gambler.” – By McKay Coppins in The Atlantic, April 2026. For me, Coppins is a must-read author. Off the top of my head, I can’t cite particular articles of his, I just know most of them have been quite good so I always read his stuff. This continues that trend and was especially interesting to me because I’ve been fascinated by the rise of legal gambling in our culture in recent years. When Coppins’ editors assigned him to write an article on gambling, they wanted it to be participatory journalism with him gambling himself then writing about it. This presented a problem because Coppins is a Mormon and that religion forbids its followers from gambling. The editors had an answer: They would stake him $10,000 of the Atlantic’s money to gamble with over the course of a year, he could pay back that advance and then he and the magazine would split any winnings. In that way, he wasn’t really gambling but was doing research for his article. Coppins got his bishop to grudgingly sign off on the arrangement and he was off. After a random early bet won him some money and gave him a false sense of confidence, he hit a losing streak which led to consultation with gambling experts who basically said, to come out ahead, you must obsess over this and even then if you only win even a little, you’ll be ahead of 95% of the gamblers in the US. The obsession part came easy because the now ubiquitous gambling apps and the wall-to-wall advertising that leads people to them proved as addictive as every other addictive (and harmful) practice from drugs to alcohol to tobacco. At the end of the year, Coppins had lost the entire $10,000, and struggled to extricate himself from the mental cage gambling had constructed around him. Finally, he not only deleted all the gambling apps from his phone, he also filed a self-exclusion form which is a state mechanism which bans online gaming companies from allowing the filer to do business with them. 

Magazine Article: “Could the girls of Camp Mystic have been saved?” by Kerry Howley in New York magazine, April 5, 2026 – In the early morning hours of July 4, 2025, a catastrophic flash flood struck Camp Mystic, a long-running all-girls Christian summer camp located along the Guadalupe River in Hunt, Texas, resulting in the deaths of 27 campers and counselors. The event was part of a larger, devastating flood system that claimed over 100 lives across Central Texas, but the tragedy at Camp Mystic was especially notable due to the high number of children lost. This article reviews what happened but it does it primarily from the perspective of several of the parents whose children died. Several have sued the camp alleging negligence in that the camp was in a known flood-prone area and that the camps’ inadequate response at the start of the flood contributed to the deaths. However, as the article makes clear, the clientele for this camp for decades has been the daughters of the Texas elite so there was a strong support for the family that owned and operated the camp. That sentiment won out and the camp will reopen this summer. The bigger picture was a depiction of a philosophy of life that treats life – to me, at least – in a cavalier fashion, reasoning that whatever happens is a manifestation of “God’s will” whether that be making guns freely available at the cost of mass school shootings, or disregarding reasonable collective safety measures in the face of a deadly pandemic, or allowing young kids to spend four weeks of the summer in a place that will predictably flood in a way that is hazardous to life.