From here on in I am going to be more brazen. I am going to be even more proud about walking down the street wearing my tzitzit and kippah, acknowledging God’s presence. And I’m going to use my voice until I am hoarse to urge my fellow Jews to do Jewish. To light candles before Shabbat. To put up mezuzas on their doorposts. To do acts of kindness. And to show up in synagogue — especially this coming Shabbat.

The era where the Jew could consider herself safe here, safer than anywhere else in the rest of the world, has ended. My daughter will grow up with a Judaism under lock and key. Prayer behind armed guards. Jumping out of your skin if a child knocks over a folding chair. No babies out of sight. No hiding behind the synagogue curtains with their best friends, trading chocolates and whispering secrets. Stay close to Mom.

While so many of us were fuming with outrage at the evil of Jew-haters and making plans to combat that evil, Rabbi Goldstein was telling the world that “a little bit of light pushes away a lot of darkness.” At this moment, thousands of emissaries like Goldstein are walking the streets of the planet looking for Jews who may need a Shabbat meal in Nepal, a mezuzah in Denmark, a kosher kitchen in Costa Rica or a Jewish kindergarten in Bakersfield.

The overarching goal of /pol/, held by most of its members, is to radicalize their fellow anons to “real-life effortposting,” i.e. acts of violence in the physical world. This goal is well embodied by a post I found in a discussion of the Poway Synagogue shooting… I’ve browsed /pol/ on an almost daily basis since the Christchurch shooting. It has not been difficult to find calls for violence.

There is a great deal of “cheerleading” that takes place on the boards when someone brings up committing an act of violence, says Hankes, as well as “really graphic celebration and lionization” of those who make good on their threats — as was the case immediately following the Christchurch shooting, when posters posted memes of the alleged shooter referring to him as a “saint” and depicting him with medieval iconography. Chillingly, /pol/ posters display a shocking degree of self-awareness about their own radicalization and how far they are in the radicalization process, as evidenced by the Poway synagogue shooter left claiming he had been radicalized by 8chan in just 18 months.

Some experts are calling for the website — which describes itself as the “darkest reaches of the Internet” — to be monitored like a terrorist recruiting website, so law enforcement would intervene more when chatter becomes violent, my colleagues wrote.

An absent caliph is not a caliph, his enemies said. (The memory of Mullah Omar, the supreme leader of the Taliban, is fresh. His followers kept their allegiance to him for years after his death. The Islamic State ridiculed them for their zombie-like loyalty.) With this video, we know that the caliph still lives, rules, and demands oaths from his followers. Some of those followers followed him because they thought he would lead them in a series of never-ending victories. Whether they continue to follow him, now that he is an aging warlord holding court in front of a bedsheet, remains to be seen.

Combined with his repeated references to Islam and global struggle, ISIS wants to show Baghdadi as a leader who retains a divine right to be obeyed not just by ISIS followers, but by the world. This is a crucial ingredient of ISIS ideology, which is uniquely authoritarian. But it also supports ISIS recruitment efforts to offer a credible cause to both Salafi-Jihadists and social malcontents.

Bombings in ISIS’ name in places like Sri Lanka does not mean there is an ISIS worth fighting in Syria. No evidence exists that anyone in Syria organized the Sri Lanka bombings… The persistence of terrorist outrages is, if anything, evidence of the futility of making war on it. Attempting to manage civil wars with U.S. troops in the name of counterterrorism is a bankrupt idea.

Trump proceeded to tell the raucous crowd that Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers “shockingly stated that he will veto legislation that protects Wisconsin babies born alive. Born alive. The baby is born, the mother meets with the doctor, they take care of the baby, they wrap the baby beautifully, and then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.” Trump repeated this again, and used a guillotine hand motion for effect. None of what he said is true.

Trump’s words are a cruel insult to parents who have to make agonizing decisions about end-of-life care for babies that are born extremely prematurely, or with serious anomalies. Doctors and mothers don’t choose to “execute” newborns. They are forced to decide, in excruciating situations, when to forgo medical interventions and provide palliative care instead. There are exceedingly rare cases where babies survive an attempted abortion, but federal law already extends the same protection to them due any other infant.

It’s fine and fair to point out how that current abortion law results in the termination of relatively few viable babies. But that’s no excuse to not provide protection for those born alive, and certainly not one to baselessly accuse the president of lying when, for once, he’s telling the cold, hard truth.

People seem not to care that Holzhauer’s streak reflects the same grim, data-driven approach to competition that has spoiled (among other sports) baseball, where it has given us the “shift,” “wins above replacement,” “swing trajectories” and other statistically valid but unholy innovations. Like the number crunchers who now rule the national pastime, Holzhauer substitutes cold, calculating odds maximization for spontaneous play.

I’ve been watching Jeopardy since before I can remember (thanks, Dad), and I might love Jeopardy strategy and theorycrafting almost as much as I love trivia itself. Watching Holzhauer is almost pleasant, in a way that watching players with otherworldly bodies of knowledge is not… He is mellow and unflappable and it never feels like he is specifically railroading his opponents, yet when you look down at the end of a round he has 30 times as much money as the other two players.

Putting a professional gambler in a game of amateurs makes it ridiculously predictable and therefore incredibly boring… But my own delight rests in the fact that here, at last, on a public stage, intelligence is rewarded with victory, facts are to be respected and learning is a vital and worthwhile endeavour. These once-cherished values have been eroded, scorned and scoffed at by leaders and politicians, here and abroad, leaving many of us bewildered and disheartened.

I watch Holzhauer show us over and over what he knows and feel happy. One can almost start believing in meritocracy again.

Wherever we turn, we are encouraged to strive for happiness. We’re told it will make us better at parenting, work and life in general. So it’s no wonder most of us seek happiness goals to which to aspire, whether they are based on cultural norms, self-help books or scientific research. However this pursuit of happiness can be stressful – and research suggests that it actually makes many people unhappy.

Does California’s commitment to happiness end up leaving us bereft? In the Land of Dreams people seemed to find the love of their lives or their very purpose just last week. Yet all of it could be replaced by a new purpose, a superseding passion, a few days later. Foundations are not easily laid down in a place rooted in the future tense, where every notion is rebooted like a script in permanent turnaround.

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t strive for success, or attain wealth, or advance their station in society if that matters to them. The problem is that people seem to have lost the ability to just stop and finally be content at some point. It took me years to reach that kind sanity, and I am still working out how it all works, but here is the rub: You do not deserve to be happy in the grand scheme of reality, but you still can be. Here’s how.