Wednesday, October 21, 2026
The stakes are high, because A.I. is the first technology in a long time that can favor the little guy. For most of the last century, size was destiny. A big company could afford an IT department, in-house lawyers, a finance team and analysts poring over its data, and the corner store could not.
Recently I’ve come to believe that the strongest influence on developing human beings is the times in which they live. Try as I might, summoning all the empathy I possess, I simply can’t know what it was like to endure the London Blitz during World War II. Or the Dust Bowl in America, or the Holocaust, all of which changed the way people lived and thought.
But this loss is different. I discovered that I’m not myself anymore; more challenging, I’m not sure who I am. When you’re a partner in a 58-year-long marriage, identity becomes somewhat fluid. We were a “we” and now I’m an “I.”
In football, if a receiver simply drops a pass, that’s an unforced error. In politics, it means a self-inflicted wound that could easily have been avoided. Come Nov. 3, I think those words will best define what will happen and why it will happen. While it’s true that the party in power tends to lose off-year elections, there have been too many unforced errors that will hurt the Republican Party.
Before becoming a photo of a scowling politician, paper has a complicated history. Somewhere there were trees — or recycled fibers that began as trees. There was harvesting, transportation, pulping, washing, processing and papermaking. There was lots of water. There was energy. There were chemicals involved in processing, bleaching and coating. There were huge vats of ink. There was printing and cutting and bundling.
For Kristen Roberts and Maria Nulty, an Oceanside connection began in childhood, took a yearslong detour and eventually led them back to the same school hallways — this time as kindergarten teachers, helping a new generation of students begin their own educational journeys.
The Island Park PTA hopes to make sure every child can participate in the holiday festivities through its first Halloween costume drive, an initiative that has drawn strong community support and inspired new partnerships to help local families.
For more than four decades, Michael Schnall helped shape the Island Park Library into a cornerstone of the community. Now, his legacy will be remembered in the building he helped bring to life.
