Read a variety of current articles in our Programs section and/or choose articles from our Archived Programs list and/or information from our Avenues of Service pages. You will be required to answer questions. There is space on the makeup request form for up to three articles to be reviewed, however you will need to read more than three to meet your 30 minute visit obligation.
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At the end of your 30 minute visit click on Make-up Request Form from the drop-down menu at top of page OR the bottom of each make-up program.
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Read Makeup Request Form carefully, and follow instructions. A Make-Up Form will appear once you press the SUBMIT button (one time only) and an email copy will be sent to the email address you provided.
PRINT YOUR MAKE-UP FORM
Once your make-up appears, if you know the email address, you can also click on File, Send and email a copy to your club secretary.
Outdoor activities start today! First Friday is May 1st! Be there at Niko’s Red Mill. 5:00-7:00 pm. Or stay longer and eat supper there. Either way, stop by for a drink and a visit with your fellow Rotarians.
We’re in the home stretch—just 281 tickets remaining and four weeks until our Grand Prize Drawing on May 29! Thanks go to Dave Byrnes, Kim McCallister-Kruse and Russ Berg for staffing the Jeep last Saturday!
The author of this article was born in 1986. By the time he was 10, or so, it was natural for him to come home and read for hours after school. TheLord of the Rings, Asimov’s Foundation series, and other fantasy and science-fiction classics were my favorites. This didn’t seem like a particularly special or noteworthy thing on his part. Throughout the 1990s, the share of teenagers who read daily outnumbered the share who read “hardly ever”, according to long-term reading surveys. But in the last 25 years, this has flipped so dramatically that today roughly half of teens say they hardly ever read for fun. The teen who reads daily is on track to become an endangered species.
The triumph of streaming video
In his essay “Everything Is Television,” He wrote that all media are converging toward the same flow of video. Social media is becoming less about keeping up with friends and more about watching short-form videos made by strangers—i.e., television. Podcasts are becoming less about listening to Internet radio and more about watching YouTube talk shows—i.e., television.
According to JPMorgan, the share of Americans who say they get their news from print has declined by about two-thirds since the early 2010s. Cable television and websites are also declining by this measure. “Social and video networks,” such as TikTok and YouTube, are gobbling up news consumption.
TikTok might be melting your brain
The frustrating truth is that we don’t really know for sure what the digital empire of short-form video is doing to our minds. But a systematic review of 71 studies with 98,000 participants published in 2025 reached an alarming finding. Across the dozens of studies, heavy short-form video users showed moderate deficits in attention, inhibitory control, and memory. In the chart below, you can see a consistently negative, if also heterogeneous, relationship between heavy short-form video use and problems with attention, memory, and control.
The whole US economy right now is one big bet on artificial intelligence
Housing is in a rut. Farmers are hurting. Manufacturing has been shrinking for months. Hiring is hell. And yet, the US economy continues to grow, powered by an AI infrastructure project unlike anything in modern history.
In the last three months, the hyperscalers — Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle — spent more than $100 billion on AI infrastructure, including chips and data centers. At this rate, the AI build-out will outspend the entire Apollo program, every year, despite being financed by the private sector.
Is alcohol over?
The share of Americans who say they drink alcohol hit a record low in 2025. Despite the US population growing by tens of millions since 2000, total beer consumption just hit a 21st-century low. Wine vineyards are “in crisis.” And Gen Z is leading the way:
Americans aren’t drunk. They’re high.
In 2010, daily or near-daily drinkers outnumbered daily marijuana users by a two-to-one margin. But since then, a wave of decriminalization has allowed marijuana use to soar into the 2020s, so that today daily marijuana users exceed drinkers for the first time ever.
Marijuana isn’t good medicine.
It’s easy to get the impression that cannabis—and its non-psychoactive cousin, CBD—is the new aspirin. It is everywhere, promising to fix everything. More than a quarter of adults in North America say they’ve used cannabis medically, and more than 1 in 10 Americans are currently using CBD to treat some kind of ailment. But our enthusiasm for medical marijuana is running way ahead of the scientific evidence.
A 2025 review of studies on the medical use of marijuana found that, although cannabis-based drugs help with nausea and appetite loss for very sick patients, their other medical uses “aren’t supported by good evidence.” Instead, frequent marijuana users report higher rates of “psychosis, anxiety, addiction, and heart and stroke problems.” Most concerning, more than one-third of people using medical cannabis meet criteria for cannabis use disorder.
No, marijuana probably isn’t good medicine.
The author of these thoughts and others left out of the bulletin for time considerations is: Derek Thompson. The title of his article was: The 26 Most Important Ideas For 2026.
I waited until the end of this to identify the author. I learned in my Freshman High School Typing class to read the entire document before beginning to type...as I was typing and the last sentence in the article that the teacher gave us was: DO NOT TYPE THIS ARTICLE!!!
If you would like a copy of The 26 Most Important Ideas For 2026, let me know and I will forward it to you.
Kudos to Laura Cullotta and President Joe. They were the only 2 Rotarians who sent me a list of their top 10 one hit wonders!
