Check out these recent articles from around the web:

A Republican and a Democrat confront our era of bad vibes by E.J. Dionne: “If that sounds grand or even theological, the specific forms of suffering that alarm Murphy and Cox are tangible and heartbreaking — from “deaths of despair” caused by suicide and drug overdoses to the collapse of communities that lost their economic purpose.”

Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable by Jen Silverman: “We need more narratives that tell us the truth about how complex our world is. We need stories that help us name and accept paradoxes, not ones that erase or ignore them. After all, our experience of living in communities with one another is often much more fluid and changeable than it is rigidly black and white. We have the audiences that we cultivate, and the more we cultivate audiences who believe that the job of art is to instruct instead of investigate, to judge instead of question, to seek easy clarity instead of holding multiple uncertainties, the more we will find ourselves inside a culture defined by rigidity, knee-jerk judgments and incuriosity. In our hair-trigger world of condemnation, division and isolation, art — not moralizing — has never been more crucial.”

How Women Went to Washington and Successfully Lobbied for Stronger Families by Amber Lapp: “Could common parental frustrations—and common joys—spark the renewal of engagement with and creation of civic associations working to lobby policymakers on behalf of the family?”

What a sane approach to marijuana regulation might look like by Judith Grisel: “Increased use of cannabis, especially for young people, enhances risk of depression, anxiety, suicide and psychosis. Moreover, carefully matched, longitudinal studies causally link the drug to reduced intelligence and shrunken cortical surface, effects that may not be reversible in young users. It’s high time our leaders, and the adult population broadly, quit throwing kids under the bus as they pander to voters, placate corporate interests or recreate blind to the repercussions.”

One Thing Parents Can Control by Esau McCaulley: “We are entrusted with the awesome responsibility of introducing our children to the world and the world to our children. We cannot and should not shield them from all difficulty. But it’s also necessary, periodically, to be a bit irresponsible, to spend a little too much on a soccer game so they remember that alongside the darkness, sometimes there is light.”

The Most Important Thing I Teach My Students Isn’t on the Syllabus by Frank Bruni: “We live in an era defined and overwhelmed by grievance — by too many Americans’ obsession with how they’ve been wronged and their insistence on wallowing in ire. This anger reflects a pessimism that previous generations didn’t feel. The ascent of identity politics and the influence of social media, it turned out, were better at inflaming us than uniting us. They promote a self-obsession at odds with community, civility, comity and compromise. It’s a problem of humility.”

A solution to our epidemic of loneliness by Kerry Robinson: “I have spent my life in the company of people who have devoted themselves to service and the alleviation of human suffering. Without such people, our world would be bereft of mercy, hope, charity and justice. And we would not have the compelling example of purpose, meaning, enthusiasm and joy to which their lives of service attest.”

The Lost Social Justice Ethic of the Temperance Movement by Daniel K. Williams: “All of this has been well documented elsewhere in other histories, but what has not yet received much attention is that even in the most conservative denominations that embraced the temperance movement, anti-alcohol advocacy pushed those denominations to show a measure of societal concern that paved the way for other social justice causes. And now that that has been lost, a principal foundation for social justice thinking has eroded as well. That is because temperance advocacy was based primarily on a social rather than individual concern.”

Less alcohol, or none at all, is one path to better health by AP: “Drinking raises the risk of several types of cancer, including colon, liver, breast and mouth and throat. Alcohol breaks down in the body into a substance called acetaldehyde, which can damage your cells and stop them from repairing themselves. That creates the conditions for cancer to grow.”