This post is a review of Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, Directed and Produced by Alex Gibney.

CLIENT 9 IS AN ARTFULLY PRODUCED, smartly edited, and dramatic reconstruction (and revisionism) of the rise and fall of “The Sheriff of Wall Street,” the man who dared to challenge the “Masters of the Universe,” Eliot Spitzer. Most of us are well aware of what happened to Spitzer in his fall from grace in a now all-too-familiar story of sexual shenanigans gone awry, but there is a redemption story here as well. Whether that works for viewers or not probably depends on one’s political persuasions and personal predilections on matters political and prostitutional.

Alex Gibney, whose previous film was another rise-and-fall epic tale entitled Enron: The Smartest Guys In the Room, is unabashedly sympathetic to Eliot Spitzer in Client 9 (his designation by the madam who orchestrated his hook ups). In an on-camera narrative that runs throughout the film, Spitzer makes no excuses for either his overweening ambition as the left’s lawman against Corporate Corruption, or for his biblical-like fall from grace as the right’s punishment for those who fly (and pry) too high and deep. The central thesis of Client 9 is that Spitzer was the victim of Wall Street heavy-hitters who would brook no probes into their sleazy back-room deals that Spitzer was on the verge of uncovering just before he was busted for his personal patronage of a high-paid prostitution ring. A cast of characters is then paraded throughout the film as those who would bring Spitzer down: the former Republican Majority leader of the New York State Senate Joe Bruno, the former chairman of A.I.G. Maurice R. Greenberg, the former director of the New York Stock Exchange Kenneth G. Langone, and a flamboyant Republican political consultant named Roger Stone. Hinted at but never directly stated, the film implies that had Spitzer not been sabotaged in his investigations of Wall Street corruption the economic collapse might have been averted. The evidence for the central thesis is circumstantial; the evidence for the covert thesis is nonexistent.

Eliot Spitzer and spouse, Silda Wall
(click image to enlarge)

In point of fact, in the final on-camera interview statement by Spitzer, when asked if he thought he was the victim of his Wall Street enemies he unhesitatingly denies the thesis and takes full responsibility for his collapse and apologizes to his family for his own misdeeds, pointing no fingers at anyone but himself. In this sense, if the point of the film was to resurrect respect for Eliot Spitzer, it does have that effect through his own words. However, as in all nonfiction works, from books to documentaries, there is here an element of what is said versus what is not said.

What is said is that Spitzer was a crusader for the little guy who stands no chance against the mighty Wall Street bankers and financiers—the regular Joes and Janes whose tiny IRAs and 401Ks are in the hands of high-stakes gamblers who do not give a damn about long-term retirement investments that are the backbone of a stable economy. (Recall in the run-up to the meltdown that far too many people quit saving and started gambling with adjustable rate mortgages but could not “flip this house” before the higher monthly payments came due—more on that in my review of the documentary film Inside Job next week, which also leaves out the greed of American consumers while focusing on the greed of Wall Street bankers and housing lenders.)

What is not said is that Spitzer’s tough-guy, law-and-order crime-busting activities included breaking up and prosecuting prostitution rings in New York, which is how he came to know (intimately) the inner-workings of the system that he then exploited for his personal pleasure, arranging sexual liaisons with women whom he couldn’t even be bothered to engage in conversation with before getting down to the dirty deed of wham, bam, thank you ma’am. (Upon realizing who her client was, one of the women—whose working name was “Angelina” and who was portrayed by an actress in the film—recounted how she really wanted to talk to Spitzer because of his reputation of being so smart and worldly, but apparently Spitzer’s tongue was tied that night.) The liberal man of the people—the voice of the voiceless, the power of the powerless—treated women as little more than fresh flesh. Oddly (or perhaps not) the infamous Ashley Dupré, whose quarter-hour of fame has now come and gone, refused to be interviewed for the film having, I suppose, shed her crocodile tears before a scolding Diane Sawyer in an exclusive ABC television interview (orchestrated with the launch of her singing career).

Ashley Dupré on the cover of Playboy magazine, May 2010 (click image to enlarge)

Here the film offers some insights into a world few can afford: The $1000 to $3000 an hour call girl. As the head of the Emperor’s Club explained, these are not alcoholic drug-addicted women who were abused as children and kept as virtual slaves to their pimps; these are ambitious beauties who, as one of them explained, likes to have her bank account filled and is now so spoiled with riches, jewels, trips, and the accoutrements of the lifestyles of the rich and famous that she can no longer date regular guys. These women are so hot that one of Ashley Dupré’s co-workers described her as possessing “great pheromones” and “an amazing coochie” (one of the service’s websites even includes a checklist of requests, from blond, brunette, or redhead to shaved, unshaved, or partial) that men could not resist, especially high testosterone men like Eliot Spitzer who can afford rates commensurate with such assets. (During the scandal I recall an interview with an evolutionary psychologist, who explained that you can tell Spitzer has high testosterone because of his boney features and high cheek bones.) One memorably funny line is when the head of The Emperor’s Club explains how she computed a full-day rate: just add a zero to the hourly rate (said with a sophomoric giggle but with a twinkle in her eyes as if to say “I can’t believe this rich bastard fell for this scheme)! A woman who goes for $2000 an hour will give you a full day (and night) of her time (and body) for $20,000. What is not said is what the agency’s commission was, but the women were apparently not complaining, and you can’t exactly go to the labor board to complain.

The salacious material, however, is secondary to the deeper Greek tragedy (think Icarus) theme of hubris and arrogance punished by the gods. Seen in conjunction with the documentary about the collapse of Wall Street and the subsequent recession—Inside Job (in which Spitzer also makes an appearance)—Client 9 is well worth seeing as long as you keep in mind that this film, as all films, has an affective agenda. But do bear in mind that Spitzer landed his own television series on CNN before this film was released. So the resurrection process had already begun.

This post is a review of Cool It, a film by Bjorn Lomborg, directed by Ondi Timoner, produced by Roadside Attractions and 1019 Entertainment. Written by Terry Botwick, Sarah Gibson, and Bjorn Lomborg. Based on the book by Bjorn Lomborg. 88 minutes.

I FIRST MET BJORN LOMBORG IN 2001 upon the publication of his Cambridge University Press book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which I found to be a refreshing perspective on what had been the doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world scenarios that I had been hearing since I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s. Back then we were told that overpopulation would lead to worldwide hunger and starvation, that there would be massive oil depletion, precious mineral exhaustion, and rainforest extinction by the 1990s. These predictions failed utterly. I felt I had been lied to for decades by the environmentalist movement that seemed to me to be little more than a political movement that raised money by raising fears.

Lomborg’s publicist thought that I might be interested in hosting him for the Skeptics Society’s public science lecture series at the California Institute of Technology that I organize and host. I was, but given the highly debatable nature of many of Lomborg’s claims I only agreed to host him if it could be a debate. Lomborg agreed at once to debate anyone, and this is where the trouble began. I could not find anyone to debate Lomborg. I contacted all of the top environmental organizations, and to a one they all refused to participate. “There is no debate,” one told me. “We don’t want to dignify that book,” said another. I even called Paul Ehrlich, the author of the wildly popular bestselling book The Population Bomb — another apocalyptic prognostication that served as something of a catalyst in the 1970s for delimiting population growth — but he turned me down flat, warning me in no uncertain language that my reputation within the scientific community would be irreparably harmed if I went through with it. So of course I did because (A) truth is more important than reputation, and (B) no one threatens me and gets away with it. My own Senior Editor, Frank Miele, who is an expert on evolutionary biology and biodiversity (and is one of the fastest and most facile researchers I’ve ever known), challenged Lomborg on several of the chapters in his book, and we had a lively and successful debate.

My experience is symptomatic of deep problems that have long plagued the environmental movement, and for a time the political pollution of the science turned me into an environmental skeptic. That alone would be meaningless, given that I have only ever written one article on the subject (my June 2006 Scientific American column explaining that I flipped from climate skeptic to believer), but I believe that the environmental extremists had a similar effect on millions of others who remain skeptical in the teeth of what now appears to be reasonably solid evidence for anthropogenic global warming.

In fact, the documentary film Cool It, based on Lomborg’s book of the same title that serves as the popular version of his more technical and scholarly first tome, opens with him stating unequivocally that global warming is real and human caused. Wait! I thought Lomborg was a climate denier? That is what his critics have accused him of being, in fact, which apparently is the charge delivered if one does not accept in full all the claims in Cool It’s erstwhile anti-avatar, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. Here it might be useful to distinguish the two films by breaking down the subject matter into five questions:

1. Is the earth getting warmer?
2. Is the cause of global warming human activity?
3. How much warmer is it going to get?
4. What are the consequences of a warmer climate?
5. How much should we invest in altering the climate?

Global warming is real and primarily human caused. With questions 3 and 4, however, estimates include error bars that grow wider the further out we run the models because complex systems like climate are notoriously difficult to predict. Lomborg (and myself) provisionally accept the estimate of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the mean global temperature by 2100 will increase by around 4–5 degrees Fahrenheit, and that sea levels will rise by about one foot, which Lomborg reminds us is about the same level that sea levels have risen since 1860, without any major (or for that matter minor) consequences. In other words, man-made global warming will be moderate, causing moderate changes.

Examining question 4 more closely, Lomborg computes that if global warming continues unchecked through the end of the century there will be 400,000 more heat-related deaths annually, but he then notes that there will be also be 1.8 million fewer cold-related deaths, for a net gain of 1.4 million lives. This is a typical calculation that Lomborg makes in what is essentially an economic triage for global warming — he is not saying that global warming is good or inconsequential, only that its consequences must be weighed in the balance against other problems. For example, Lomborg sites data from the World Wildlife Fund that at most we will lose 15 polar bears a year due to global warming, but what doesn’t get reported is that 49 bears are shot each year. What would be more cost-effective to save polar bear lives — spend hundreds of billions of dollars to lower CO₂ emissions and (maybe) lower the mean global temperature by a fraction of a degree, or limit hunting permits?

This leads to question 5 — the economics of global climate change — which Lomborg notes that if all countries had ratified the Kyoto Protocol and lived up to its standards (which most did not), according to the IPCC at best it would have postponed the 4.7°F average increase just five years from 2100 to 2105, at a cost of $180 billion a year! By comparison, although global warming may cause an increase of two million deaths due to hunger annually by 2100, the U.N. estimates that for $10 billion a year we could save 229 million people from hunger annually today.

Economics is about the efficient allocation of limited resources that have alternative uses. If you had, say, $50 billion a year to make the world a better place for more people, how would you spend it? Cool It traces Lomborg’s attempt to answer this question through a group of scientists, economists, and world leaders whom he gathered in 2004 in Copenhagen to reach what he calls the “Copenhagen Consensus.” These experts ranked reduction of CO₂ emissions 16th out of 17 challenges. The top four were: controlling HIV/AIDS, micronutrients for fighting malnutrition, free trade to attenuate poverty, and battling malaria. A 2006 Copenhagen Consensus of U.N. ambassadors constructed a similar list, with communicable diseases, clean drinking water, and malnutrition at the top, and climate change at the bottom. A late 2008 meeting that included five Nobel Laureates recommended that President-elect Barack Obama allocate his promised $150 billion in subsidies for new technologies and $50 billion in foreign aid be allocated for research on malnutrition, immunization, and agricultural technologies. For a cool Kyoto $180 billion you can buy a lot of condoms, vitamin tablets, and mosquito nets and rescue hundreds of millions of people from disease, starvation, and impoverishment.

Cool It is an uplifting film, filled with solutions that any green technophile would love: solar, wind, wave, and geoengineering technologies take up a lion’s share of the film. (And true climate skeptics will denounce Lomborg on this front as they do not believe that these alternatives can come close to replacing coal and oil as sources of energy.) To his credit, the unflappable Lomborg, with his boyish good looks and curiosity, includes in his own film harsh disparaging commentary by his long-time critic Stephen Schneider, the Stanford University climate scientist who passed away this past July. In a very classy touch, Cool It is dedicated to Schneider.

* * *

Note: If you are skeptical of Lomborg and his branch of environmental skepticism, read the Yale University economist William Nordhaus’ technical book A Question of Balance (Yale University Press, 2008). Nordhaus computes the costs-benefits of various recommendations for changing the climate by either 2105 or 2205, primarily focused on the cost of curbing carbon emissions. Economists like to compute future profits and losses based on investments made today, adjusting for the value of a future dollar at an average interest rate of four percent. If we spent a trillion dollars today (the equivalent of the recent bailout or the Iraq war), how much climate change would it buy us in a century at four percent interest? Nordhaus’s calculations are compared to doing nothing, where a plus value is better and a minus value worse than doing nothing. Kyoto with the U.S. is plus one and without the U.S. zero, for example, and a gradually increasing global carbon tax is a plus three. That is, a $1 trillion cost today buys us $3 trillion of benefits in a century. Al Gore’s proposals, by contrast, score a minus 21, where $1 trillion invested today in Gore’s plans would net us a loss of $21 trillion in 2105. Add to these calculations the numerous other crises we face, such as the housing calamity, the financial meltdown, the coming pressures of funding Social Security and Medicare, not to mention financing two wars, a failing public education system, and so forth, and suddenly global climate change is put into perspective.

As a skeptic and atheist I am often asked, “What do you believe in?” The ending preposition implies something more than what factual claims are to be believed, such as evolution, quantum physics, or the big bang. What is suggested by the question is what values does one believe in or hold to, especially without belief in God and religion. Here is my answer.

I believe in the Principle of Freedom: All people are free to think, believe, and act as they choose, so long as they do not infringe on the equal freedom of others.

I believe in civil liberties, civil rights, and the freedoms guaranteed in the United States Constitution, including and especially freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom to assemble peacefully, freedom to petition grievances, freedom to worship (or not), freedom of the press, freedom of reproductive choice, freedom to bear arms, etc.

I believe in the sanctity of private property, the rule of law, and equal treatment under the law.

I believe in free will, free choice, moral culpability, and personal responsibility.

I believe in truth seeking and truth telling.

I believe in trust and trustworthiness.

I believe in fairness and reciprocity.

I believe in love, marriage, and fidelity.

I believe in family, friendship, and community.

I believe in honor, loyalty, and commitment to family, friends, and community members.

I believe in forgiveness when it is genuinely asked for or offered.

I believe in kindness, generosity, and charity, especially voluntary aid to others in need.

I believe in science as the best method ever devised for understanding how the world works.

I believe in reason and logic and rationality as cognitive tools for answering questions, solving problems, and devising solutions to life’s many problems and quandaries.

I believe in technological growth, cultural advancement, and moral progress.

I believe in the almost illimitable capacity of human creativity and inventiveness for our species to flourish into the far future on this planet and others.

Ad astra per aspera!

So, if you are ever asked by a believer what you believe in, offer your own list along these lines of values that you honor, and then ask, “Why, what do you believe in? Do you not honor these values?”

The impetus for essay, which I penned on a plane to Los Angeles on October 15, 2010, was that I was asked this very question the night before during the Q&A after a talk I delivered before a sizable audience at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, sponsored by CASH (Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists), supported by several other Minnesota atheist and humanist groups, and attended as well by many believers. The woman who made the inquiry explained that as an atheist she is often asked this question in a tone implying that atheists cannot or do not believe in anything.

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, but such is the delimiting effect of religious belief and the myth that without God anything goes. Quite the contrary. Without God, values matter more here and now than they ever could in any projected afterlife proscenium where the moral play is finally enacted.

P.S. The final line above translates as: To the stars with difficulty. The phrase originated with the Roman poet Seneca the Younger and was made famous on a plaque honoring the Apollo 1 astronauts who perished in a fire on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral.

A review of Clint Eastwood’s film Hereafter

/// ATTENTION! Spoiler Alert! ///

After a string of highly successful and critically acclaimed films by Clint Eastwood (Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino, Invictus, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, etc.), I fully expected his latest, Hereafter, to be so well written (screenplay by Peter Morgan—Frost/Nixon, The Queen) and so compelling that stories about near-death experiences would skyrocket and that I would be preoccupied for months dealing with media inquiries about “true stories” of the hereafter. Alas, and with some relief, this will not happen as Hereafter is possibly the worst film Eastwood has ever directed.

If the hereafter is anything like its filmic namesake, then it will turn out to be glacially slow, eternally boring, and pointless, with seemingly random plot lines aimlessly wandering about the ethereal landscape. I wanted to like this film, despite my skepticism on its subject, because I like Clint Eastwood productions and I’m a sucker for a well-produced story, able and willing to suspend disbelief long enough to get emotionally involved. I tried but failed to do so with this film. It’s a bomb. Don’t bother to see it in the theaters, and don’t even waste a couple of bucks on a Netflix rental.

The only redeeming part of the film was the striking opening scene of the tsunami in Southeast Asia that sets the background for the first plot line. An attractive French reporter leaves her lover in their hotel room to go shopping for his kids among the street vendors below. When he hears a disturbing sound and looks out the window he sees the ocean receding, followed by a massive body of water rushing back in to the shore and slamming into buildings and leveling everything in its path. From the woman’s street level view tucked in among buildings she can only see trees felling and chaos approaching with only enough time to realize that there is no time to do anything about it. She is swept up in the tsunami’s leading edge and slammed about cars, building debris, trees, and the like, until she is whacked on the head unconscious. Cut to minutes later when she is being given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by rescuers, to no avail. They give up and move on to the next victim, whereupon she comes to life, after a brief encounter with the hereafter, which Eastwood portrays as a fuzzy, nebulous place with people walking about aimlessly. It’s a portent of things to come.

The second plot line is Matt Damon’s psychic character George, a former psychic who gave up fame and riches because his “gift” is also a curse. A cross between James Van Praagh and John Edward, George concedes to a reading for a client of his sleazy brother (Jay Mohr) and scores several hits. The brother encourages George to quit his job at a San Francisco dock and return to the psychic world, but he will have none of it as it’s just too emotionally traumatic to read people’s inner thoughts (that much I suspect is true, if any of it were true, which it isn’t). Matt Damon’s love interest is the beautiful Bryce Dallas Howard, whom he meets at a cooking class, but after nearly an hour’s worth of romantic buildup to some sort of coming together, she departs the film for good after George reads her and conveys the message that her deceased father is sorry for the naughty things he did to her as a young girl.

The third plot line develops around 12-year old twins named Marcus and Jason, who live with their drug-addicted mother in London, England. Jason is hit by a car and killed, leaving Marcus to wander about the city in search of a psychic who can connect him to his brother. Here at least Eastwood had the good sense to depict what most psychics are like—scammers and flimflam artists conning their marks out of a few bucks by talking twaddle with the dead through standard cold-reading techniques. Marcus is dismayed by the idiocy of these pretenders and finally returns to the foster home where he struggles to keep his sanity.

For an hour and forty-five minutes all three of these plot lines run parallel, leaving audience members to wonder when—oh please when?!—will they finally be brought together. Finally, after what feels like an interminable marathon of tedium, George quits his job and takes a vacation in London to visit the home of his favorite author, Charles Dickens. While there he notices a flyer for a lecture about Dickens at a book fair in London, where, per chance, the French reporter is doing a signing for her new book on life after death, which she was inspired to write after an hour and a half of futzing around with her mundane reporter’s job distracted by her experience with the hereafter in the tsunami. By chance, little Marcus finds himself drawn to the book fair where he recognizes George from his web page photos, and begs him for a reading, which he finally gets. Naturally, George is better than those phony psychics, and Marcus encourages George to seek out the French woman so that they may all connect to the dead. George and Marie find a love connection as well and the story ends happily ever after.

Never have I been so relieved for a movie to end. There was one memorable moment, however, and that was the opening line of the opening trailer before Hereafter even started. The trailer was for a January 2011 release called The Rite, staring Anthony Hopkins as an American priest who travels to Italy to study at an exorcism school. (You can watch the trailer here). The line that rather caught my attention as I was settling into my seat, was, “You know the interesting thing about skeptics?” To which I blurted out “No, what?” The answer: “It’s that we’re always looking for proof. The question is, What on earth would we do with it if we found it?” I know what I do with proof when I find it. I publish it! Another character in the trailer then says “I believe people prefer to lie to themselves than face the truth.”

Here, then, in this trailer is the message for belief in the hereafter. If there were proof of it, we would publish it to the high heavens. But, since there isn’t, most people prefer to lie to themselves about it rather than face the truth that it is what we do in this life that counts.

From birth to college, the number of days as a parent doesn’t begin to capture empty nest syndrome

When I matriculated at Pepperdine University in 1974 and moved to the Malibu campus from my home in La Canada, my mother exercised her parental right to express her angst at my departure from the nest, now empty.

I responded with typical teenage indifference and bafflement born of ignorance. “Sheez, Mom, I’m only an hour away. What’s the big deal?”

“You just wait until you have one of your own,” she cried. “Then you’ll know what I’m feeling.”

Last month I found out when my daughter moved into her dorm at college and life as I know it has come to an end. Or so at least that’s what it feels like. I find myself waking up at four in the morning, reaching for some distracting literature and finding light comfort in Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. I entertain a fantasy of riding my bike to Mount Wilson and hurling myself off the cliff fully clipped into my pedals, sans helmet. I turn to the Internet for advice and find this on netdoctor.co.uk (“empty-nest syndrome”): “you could have a long lie in a scented bath. You may even come to see that although you’ve lost a teenager, you’ve gained a bathroom!” Oh, great, I’ve got a woman’s disorder. I flip back to Bourdain and learn never to order fish on Mondays (weekend leftovers).

The nest’s empty loneliness is almost unbearable. Why does it hurt so bad? Science has an answer: we are social mammals who experience deep attachment to our fellow friends and family, an evolutionary throwback to our Paleolithic hunter-gatherer days of living in small bands of a couple of dozen to a couple of hundred people who were either related to one another or knew one another intimately. Bonding unified the group, aiding survival in harsh climes and against unforgiving enemies, and attachment between parent and offspring assured that there is no one better equipped to look after the future survival of your genes than yourself. We are a pair-bonded species, practicing monogamy (or at least serial monogamy) long enough to get our children out of childhood.

How long is that? In the modern world it’s a long time. In my case, from birth to college was 6,895 days, or just a shade under 18.9 years. (For you numerophiles, that’s 165,480 hours, or 9,928,800 minutes, or 595,728,000 seconds). The quantitative figures do not begin to capture the qualitative feeling of bonding that happens between a parent and a child from the sheer amount of time spent together. Think about what those numbers mean. Every day for 6,895 days, when you get up and around in the morning your primary duty in life is to assure your child’s care and safety. An unbroken chain, suddenly cut.

We parents can’t help feeling this way and neuroscience explains why: there are a number of addictive chemicals such as dopamine and oxytocin that surge through the brain and body during positive social interactions (especially touch) that causes us to feel closer to one another. As my colleague at Claremont Graduate University Paul Zak has demonstrated in his lab, between strangers oxytocin creates a feeling of friendship. Between couples it leads to attraction and love. Between parents and offspring it cements a bond so solid that it is broken only under the most unusual (and usually pathological) circumstances. Mothers of serial killers have been known to weep in court and plead for leniency, even in the presence of the mothers of the murdered victims.

The empty-nest syndrome is real, but there is good news for this and all forms of loss and grief. According to the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, we are not very good at forecasting our unhappiness. In a comprehensive study involving six different experiments, Gilbert and his colleagues asked subjects to imagine how they would feel in a number of different scenarios that one could reasonably expect would trigger negative emotions, including the breakup of a romantic relationship, the failure to earn tenure, a defeat in a political election, negative feedback on one’s personality, the death of a child, and a job rejection by a prospective employer. Most of us think that we would be miserable for a very long time. Gilbert calls this the durability bias, an emotional misunderstanding. “Common events typically influence people’s subjective well-being for little more than a few months, and even uncommon events—such as losing a child in a car accident, being diagnosed with cancer, becoming paralyzed, or being sent to a concentration camp—seem to have less impact on long-term happiness than one might naively expect.”

In such situations we seem to experience immune neglect, says Gilbert, where we neglect to consider the strength of our psychological immune systems to protect us against the pain of insult, defeat, regret, and loss. In his experiments, for example, Gilbert and his colleagues found that “students, professors, voters, newspaper readers, test takers, and job seekers overestimated the duration of their affective reactions to romantic disappointments, career difficulties, political defeats, distressing news, clinical devaluations, and personal rejections.”

The durability bias and the failure to recognize the power of our emotional immune systems leads us to overestimate how dejected we will feel and for how long, and to underestimate how quickly we will snap out of it and feel better.

For me, taking the long view helps. How long? Deep time. Evolutionary time, in which 6,895 days represents a mere .000000005 percent of the 3.5 billion-year history of life on earth. Each of us parents makes one small contribution to the evolutionary imperative of life’s continuity from one generation to the next without a single gap, an unbroken link over the eons, glorious in its contiguity and spiritual in its contemplation.

And always remember, there’s no place like home…