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It was last Saturday when it hit me that my entire life has been framed by violence. I don’t remember being born on Jan. 28, 2000, and I don’t remember being a year and a half old when 9/11 happened. I don’t remember the panic of my mother as she stepped outside our house in Washington and smelled the smoke of the burning Pentagon. I don’t remember her knowing I would grow up in a changed world.But I remember other things. I remember being 7 years old and seeing adults who were sad, angry, shocked after something terrible happened at Virginia Tech. (Julia Savoca Gibson, 11/1)

About two-thirds of gun deaths in the U.S. each year are suicides, traumatic and desperate acts that often lie at the nexus of mental illness and ready access to a firearm. Yet a new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine finds that only 13% of people know that gun suicides far outpace homicides, a likely function of regular news coverage of violent crimes and a tendency to not cover suicides. (Scott Martelle, 11/1)

In this most indecent time of political rage and politically weaponized tragedy, America desperately needed to see decent people do the decent thing: Like Dr. Jeffrey Cohen and other Jewish doctors and nurses who treated the wounded, raving and murderous anti-Semite who’d just slaughtered 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. (John Kass, 11/1)

Basic human rights and protection from discrimination should not be a topic for debate. Whether or not the life experience of a least 1.4 million American transgender adults and thousands of youth is valid and true should not be an academic conversation about legal precedent.But the memo related to Title IX currently circulating in the Department of Health and Human Services does exactly that. The department is seeking to define gender “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable,” and if the topic is ever unclear, should be settled with genetic testing. (Chris Davis, 11/1)

We’ve gotten used to a president who tells lies so habitually, so routinely, that even the fact-checkers have grown blasé. We can become so numb, so exhausted by the everyday spectacle of lie after lie, that it’s easier to just go with the flow of believing the politicians, rather than consulting our own hearts or minds about what they tell us .On abortion, for example. You may have heard that some Democrats currently running for office are “pro-abortion.” In fact, that some are so “pro-abortion” that they are for it “right up to the moment of birth.” (Susan Bordo, 10/30)

As nutrition experts, we will leave the spiritual nature of veganism to others and focus on the onslaught of conflicting health claims regarding the beneficial effects of veganism on blood pressure, weight, longevity and just about every other system in our bodies. Unfortunately, most Americans get this information from our least reliable medical news source, the morning talk shows. Spoiler alert. The answer is going to be, “We’re not sure.” Don’t keep reading if you don’t like an honest response. (Michael Rosenbaum and David Seres, 11/1)