Last week, British bestselling author Simon Winchester wondered aloud whether we have too much information — so much so that it impedes our thinking.

At the Providence Athenaeum in Rhode Island, he spoke about his new and compelling book, “Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic.”

Winchester wondered whether the great minds of antiquity, who gave us what was to become Western civilization, weren’t assisted by having no legacy; weren’t boxed in by previous thinkers.

These men — including but not limited to Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Euclid, Archimedes, Hippocrates, Thucydides and Sophocles — were the founding fathers of Western philosophy, science, history and theater.

The list is awesome, and the idea of a kind of zero-sum game in thinking is intriguing. How did they do it, starting with so little knowledge in circulation around the Mediterranean about 2,500 years ago?

Winchester — who apologized for a tendency to get off the subject — mused on whether they would have been able to reach such towering intellectual heights if they had their heads stuffed full of what passes as knowledge in today’s world.

Of course, Winchester, a great purveyor of knowledge — and a lot of fun stuff — doesn’t believe we should turn into know-nothings, he just raises an interesting question: How did it happen?

Winchester first worked as a journalist for the British newspapers the Guardian and then the Sunday Times. His journalism took him around the world from Northern Ireland’s Troubles to the numerous slums of Bangalore (now Bengaluru).

In his book, he tells the story of how one woman changed the lives of otherwise hopeless children in the Bangalore slums by teaching them to read and speak in English, an official language of India. The results were that these urchins went on to great success inside and outside India and in many callings.

In fact, not only is Winchester’s book about learning, but it is also hugely endorsing of scholarship. He reveres libraries, and during his remarks he ran through a list of the great libraries of the world from the library of the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal to the Great Library of Alexandria to the eccentric London Library, of which he is fond, less famous than the British Library.

In pondering the effects of knowledge, Winchester mentioned parenthetically how we are losing our sense of direction. This hit home for me, as my wife had a sharp sense of direction until she started using Google Maps.

In Africa, when I was a boy, the Africans could tell time with accuracy by a quick glance at the sun. This fascinated me. But when they got watches, that skill seemed to decline. Also, farmers everywhere used to determine the pH of soil by testing it on their tongues. Now they must send it to a lab.

My favorite historical story about immaculate creation through ignorance is about James IV of Scotland, an erudite and progressive monarch. During his rule, compulsory education was introduced in 1495, and the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh was established in 1505.

James IV also had a keen interest in language and religion. He thought infants without parental or other influence would naturally grow up speaking Hebrew. To prove his point, he sent two infants in the care of a deaf and dumb woman to the island of Inchkeith. Some reports were that as they grew, the children could communicate with each other with grunts and their own words, but they spoke no language — let alone Hebrew.

Let me assure you that Simon Winchester, writer of books which inform (like the one about the assembling of the Oxford English Dictionary, “The Professor and the Madman,” which became a runaway success around the world), doesn’t propagate absurd theories, but they intrigue him. Ditto myself.

If you want great information, superb anecdotes and splendid writing, I suggest you read Winchester’s “Knowing What We Know.” You will know even more when you have read this work and your mind won’t be cluttered, just better stocked.

This is a horror story.

It is a story of unmitigated suffering and death from despair. It is the story of our veterans, who are 57 percent more likely to take their own lives than those who haven’t served their country.

Every day in the United States, an average of 17 veterans commit suicide. Those who have served in special combat force units, like Navy SEALS, are a little more likely to die this way than regular forces.

These veterans are suffering and dying in plain sight. Veterans, whether they have seen action or not, are ending lives by their own hands — hands that willingly took up arms to serve.

There is a clear and present crisis in the deaths of those who have borne the battle, heard their country’s call, and who die, often alone in despair.

Around Veterans Day, we remember them, but what do we know of them?

More veterans have taken their own lives in the last 10 years than died in the Vietnam War. Frank Larkin, chairman of Warrior Call, an organization that asks anyone who knows a veteran to call them from time to time and ask, “How are you doing? What do you need? Can I get help for you?” But primarily to convey the comfort of knowing “you are not alone.”

However, the problems are beyond loneliness and the well-known precursors to suicide: drug abuse, alcoholism, joblessness and broken relationships.

New research shows that what ails these sad heroes isn’t just psychological and moral despair but physical brain damage — minute tears in the brain that CT scans don’t pick up.

A leading researcher into brain injury and concussion, Dr. Brian Edlow, professor at Harvard and associate director of the Center for Neurotechnology and Neurorecovery at Massachusetts General Hospital, said these tears are only discovered in postmortems when the brain tissue is put under a powerful microscope.

The cause of these tears, Edlow told guest host Adam Clayton Powell III in a special Veterans Day episode of the television program “White House Chronicle,” are blasts that troops experience on the battlefield and in training — massive concussive blasts, over and over again. Those concerned emphasize that the victim doesn’t have to see combat to suffer damage, it happens in training as well.

Sometimes the tears are a result of a physical head injury like a soldier’s head hitting the inside a tank or a blast throwing a soldier against a wall. Still, mostly it is the shockwave, according to Edlow.

“Just to appreciate the scope of this problem, if you look at the post-9/11 generation, those who answered the call to serve after September 11, 2001, over 30,000 active-duty and veteran military personnel have died by suicide during that time period, which is four times more than the number of active-duty personnel who died in combat,” he said, adding that the “extent of the suicide problem is humbling.”

Larkin said that two-thirds of those who commit suicide have never been to a VA hospital or sought institutional help.

For Larkin, the story is personal. His son Ryan, a decorated Navy SEAL who served for 10 years with four active-duty deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, was a suicide.

Ryan returned from active duty a changed young man, 29 years old. He was moody, didn’t smile and showed classic signs of depression. His family couldn’t get him out of it, and his brain scans were negative. After a year, he took his own life.

Earlier, Ryan had asked that his body be used for medical research. Postmortem diagnosis at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center revealed substantial brain damage that wasn’t detectable during the year before his death, his father said.

“The system didn’t know what to do and it defaulted toward psychiatric diagnosis,” Larkin said.

Referring to scans and other techniques now in use to examine the brain, Edlow said, “We simply are not accurate enough to detect these sub-concussive blast-related injuries.”

Ryan’s tragedy is repeated 17 times a day — and that figure doesn’t account for those who die in deliberate accidents and are otherwise not reported as suicide, Larkin said.

While medical science and the military catch up, all we can do, as Larkin said, is to check on a veteran, any veteran. You could save a life, bring a man or woman back from the precipice.

This article is based on remarks the author made to the Association of European Journalists annual congress in Vlore, Albania, last week.

I am a journalist. That means, as it was once explained to me by Dan Raviv of CBS News, I try to find out what is going on and tell people. I know no better description than that of the work.

To my mind, there are two kinds of news stories: day-to-day stories and those that stay with us for a long time.

My long-term story has been energy. I started covering it in 1970, and, all these years later, it is still the big story.

Now, that story for me has been joined by another story of huge consequence to all of us, as energy has been since the 1970s. That story is artificial intelligence.

Leon Trotsky is believed to have said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” I say, “You may not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you.”

Just as the Arab oil embargo of October 1973 upended everything, AI is set to upend everything going forward.

The first impact on journalism will be to truth. With pervasive disinformation, largely emanating from Russia, establishing the veracity of what we read — documents we review, emails we receive — will be harder. The provenance of information will become more difficult to establish.

Then, it is likely that there will be structural changes to our craft. Much of the more routine work will be done by AI — things like recording sports results and sifting through legal documents. And, if we aren’t careful, AI will be writing stories.

One of the many professors I have interviewed while reporting the AI story is Stuart Russell at the University of California, Berkeley, who said the first impact will be on “language in and  language out.” That means journalism and writing in general, law and lawyering, and education. The written word is vulnerable to being annexed by AI.

The biggest impact on society is going to be on service jobs. The only safe place for employment may be artisan jobs — carpenters, plumbers, and electricians.
Already, fast-food chains are looking to eliminate order-takers and cashiers. People not needed, alas.

The AI industry — there is one, and it is growing exponentially —likes to look to automation and say, “But automation added jobs.”

Well, all the evidence is that AI will subtract jobs almost across the board. Think of all the people around the world who work in customer service. Most of that will be done in the future by AI.

When you call the bank, the insurance agency, or the department store, a polite non-person will be helping you. Probably, the help will be more efficient, but it will represent the elimination of all those human beings, often in other countries, who took your orders, checked on your account, helped you decide between options of service, and to whom you reported your problems or, as often, voiced your anger and disappointment.

The AI bot will cluck sympathetically and say something like, “I am sorry to hear that. I will help you if I can, but I must warn you that company policy doesn’t allow for refunds.”

On the upside, research — especially medical research — will be boosted as never before. One researcher told me a baby born today can expect to live to 120 — another big story.

As journalists, we are going to have to continue to find out what is going on and tell people. But we will also have to find new ways of watermarking the truth. Leica, for instance, has come out with a camera that it says can authenticate the place and time a photo was taken.

We are going to have to find new outlets for our work where people will know that it was written and reported by a human being, one of us, not an algorithm.

Journalists are criticized constantly for our failings, for allegedly being left or right politically, for ignoring or overstating, but when war breaks out, we become heroes.

I salute those brave colleagues reporting from Gaza and Ukraine. They are doing the vital work of finding out what is going on and telling us. Seventeen have been killed in Ukraine and 34 in Gaza. They are the noble of our trade.

When you see a sleek new Tesla in a parking lot or hear an announcement of a utility committing to solar or that work is proceeding with converting steel-making from coal to electricity, you might think oil and natural gas are on the ropes, that coal has left the utility scene and the new, green world is at hand.

Yes, yes, yes, Herculean efforts are underway in advanced countries to curb the use of fossil fuels. But those fuels are still dominant and will remain so for a long time. World oil consumption is now at 97 million barrels a day. It is set to rise before it falls back.

In the United States last year, according to the Energy Information Administration, natural gas accounted for 39.9 percent of electricity production; coal, 19.7 percent; nuclear, 18.2 percent; and renewables, the rest, although these are coming on fast.

A study released this month by the International Energy Agency in Paris predicts world oil production will peak in 2030. Maybe. But one by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries also released recently, says this won’t occur until 2045 or later.

One way or another, oil remains the big enchilada of fossil fuels. Gradually, it may yield to natural gas, which has become a vital part of the U.S. and global electricity scene. Eventually, it will become essential as a maritime fuel.

Oil has been phased out of U.S. electricity generation, except for emergencies. But natural gas has become the bridge, if you will, to the renewables, mainly wind and solar.

Though under threat, coal is still a vital part of U.S. electricity generation. In China and India, its share is 50 percent and rising.

Although oil may peak in 2030 or 15 years later, it is going to be the critical transportation fuel for decades. Even if electric cars take over, and light trucks and some buses do likewise, it will be a long time before ships, trains, inter-city trucks, and airplanes give it up.

New cruise ships will be powered with natural gas, and some of the larger, older ones are slated to make the conversion. But for the rest of the global maritime fleet, that isn’t going to happen.

There are about 55,000 merchant ships traversing the world’s oceans. Hardly any of them will convert to compressed natural gas, which is much less polluting than the oil now burned at sea, mostly residual or diesel.

The reason they won’t convert is prohibitive cost; bunkering is a problem, too. Major new infrastructure is needed to support compressed natural gas as a maritime fuel.

Aircraft have an acute problem of their own. It arises from the way jets spew pollution at altitude, making them a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions.

While it isn’t certain how many aircraft there are in the world, estimates put large aircraft at around 23,000, and if absolutely everything that is flyable with an engine is added, it may be close to double that number.

The airlines, airframe makers, and engine manufacturers are desperately seeking solutions, but so far, nothing viable has emerged. Batteries are heavy and draw down quickly; hydrogen doesn’t have the energy density and is highly flammable.

No new technology is on the horizon, but more people are flying, and that number appears to be exponential. Up, up, and away is now an expectation for even people of modest income.

The surviving usefulness of fossil fuels globally presents U.S. policy-makers with a dilemma: It is the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer. It has a surplus of natural gas for export as liquified natural gas (LNG). The United States produces 12 million-plus barrels of oil a day, but well short of the 19 million barrels a day the nation consumes. Ergo, there is a security advantage in increasing domestic oil production, which alarms the Biden administration.

LNG exports are important not only because of their profitability but also their stabilizing effect on world markets, as demonstrated by the Ukraine crisis.

It behooves the United States to up the production and export of natural gas while continuing downward pressure on domestic oil consumption. A simple enough proposition, except that environmentalists and the administration would like to reduce natural gas consumption and production.

New England, for example, tried to starve out gas by not installing delivery pipelines. Now, LNG that should be flowing overseas to stabilize and reduce coal consumption is going to the Northeast, a costly and futile attempt at curbing greenhouse gases.

Damn those fossils! You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them.

Many years ago, I was mugged in Washington.

I was looking for an informal club of the kind that sprang up after hours around big newspapers. These “clubs” were usually just an apartment with beer, liquor and card games for those who finished work after midnight.

The club I was looking for was on 14th Street, then considered a bad part of town. I never got there: I was jumped and punched by a group of teenagers, who threw me to the ground and took my wallet.

My colleagues at The Washington Post brushed it off as my fault, a self-inflicted wound — no excuses for my nocturnal wanderings.

I was bruised and felt ashamed of my stupidity. But Barry Sussman, an editor, said, “Llewellyn, you didn’t mug yourself.”

It is a sentiment that comforted my shaken self then and has stuck with me. Incidentally, Sussman was the unsung hero of the Watergate story: He edited the reporting as it came in.

My initial reaction to the carnage in Israel was, “What happened to Israeli intelligence? Where was the vaunted Mossad? By extension, where was the CIA, known to work closely with Mossad?”

Once on the Golan Heights, an Israel Defense Forces officer stood with me and boasted about how, with American-supplied gear, the military could listen to telephone calls in Jordan or watch a Syrian soldier on the plain below leave his tent to pee in the night.

So where was the surveillance, and what of human intelligence?

Thousands from Gaza went to Israel every day to work. Surely someone would have seen something; someone would have blown the whistle on Hamas’ intention to wreak mayhem on innocent Israelis — 1,400 were butchered.

Anthony Wells, a retired intelligence officer and author who uniquely served in the British and American intelligence services, told me in an interview on the television program “’White House Chronicle” that the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was partly to blame. He said the prime minister had leaned toward Hamas, ignoring the Palestinian Authority and sometimes ignoring Mossad. This, plus political unrest in Israel over Netanyahu’s plan to curtail the power of the Supreme Court, added to the intelligence failure.

But Israel didn’t mug itself.

The planners of the industrial-scale murder of Israelis at a music “festival for peace,” of all things, had to know that Israel would take terrible revenge; that the hurt to the people living in the Gaza Strip would exceed the hurt brought to Israel; that the vengeance would be swift and terrible.

I have noticed that where there is long-enduring hatred, as between the Greeks and the Turks, the Protestants and the Catholics in Northern Ireland, and the Shona and Ndebele in Zimbabwe, hating has its own life. People come to love to hate, to revel in it, even to find comfort in it.

Hatred is also taught, handed down through the generations.

In the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Arabs have come to treasure their suffering and to love their hating. But, as Wells told me, wars of vengeance have a price: Witness the U.S. response to 9/11 with the invasion of Afghanistan.

The suffering on both sides in the Israel-Gaza conflict is hard to process. The screaming of wounded children, the hopelessness of those who won’t be whole again, the agony of those who pray for death as they lie under rubble, hoping only for quick release.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is now put asunder. It went on too long without peace.

David Haworth, the late English journalist, said, “I’m tired of the process, where is the peace?” Exactly. Now, it may be decades away as Israel digs in and the Palestinians ramp up their devotion to victimhood.

The blame game for what happened is in full swing: anger at the intelligence failure; the national distractions in Israel, initiated by Netanyahu; and the slow response by the Israel Defense Forces.

I must remind myself over and over again, as my heart goes out to the people of Gaza and the generations that will pay the price, that Israel didn’t mug itself: It was invaded by terrorists for the purpose of terror.

My parting thought: The mass killing of the kind in Israel and Ukraine diminishes all of us. It makes the individual, far from the slaughter, feel very insignificant — and lucky.

I have a soft spot for engineers and engineering. It started with my father. He called himself an engineer, even though he left school at 13 in a remote corner of Zimbabwe and went to work in an auto repair shop.

By the time I remember his work clearly, in the 1950s, he was amazingly competent at everything he did, which was about everything that he could get to do. He could work a lathe, arc weld and acetylene weld, cut, rig, and screw.

My father used his imagination to solve problems, from finding a lost pump down a well to building a stand for a water tank that could supply several homes. He worked in steel: African termites wouldn’t allow wood to be used for external structures.

Electricity was a critical part of his sphere; installing and repairing electrical power equipment was in his self-written brief.

Maybe that is why, for more than 50 years, I have found myself covering the electric power industry. I have watched it struggle through the energy crisis and swing away from nuclear to coal, driven by popular feeling. I have watched natural gas, dismissed by the Carter administration as a “depleted resource,’’ roar back in the 1990s with new turbines, diminished regulation, and the vastly improved fracking technology.

Now, electricity is again a place of excitement. I have been to four important electricity conferences lately, and the word I hear everywhere about the challenges of the electricity future is “exciting.”

James Amato, vice president of Burns & McDonnell, the Kansas City, Mo.-based engineering, construction, and architecture firm that is heavily involved in all phases of the electric infrastructure, told me during an interview for the television program “White House Chronicle” that this is the most exciting time in supplying electricity since Thomas Edison set the whole thing in motion.

The industry, Amato explained, was in a state of complete reinvention. It must move off coal into renewables and prepare for a doubling or more of electricity demand by mid-century.

However, he also told me, “There is a major supply problem with engineers.” The colleges and universities aren’t producing enough of them, and not enough quality engineers — and he emphasized quality — are looking toward the ongoing electric revolution, which, to those involved in it, is so exhilarating and the place to be.

This problem is compounded by a wave of age retirements that is hitting the industry.

I believe that the electric supply system became a taken-for-granted undertaking and that talented engineers sought the glamor of the computer and defense industries.

Now, the big engineering companies are out to tell engineering school graduates that the big excitement is working on the world’s biggest machine: the U.S. electric supply system.

My late friend Ben Wattenberg, demographer, essayist, presidential speechwriter, television personality, and strategic thinker, hosted an important PBS documentary film and co-wrote a companion book, “The First Measured Century: The Other Way of Looking at American History.” He showed how our ability to measure changed public policy as we learned exactly about the distribution of people and who they were. Also, how we could measure things down to parts per billion in, say, water.

In my view, this is set to be the first engineered century, in tandem with being the first fully electric century. We are moving toward a new level of dependence on electricity and the myriad systems that support it. From the moment we wake, we are using electricity, and even as we sleep, electricity controls the temperature and time for us.

The new need to reduce carbon entering the atmosphere is to electrify almost everything else, primary transportation — from cars to commercial vehicles and eventually trains — but also heavy industrial uses, such as making steel and cement.

Amato said there is not only a shortage of college-educated engineers needed on the frontlines of the electric revolution but also a shortage of competent technicians or those trained in the crafts that support engineering. These are people who wield the tools, artisans across the board. In the electric utilities, there is also a need for line workers, a job that offers security, retirement, and esprit.

In the 1960s, the big engineering adventure was the space race. Today, it is the stuff that powers your coffeemaker in the morning, your cup of joe, or, you might say, your jolt of electrons.

This is a seminal year, meaning nothing will be the same again.

This is the year when two monumentally new forces began to shape how we live, where we reside and the work we do. Think of the invention of the printing press around 1440 and the perfection of the steam engine in about 1776.

These forces have been coming for a while; they haven’t evolved in secret. But this was the year they burst into our consciousness and began affecting our lives.

The twin agents of transformation are climate change and artificial intelligence. They can’t be denied. They will be felt, and they will bring about transformative change.

Climate change was felt this year. In Texas and across the Southwest, temperatures of well over 100 degrees persisted for more than three months. Phoenix had temperatures of 110  degrees or above for 31 days.

On a recent visit to Austin, an exhausted Uber driver told me the heat had upended her life; it made entering her car and keeping it cool challenging. Her car’s air conditioner was taxed with more heat than it could handle. Her family had to stay indoors, and their electric bill surged.

The electric utilities came through heroically without significant blackouts, but it was a close thing.

David Naylor, president of Rayburn Electric, a cooperative association providing power to four distribution companies bordering Dallas, told me, “Summer 2023 presented a few unique challenges with so many days about 105 degrees. While Texas is accustomed to hot summers, there is an impactful difference between 100 degrees and 105.”

Rayburn ran flat out, including its recently purchased gas-fired station. It issued a “hands-off” order that, Naylor said, meant “facilities were left essentially alone unless absolutely necessary.”

It was the same for electric utilities nationwide. Every plant that could be pressed into service was and was left to run without normal maintenance, which would involve taking it offline.

Water is a parallel problem to heat.

We have overused groundwater and depleted aquifers. Saltwater is seeping into the soil in some regions, rendering agriculture impossible.

That is occurring in Florida and Louisiana. Some of the saltwater intrusion results from higher sea levels, and some of it is the voracious way aquifers have been pumped out during long periods of heat and low rainfall.

Most of the West and Florida face the aquifer problem, but in coastal communities, it can be a crisis — irreversible damage to the land.

Heat and drought will cause many to leave their homes, especially in Africa, but also in South and Central America, adding to the millions of migrants on the move around the world.

AI is one of history’s two-edged swords. On the positive side, it is a gift to research, especially in life sciences, which could deliver a life expectancy north of 120 years.

But AI will be a powerful disruptor elsewhere, from national defense to intellectual property and, of course, to employment. Large numbers of jobs, for example, in call centers, at fast-food restaurant counters, and at check-in desks in hotels and airports, will be taken over by AI.

Think about this: You go to the airport and talk to a receptor (likely to be a simple microphone-type of gadget on the already ubiquitous kiosks) while staring at a display screen, giving you details of your seat, your flight — and its expected delays.

Out of sight in the control tower, although it might not be a tower, AI moves airplanes along the ground and clears them to take off and land — eventually, it will fly the plane if the public accepts that.

No check-in crew, no air traffic controllers and, most likely, the baggage will be handled by AI-controlled robots.

Aviation is much closer to AI automation than people realize. But that isn’t all. You may get to the airport in a driverless Lyft or Uber car, and the only human beings you will see are your fellow passengers.

All that adds up to the disappearance of a huge number of jobs, estimated by Goldman Sachs to be as many as 300 million full-time jobs worldwide. Eventually, in a re-ordered economy, new jobs will appear and the crisis will pass.

The most secure employment might be for artisans. People who fix things — people like plumbers, mechanics and electricians. And, oh yes, those who fix and install computers. They might well emerge as a new aristocracy.

The United Auto Workers strike against the Big Three U.S. automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, formerly Chrysler — no matter the merits of the workers’ yearnings, shouldn’t have happened. Once it got going, it shouldn’t have lasted. The White House should have spoken.

Already, there is damage. Ford has “paused” plans to build a $3.5-billion battery plant in Michigan. If the strike drags on or if the industry bows to the most damaging demand in the union’s wish list (a 32-hour work week), then EVs and battery leadership production will be ceded to other countries. U.S. automakers’ dependence on China — the world’s top battery maker for EVs — will continue.

The U.S. auto industry is starting its EV surge behind others, and it will suffer mightily if the UAW  doesn’t return to work.

With so much at stake in this circumstance, it would be reasonable to expect President Biden to have both sides closeted at Camp David and  to be “knocking heads together.”

The president is the ultimate arbitrator, the one we look to for guidance and to tell us what is best. Yet, instead of bringing both sides together in the national interest, Biden has chosen sides and chosen to walk the picket line.

Even Steven Rattner, the Democrats’ mechanic regarding auto issues, has said this is wrong.

Rattner — whom I caroused with when he was a reporter at The New York Times before he became fabulously rich on Wall Street — is through-and-through a Democrat and one of the party’s intellectuals. In 2009, he authored the rescue plan for the auto industry. At that time, it looked as if General Motors and Chrysler were headed for permanent closure.

What was Biden thinking? Why did he abandon the high ground of the presidency? How can Biden now sit down and bring both sides to the table to negotiate in good faith? He has already declared his allegiance to one.

I believe in the value of unions: guarantors of middle-class life for many. I am not just saying that. I have lived it.

I was once the president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. I am very proud of the financial settlement we got on my watch for reporters and editors at The Washington Post. It was a breakthrough: a 67 percent pay raise over three years.

The newspaper industry was prosperous then, whereas reporters and editors were poorly paid. It was long before the internet would crush the industry, reducing it to its present state of poverty and collapse. We were asking for some of the goodies we had created. There was no danger of The Washington Post moving to China.

Sadly, the unions have been slow to adjust to new realities. They are stuck in a mindset of the days when we were a country of industrial robber barons and industrial unions made sense. Now, we are a service economy desperately seeking to re-industrialize. EVs are essential in that effort.

I ran into outdated union thinking head-on at the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. Although we were largely autonomous, we were a chapter of the American Newspaper Guild, our head office.

I had a proposal for simplifying work schedules for editorial staff. My proposal was that editorial staff work three days — 10 to 12 hours a day — and have three days off. My colleagues loved it; the Washington Post management saw it as a solution to overtime and weekend staffing problems. I had seen it work well at the BBC in London, where it was standard practice.

The ANG head office went berserk: It was a betrayal of union history and the “model” contract, written by the legendary reporter, columnist and ANG founder Heywood Broun in 1935. In negotiations with The Post, I dropped the proposal, to everyone’s regret. That kind of legacy thinking is what has been killing unions and unionism.

There is a backstory to the Hollywood writers’ strike and the auto workers’ stoppage: artificial intelligence. It will change lives and threaten the kind of work unions have protected.

Biden might well have chosen the strikes as a chance to bring about settlements but also to begin a national dialogue on AI.

Instead, Biden walked a picket line, resolving nothing.

Edmund Burke, the 18th-century British statesman, argued during the celebrated impeachment of Warren Hastings, the governor of Bengal, that impeachment was essentially a political process, not a judicial one. Quite so.

The political dimension of impeachment is again on display in Washington, where the Republicans, driven by a faction of the party, are moving toward impeaching President Biden.

Historically, presidential impeachment has been reserved for actions that meet the undefined standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It has been used with incredible restraint; until the impeachment of Bill Clinton, only Andrew Johnson had been impeached. The bar was lowered for the Clinton action then, and the attempt to impeach Biden is a further lowering —  pointing up that it is, as Burke argued, a political process.

Impeachment is becoming a common political tactic, not as envisaged by the Founders, the ultimate censure, leading to a trial in the Senate and removal from office.

The two indictments of Donald Trump met, to my mind, the constitutional standard, and had the Senate been in other hands, led to a trial and removal. It is argued that those indictments didn’t meet the standard and were no more than censure by another name, carried out along party lines.

The gravity of impeachment has been preserved since the republic’s beginning, but it is in danger.

Some aspects of the structure of the state should be out of reach of the political process. The Constitution guarantees that it can’t be easily amended, or today it wouldn’t be recognizable, as every fashionable fixation would have been added. The mistake of Prohibition would be written again and again.

When the Northern Ireland peace accords were being written, I was involved with a lively summer school in Ireland — which might be thought of as a think tank that meets once a year.

This organization, the International Humbert Summer School, studied Ireland’s relationship with the world but became involved in the peace process. There were speakers from the Unionists (pro-British) and Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA.

At one session, my role was to respond to the late Martin McGuinness, widely known as a top leader of the IRA, believed by the British to be a terrorist with blood on his hands.

Because I have a British accent, the organizers, John Cooney, the Irish historian and journalist, and Tony McGarry, a prominent local headmaster in Ballina, County Mayo, where we gathered, were nervous about what I might say to a man who was regarded with fear and awe as a killer.

Our event turned into a debate. McGuinness was sharp, had a good sense of humor and was open to ideas. Because the IRA had been engaged in armed struggle for so long, it hadn’t thought about constitutional arrangements in peace.

Thinking of the U.S. Constitution, I suggested to McGuinness that if a new constitution for Northern Ireland were to be written, it should sweep nothing under the carpet by ignoring it (as was the American case with slavery) and that when finished, it should be placed on “a high shelf” from which it couldn’t be easily taken down.

McGuinness agreed heartily, leading to a discussion of constitutions and systems of government and how the drafting could be perfected.

But my idea of a high shelf was what stuck with him.

So, it is profoundly disheartening to see impeachment treated as just another political tactic to be launched against any American president simply because the opposition party doesn’t like the president’s policies. But that is what is happening.

Incidentally, the impeachment of Warren Hastings, which dragged on for years and was enormously expensive, ended in acquittal before the House of Lords, proving Burke’s point that impeachment was a political process.

In the United States, we have avoided keeping it out of the political maelstrom for most of our history. It is sad to see it used now as a purely political tactic.

We have a permanent campaign for the presidency. No sooner is one election certified than rumblings about the next one, with all the attendant speculation, begin.

Will presidential impeachment become part of the political process? And what if a Senate has a two-thirds’ majority to convict on political grounds? There is danger here.

At the end of our exchange, I wished the IRA leader “the best of British luck.” He laughed. No attempt to kneecap me followed.