How Does One Stay Sane in a World Like This?

It might be the signature question of our time.

You try not to think about it all the time. But it is very hard not to think about it all the time.

August is always the longest month. But this has to have been the longest of all the Augusts. It has been only one month — one month — since the shooting at NFL headquarters in Manhattan, a terrifying, awful event that, until I sat down to research this column, I had entirely forgotten happened. So much went down in August. I’m not sure we’ve truly processed how much we may have changed, just in August 2025. I wonder if August was the real pivot month.

On August 1, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its July jobs report, and it was a disaster: Only 73,000 jobs added that month and, much worse, an added revision to previous month’s reports, a common occurrence when new data is available, that dramatically reduced the number of jobs added in May and June. It was a clear sign that the job market, in direct response to the President’s trade and tariff policies, was stalling, with ominous signs for the economy at large; in immediate response, the Dow dropped 1.3 percent by mid-morning. “This is absolutely the worst major economic report since the end of the pandemic era,” Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM US, told CNN. This news came on…