For Lynn Lee, at 65, it was her fourth layoff in April 2025. Yet tears still rushed down her cheeks.“I remember thinking, ‘What are the odds this would happen again?’ ” Lee said. Lee has survived a rolling tide of economic forces that have transformed manufacturing in rural America. The textile plants that moved to Brazil in the mid-2000s. The glass-fiber plant that shut down several years later. The sign-making company that shed workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. After each layoff, Lee found something new. Now, she was at retirement age. But like many older Americans with little savings and heavy financial burdens, retirement was out of the question.

She had $7,000 in mostly out-of-pocket medical debt left over from breast-cancer treatment in 2020 and a heart procedure in 2024. Plus, there was the $42,000 she still owed from a second mortgage on her home.Lee was back to searching for work. This time, she would be competing against a legion of other job seekers in an unforgiving market. Nearly a quarter of unemployed people have been without a job for at least 27 weeks. …Excerpt from The Bruising Reality of Searching for a Job at 65, WSJ, Dec. 26, 2025

According to Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic: “By the summer of 2026, I expect that many people who work with frontier AI systems will feel as though they live in a parallel world to people who don’t. And I expect this will be more than just a feeling – similar to how the crypto economy moved oddly fast relative to the rest of the digital economy, I think we can expect the emerging “AI economy” to move very fast relative to everything else… But a crucial difference is that the AI economy already touches a lot more of our ‘regular’ economic reality than the crypto economy.” Excerpt from Import AI 438: Siren sirens, flashing for us all, by Jack Clark, Dec. 22, 2025