Sensible gun laws, a safer environment, campaign finance reform, affordable access to health care, and many other progressive priorities are supported by an overwhelming majority of the American people. But they aren't the law of the land. That isn't an accident. Republicans know they don't enjoy popular support. So, keeping certain people from voting is at the heart of their election strategy. We have to fight voter suppression, but we can't just play defense anymore. iVote is going on offense to fight to expand access to voting to ensure more people vote... because if everyone voted our democracy would finally reflect the will of all its people.
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As screens replace toys, childhood is being gamified. What this shift means for parents, play, development, and holiday gift-giving.
Getty Images, Oscar Wong
The Christmas When Toys Died: The Playtime Paradigm Shift Retailers Failed to See Coming
Dec 23, 2025
Something is changing this Christmas, and parents everywhere are feeling it. Bedrooms overflow with toys no one touches, while tablets steal the spotlight, pulling children as young as five into digital worlds that retailers are slow to recognize. The shift is quiet but unmistakable, and many parents are left wondering what toy purchases even make sense anymore.
Research shows that higher screen time correlates with significantly lower engagement in other play activities, mainly traditional, physical, unstructured play. It suggests screen-based play is displacing classic play with traditional toys. Families are experiencing in real time what experts increasingly describe as the rise of “gamified childhoods.”
Parents walk store aisles searching for something that will excite the children on Christmas morning, yet we already know the truth. The toys we select will not compete with Minecraft® or Roblox® games like Dress to Impress® and 99 Nights in the Forest®, or with other digital universes where kids spend most of their creative energy. Children care about avatars, skins, upgrades, quests, weapons, and character packs. They care about customizing their online identities, cheat codes, and unlocking features that help them advance. Dolls, trucks, and building sets simply cannot hold their attention as well as digital play does.
This year, my family donated toys twice. Not because we want to purge clutter, but because the playroom tells the whole story. Many toys from birthdays still remain unopened in the closet. Others are played with once and never touched again. Yet the moment a tablet turns on, the excitement is instant. The dopamine hits from the rewards of progressing through a game are strong. The children want Robux, Minecoins, game passes, exclusive content, and digital tools that help them explore their online worlds. It becomes clear that parents are shopping in physical toy stores for an outdated model of childhood.
Retailers are falling even further behind. Childhood culture has shifted. Merchandise tied to the digital properties kids care about barely exists. Try finding quality items connected to 99 Nights in the Forest, KPop Demon Hunters®, or many of the other games that influence children’s online experiences. You will likely walk away empty-handed. The demand is high, and the audience is loyal, yet retailers are missing a significant financial opportunity.
This disconnect leaves parents frustrated, confused, and sometimes feeling guilty. We want to give something meaningful. We want to see genuine joy on our children’s faces. Instead, we often watch them unwrap toys that end up in the donation pile by Spring Break. At the same time, many parents feel a quiet worry building. We see how deeply these games pull our children in, and we instinctively sense that this level of immersion is not always healthy. The research reflects their concerns. Some families even notice changes in mood, patience, and attention when gaming becomes the center of play. Gaming is not a slight seasonal trend. It reflects a significant cultural shift in how children imagine, learn, and socialize.
I admit I disapprove of the nature of many of these games for the children in my family, yet I see the pressure they feel because all their friends are talking about the zombie-crazed deer in 99 Nights. The adage that asks whether you would jump off a bridge if your friends did no longer works. The answer is yes, but now parents are the ones providing the safety equipment so their children can jump and land as softly as possible.
As a former teacher and an early childhood specialist, I suggest shifting the focus this holiday season to experiences as gifts. Children may not hold on to physical toys, but they remember moments. Experiences support healthy development in ways that toys sometimes cannot. Families can consider museum memberships, robotics camps, art classes, sports clinics, concerts, creative workshops, or meaningful family outings. To keep the magic of unwrapping alive, parents can place a small related gift under the tree, such as a child-friendly camera for a year of museum visits, a nature explorer kit for an outdoor program, or art supplies that introduce an upcoming class.
Christmas feels different now, but it also offers an opportunity. I am mourning the decline of traditional toys, but parents can use this season to rethink how we protect, connect, and support our children in an evolving world.
The playtime paradigm shift is already here.
Janice Robinson-Celeste is a former educator and the founder of Successful Black Parenting Magazine, a multi-award-winning publication that empowers Black families. She is a Public Voices fellow of the OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.
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Amid division and distrust, collaborative problem-solving shows how Americans can work across differences to rebuild trust and solve shared problems.
Getty Images, andreswd
Where is the Holiday Spirit When It Comes to Solving Our Nation’s Problems?
Dec 23, 2025
Along with schmaltzy movies and unbounded commercialism, the holiday season brings something deeply meaningful: the holiday spirit. Central to this spirit is being charitable and kinder toward others. It is putting the Golden Rule—treating others as we ourselves wish to be treated—into practice.
Unfortunately, mounting evidence shows that while people believe the Golden Rule may apply in our private lives, they are pessimistic that it can have a positive impact in the “real” world filled with serious and divisive issues, political or otherwise. The vast majority of Americans believe that our political system cannot overcome current divisions to solve national problems. They seem to believe that we are doomed to fight rather than find ways to work together. Among young people, the pessimism is even more dire.
The good news is, we don’t need a Christmas miracle to make things better. We know from experience that Americans can overcome deep division: it is indeed possible to work across differences in a way that fosters respect and positive relationships and achieves remarkable results in the process.
For over two decades, we have successfully addressed critical issues at the national, state, and local levels through what we and others call “collaborative problem-solving.” We’ve found that so long as people agree there is a problem to solve, they can work together productively. Even people who assume they are inalterably opposed can find ways to build durable solutions and, in many instances, surprising friendships.
For example, in 2012, the Convergence Center for Policy Resolution convened a few dozen deeply divided leaders on K-12 education and engaged them in a collaborative problem-solving project. One participant, Gisele Huff, then head of the conservative Jaquelin Hume Foundation, was a strong critic of teachers’ unions and an advocate for school choice. She said she joined the project mainly to counteract union views and “had no illusions about the work product being anything worthwhile.
When they engaged in the collaborative problem-solving process, Gisele and the union representatives were surprised to see that they agreed on a lot. Gaps remained, and still remain, on issues like school choice. But they also found that when they focused on a common problem rather than defeating each other’s agendas, and broadened their perspectives, they were able to find enough common ground to form a more creative and compelling vision for the future of K-12 education than any party had before they met.
In this process, Gisele formed a positive relationship with her former adversary, Becky Pringle, now president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union. They have supported each other through family challenges and even did something previously regarded as unthinkable: they went on a joint speaking engagement to spread the gospel of “learner-centered education.”
The collaboration was so successful that in 2015, a wide array of participating groups formed a new organization called Education Reimagined. Since then, the organization has been successfully moving its vision into action through grassroots efforts across the country.
The example of Gisele and Becky is one of many similar stories. If philosophical adversaries like them can generate and work to implement shared solutions, there is no reason why others—in government at all levels, businesses, nonprofits, academia, religious institutions, community groups, and more—cannot do the same.
The starting point for success lies in cultivating a “collaborative mindset.” Aspects of this include: seeing that conflict can be constructive and can push thinking to a higher level; giving others the benefit of the doubt rather than making premature assumptions; cultivating a practice of genuine curiosity to really understand each other; believing that win-win solutions are possible; and entertaining the idea that no one person, perspective or ideology has all the answers and that better solutions are likely to emerge by integrating collective wisdom. People who practice this mindset, or at least stay open to it, are more likely to have success employing the key steps entailed in any collaborative problem-solving effort.
There is no reason why most people cannot try these methods in a surprisingly wide array of circumstances. With good faith and honesty, this approach can help solve tough problems far more effectively and amicably than most would ever imagine.
We know we can do better as a nation. This mindset and simple steps hold exciting potential to help foster a cultural shift toward a deeply held aspiration of the season: to bring the “holiday spirit” into our private and public lives.
Mariah Levison is the organization’s current CEO. They are co-authors of From Conflict to Convergence: Coming Together to Solve Tough Problems
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Varying speech bubbles.
Getty Images, DrAfter123
Political Division Is Fixable. Psychology Shows a Better Way Forward.
Dec 23, 2025
A friend recently told me she dreads going home for the holidays. It’s not the turkey or the travel, but rather the simmering political anger that has turned once-easy conversations with her father into potential landmines. He talks about people with her political views with such disdain that she worries he now sees her through the same lens. The person she once talked to for hours now feels emotionally out of reach.
This quiet heartbreak is becoming an American tradition no one asked for.
What many are all feeling at home with family members is a small sampling of what is happening nationally. This is indicated, on a larger scale, by the end of the most recent government shutdown – the longest in our nation’s history. Its unprecedented length points to something more troubling than congressional gridlock; it signals an escalating form of ideological and emotional division that’s reshaping not just politics but daily life. Historically, even when lawmakers disagreed, they were compelled, both morally and practically, to find common ground. Today, partisans are often seen not as opponents, but as threats to be feared, shunned, or morally condemned.
This shift is not about policy alone. It is fundamentally psychological.
For years, we’ve analyzed polarization through political explanations: media structures, partisan tactics, demographic shifts. These matter, but they overlook something essential: the minds and motivations of the people living in this environment. Political affiliation was once an opinion; today, it has hardened into a core identity. When identity becomes the battleground, politics becomes personal. Compromise becomes betrayal.
We’ve felt this shift before. In 2008, Senator John McCain took the microphone from a supporter using racist and dehumanizing language about Barack Obama. He corrected her with grace and moral clarity, reaffirming his opponent’s humanity. In the political climate of 2025, that moment feels like a relic from another era.
So how did we get here?
Americans are more stressed, financially strained, and socially isolated than in recent decades. Much of their limited free time is spent in digital spaces designed not to inform, but to engage and often inflame. The average American spends six hours and forty minutes a day on screens, where partisan spin, viral hoaxes, and algorithm-driven outrage exploit natural human fears.
Falsehoods spread faster than truths, especially those that evoke disgust, fear, or surprise. One study of 126,000 X (formerly Twitter) cascades found that emotionally charged misinformation travels further and faster than accurate information. Outrage is rewarded; accuracy is not.
Personal data is increasingly weaponized, shaping the ads we see, the posts we’re shown, and the narratives we believe. This fragmented, emotionally manipulative information environment activates predictable vulnerabilities in human cognition. It makes us anxious, reactive, and suspicious of those who think differently.
Yet even these factors are symptoms of something deeper.
Research shows that while ideological polarization has remained relatively stable across two decades, emotional polarization has skyrocketed. Americans are not necessarily further apart on policy, but they feel further apart as people.
And that means something vital: America’s political divide won’t heal through politics alone. We must apply psychology.
Many solutions begin closer to home than we realize, starting with the institutions that shape our shared civic identity.
We can start by strengthening civic education. The “I’m Just a Bill” era of Schoolhouse Rock modeled the idea that understanding government was foundational. Today, we need to expand that model. Media literacy, social psychology, and democratic norms should be integrated into K–12 and university curricula. Students should learn not just how government works, but how manipulation works: how information spreads, how bias forms, and how algorithms influence belief.
Lawmakers also have a crucial role to play. They can model something Americans rarely see anymore: reaching across the aisle not to win, but to understand. Moral reframing—discussing issues using values meaningful to the other side—helps maintain dignity and reduces hostility. Research consistently shows that bipartisan affirmations of norms can depolarize audiences, particularly when voiced by trusted ideological leaders.
None of this is simple. But the psychological forces dividing us are not immovable.
They are rooted in universal human needs: to belong, to feel morally right, to be respected, and to be seen. When those needs go unmet, people become defensive, fearful, and convinced of the worst in others. When those needs are acknowledged, we become capable of curiosity instead of judgment, and connection instead of contempt.
We do not have to wait for unity to arrive on its own. We can build it – imperfectly, slowly, intentionally – if we use the science already in front of us.
And maybe, over time, conversations around our dinner tables can return to what they once were: not landmines, but lifelines.
Michelle Quist Ryder, PhD, is a seasoned psychology researcher and nonprofit executive with nearly two decades of experience applying behavioral science to real-world social challenges. As CEO of APF, she leverages deep expertise in motivation, program development, and evidence-based interventions to inform actionable insights that strengthen communities.
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An Israeli army vehicle moves on the Israeli side, near the border with the Gaza Strip on November 18, 2025 in Southern Israel, Israel.
(Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images)
After the Ceasefire, the Violence Continues – and Cries for New Words
Dec 23, 2025
Since October 10, 2025, the day when the US-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was announced, Israel has killed at least 401 civilians, including at least 148 children. This has led Palestinian scholar Saree Makdisi to decry a “continuing genocide, albeit one that has shifted gears and has—for now—moved into the slow lane. Rather than hundreds at a time, it is killing by twos and threes” or by twenties and thirties as on November 19 and November 23 – “an obscenity that has coalesced into a new normal.” The Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik describes the post-ceasefire period as nothing more than a “reducefire,” quoting the warning issued by Amnesty International’s secretary general Agnès Callamard that the ”world must not be fooled” into believing that Israel’s genocide is over.
A visual analysis of satellite images conducted by the BBC has established that since the declared ceasefire, “the destruction of buildings in Gaza by the Israeli military has been continuing on a huge scale,” entire neighborhoods “levelled” through “demolitions,” including large swaths of farmland and orchards. The Guardian reported already in March of 2024, that satellite imagery proved the “destruction of about 38-48% of tree cover and farmland” and 23% of Gaza’s greenhouses “completely destroyed.” Writing about the “colossal violence” Israel has wrought on Gaza, Palestinian legal scholar Rabea Eghbariah lists “several variations” on the term “genocide” which researchers found the need to introduce, such as “urbicide” (the systematic destruction of cities), “domicide” (systematic destruction of housing), “sociocide,” “politicide,” and “memoricide.” Others have added the concepts “ecocide,” “scholasticide” (the systematic destruction of Gaza’s schools, universities, libraries), and “medicide” (the deliberate attacks on all aspects of Gaza’s healthcare with the intent to “wipe out” all medical care). It is only the combination of all these “-cides,” all amounting to massive war crimes, that adequately manages to describe the Palestinian condition. Constantine Zurayk introduced the term “Nakba” (“catastrophe” in Arabic) in 1948 to name the unparalleled “magnitude and ramifications of the Zionist conquest of Palestine” and its historical “rupture.” When Eghbariah argues for “Nakba” as a “new legal concept,” he underlines, however, that to understand its magnitude, one needs to go back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British colonial power promised “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, even though just 6 % of its population were Jewish. From Nakba as the “constitutive violence of 1948,” we need today to conceptualize “Nakba as a structure,” an “overarching frame.”
As a scholar of genocide and trauma and their literary and philosophical representations, I study how the creation of words (such as “reducefire,” “medicide,” “memoricide” or the coining of “Nakba” as a concept) makes realities thinkable for which previously there were no words. This is important because, as Eghbariah underlines, “generating legal language […] to name certain types of oppression is a crucial step toward demanding justice.” “Naming,” Eghbariah quotes a legal study from 1981, “may be the critical transformation,” because naming opens new narrative possibilities. But to find words to name, we also need to listen. Rosemary Zayigh’s oral histories of displaced Palestinians are foundational. Sherene Seikaly describes the heartrending difficulty of finding language in the midst of today’s devastation: “To parent in genocide is to exist in fragments between speech and silence. It is to find words to prepare children for forced absences, sudden deaths, unexpected arrests, and critical injuries” and to “witness famine robbing speech.”
During the last week of November, two independent agencies issued two reports that documented the systematic destruction still inflicted by Israel. These reports received scant attention, now that the American public is under the false assumption that “peace” has arrived in Gaza.
The report “Developments in the economy of the Occupied Palestinian Territory” was published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Its summary states that the scale of destruction “has unleashed cascading crises, economic, humanitarian, environmental, and social, propelling the Occupied Palestinian Territory from de-development to utter ruin. The military operations have ravaged vital infrastructure, including hospitals, universities, schools, places of worship, cultural heritage sites, water and sanitation systems, agricultural land and telecommunications and energy networks.” Towards the end, the report warns that while the dependence of Gaza on aid is “absolute, […] even this lifeline is obstructed by violence,” adding that Israel’s military campaign has “plunged Gaza into a human-made abyss, without a respite in sight. The sustained, systematic destruction casts significant doubt on the ability of Gaza to reconstitute itself as a liveable space and society.” Without respite in sight, the 'sociocide' is expanding today, during the 'reducefire.” It is rare to read in the official report of a UN agency an expression like “human-made abyss.”
A second report resulted from a study undertaken by a team from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and the Centre for Demographic Studies (CED) in Rostock, Germany, on the true death toll of Israel’s campaign of annihilation in Gaza. Using a scientific modeling approach, and based on data received from a number of different public sources from Israel, Gaza, and the United Nations, the researchers established that the official death toll by the Gaza Ministry of Health very likely reflected an undercount of at least 35%. In concrete numbers, they estimate the death toll between October 7, 2023, and December 31, 2024, to exceed 78,000 people. After their study’s publication, the scientists also presented an update estimating that by October 6 of this year, the “violent death toll” had “likely surpassed 100,000.” However, as the lead author Ana C. Gómez-Ugarte added, this estimate does not take into account the “indirect effects of war, which are often greater and more long-lasting,” meaning that the toll is likely to be much higher. Already in July 2024, three researchers affiliated with Canadian, Palestinian, British and US research institutes had warned in a “Correspondence” to the renowned medical journal The Lancet that “in recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths,” and that it would be plausible to apply a “conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death” to the death count in Gaza. The researchers point out that it is impossible to know how many dead are buried under the rubble. Using their “conservative” numbers, the estimated death toll would reach a staggering half a million.
Given that Israel had dropped already in February 2024 the equivalent of two atomic bombs, these numbers are unfortunately not unrealistic, also in light of the threat, issued in November 2023 by the Likud Minister Avi Dichter that Israel would be “rolling out the Gaza Nakba and that there was “no way to wage a war.” Indeed, the correct concept should be “campaign of annihilation,” not “war.” This is what Palestinian legal scholar Noura Erakat responded to when she warned in February 2024 that Israel did not want peace, but a “Nakba peace.” She described “Nakba peace” as “the establishment of security achieved through the removal of native Palestinians who, by their very existence and refusal to disappear, challenge Zionist settler sovereignty.” Her words prove today prophetic. The so-called “peace plan” that is in place with US support allows only for a “Nakba peace” under whose auspices, as Makdisi writes, “Israel can confine an entire population without any means of subsistence to an utterly desolated wasteland and leave it entirely dependent on a trickle of aid handouts that it can turn on and off at will.”
We have to pressure our political representatives to stand up against the appalling variety of “-cides” that define Palestinian life and that risk becoming accepted as the new normal. We have to learn and teach the new words that name these new forms of “colossal violence.” We have to pressure our political representatives to reject the current “Nakba peace” and push for a future that is based on true equality of political rights for Palestinians and Israelis. Crucial steps
include demanding legislative oversight, such as insisting on the State Department’s and Department of Defense’s adherence to the Leahy Laws that prohibit financial and military assistance to foreign military or police units involved in gross human rights violations, and adherence to international law. Other steps include supporting civic advocacy groups dedicated to pursuing a just future in Israel/ Palestine, such as Amnesty International, Jewish Voice for Peace, the Palestinian Futures Fund, the development organization in Palestine, Taawon, and the American Friends Service Committee. But no less important is to finally center Palestinian voices, in Gaza, the West Bank, and here in the United States, and, in Sherene Seikaly’s words, to “listen to ordinary people narrating extraordinary things.” As Seikaly reminds us with Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians tell their stories to assert “living despite catastrophe” and to “hold tightly” to their “visions of the possible.”
Elisabeth Weber is a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project at UCSB.
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