When President Trump reversed US policy on Syria Wednesday by ordering a full and rapid withdrawal of the 2,000 troops on the ground there, stunned officials and foreign policy analysts saw a number of individuals and factors behind the surprise decision.

For some, it was Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who met with Mr. Trump recently and spoke with him by phone Friday, whose arguments convinced the president to make the move.

Others speculated it was the recent fall of one of the Islamic State’s last toeholds in Syria that prompted the president’s mission-accomplished decision.

And for still others, it reflected a preoccupation with domestic political setbacks: the inability to get congressional funding for the promised border wall, for one, and then the barrage of bad news coming out of the 2016 campaign investigations.

From this perspective, it was the sentencing last week of Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, and the court appearance this week of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, that convinced Trump he needed to do something to change the subject.

Yet while all of these explanations may have played a role to some degree, what it may come down to is that a president who continues to consider himself his own best counsel acted on instincts dating back to the earliest days of his presidential campaign.

Under an America First foreign policy, Trump’s gut has always told him, US troops engaged in overseas conflicts would be brought home (and only sparingly deployed) unless a clear and narrowly defined national security threat justified their mission.

“Trump was never comfortable with the policy decision earlier this year to leave troops in Syria indefinitely, and now he’s returning to his thinking that ISIS is largely defeated, so it’s time to come home,” says Harry Kazianis, director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest in Washington. “This is Trump holding to a campaign promise to limit troop deployments to addressing core national security concerns and being consistent with his own foreign policy vision that places America’s interests above all else.”

What the abrupt decision Wednesday reveals, Mr. Kazianis says, is a president “whose focus is two-fold – China and Iran – and who wants out of anything distracting from those two priorities.”

But if that’s the case, and in particular if Trump is indeed intent on countering Iran, then many foreign policy analysts and most of Trump’s own national security staff seem to consider this step the wrong way of going about it.

As recently as September, national security adviser John Bolton indicated to reporters at the United Nations in New York that the US presence in Syria would continue beyond the defeat of ISIS with the goal of containing Iran and thwarting its “malign activities” across the Middle East.

“We’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders, and that includes Iranian proxies and militias,” Mr. Bolton said. The list of Iranian “proxies and militias” on the ground in Syria includes the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Qods Force, and Iran-aligned Hezbollah.

The Kurdish question

For some Middle East analysts, Trump’s about-face reveals that the president was never comfortable with the Syria policy his aides talked him into over the summer – and may suggest he was looking for a justification for getting back to his original “troops out now” policy all along.

“This tells us that Trump is not in tune with his closest Syria advisers, and continues to have very different priorities from most of them,” says Nicholas Heras, a fellow in the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in Washington. “You can’t call for a policy of diminishing Iran’s influence in the Levant one day, and suddenly announce you’re withdrawing from Syria the next.”

Like many others, Mr. Heras suspects it was Trump’s recent discussions with Turkey’s President Erdoğan that in a sense gave Trump the pretext he’d been looking for to withdraw from Syria.

According to some officials, Erdoğan’s case for Turkish military action across the border into northeastern Syria to clean out what the Turkish leader considers to be “terrorist forces” rang true with Trump, who speaks often of security threats he sees mounting along the US southern border with Mexico.

The problem for many US officials and analysts is that those forces Erdoğan considers “terrorists” are Kurdish fighters whom the US has trained and supplied and who have proven to be the US military’s most effective local ally in the fight against ISIS.

Pentagon officials have said that abandoning the Kurdish and Sunni Arab fighters the US has depended on would constitute betrayal, and would send a damaging signal to local fighters the US works with elsewhere that the US is not a reliable partner. 

But if instant reaction to the decision is any measure, Trump is also not in tune with a wide range of foreign-policy perspectives in Congress, where both Republicans and Democrats were quick to blast the president’s move.

Graham: We have been dishonorable

Many hawkish Republican senators, including some close Trump allies, branded the decision a “mistake” and predicted it would haunt the administration the same way President Barack Obama was forever tagged by his decision not to use force to challenge Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s crossing of Mr. Obama’s own chemical weapons “red line.”

At a press conference Thursday with a bipartisan group of senators, Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina called Trump’s decision “akin to surrender” and predicted that it would tarnish the Trump presidency with the Iraq-war-ending the president has wanted to avoid on his watch.

Senator Graham expressed sympathy with Trump’s desire to get US troops out of the Middle East, but said he would join a bipartisan group of senators in trying to convince the president that a rash pullout from Syria is the wrong way to accomplish his goal.

“Who doesn’t want our troops to come home?” Graham said. “All of us” want that, he added, “but we want to do it smartly.”

Perhaps the most blistering rebuke came from Sen. Ben Sasse (R) of Nebraska, who said Trump’s “retreat” was a boon to “high-fiving winners today” including Iran, ISIS, and Hezbollah, while the losers would include close ally Israel, Syria’s war-traumatized civilians, and US intelligence gathering.

“A lot of American allies will be slaughtered if this retreat is implemented,” Senator Sasse said, presumably referring to the Kurdish and Sunni Arab Syrian forces, grouped under the umbrella of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), that US troops in Syria have been training and guiding – and employing in gathering intel on ISIS targets – in the fight with ISIS.

On Wednesday Graham took to the Senate floor to deliver a withering late-night broadside at Trump’s decision, which he said would be “disastrous to our own national security.”

Saying the decision was a betrayal of US allies in the region, Graham added, “We have been dishonorable. This is a stain on the honor of the United States.”

Praise from Putin

Critics of Trump’s move say that not just Iran, but Russia, which is also in Syria supporting Mr. Assad’s regime, will benefit from the US withdrawal. Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin was quick to praise Trump’s move, calling it the “right decision” Thursday and telling journalists at his year-end press conference that “Donald is right, and I agree with him.”

At the same time, members of the “realist” foreign-policy community both in and outside Congress were supportive of Trump’s move, including Sen. Rand Paul (R) of Kentucky.

“The standard neocon view has been that the US needs to stay in Syria to root out the remnants of ISIS and make sure it doesn’t rise again, but also to contain Iran,” says the Center for the National Interest’s Kazianis. “But I don’t know how you contain Iran with 2,000 troops, in fact the evidence is that you don’t.”

Others praise the president for sticking to his core goal for the US presence in Syria of defeating ISIS, while resisting the “mission creep” advocated by his top aides.

“This is a good decision made in a bad way,” says Benjamin Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, a policy group advocating restraint in US military deployment, and a lecturer at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

Saying the administration policy announced last summer of an indefinite US presence in Syria to deliver ISIS’s “enduring defeat” risked turning into expensive and unending nation-building, Mr. Friedman says, “We’re winding up in a good place.”

Attempts to reverse decision

Still, noting the repeated shifts in Syria policy under Trump from “out now” to “stay the course,” Friedman and others say they expect to see fierce and sustained effort from Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and other Pentagon voices to at least down-shift if not still reverse the decision. However, on Thursday evening, Trump tweeted that General Mattis will be retiring in February.

“The blob is very much going to try to ‘slow walk’ the implementation of this decision,” says Justin Logan, director of programs at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at the Catholic University of America, in Washington. “Sixty to 100 days,” the announced timetable for a full US withdrawal from Syria, “is an awful long period of time … for attempts by people who don’t agree with this decision.”

Heras of CNAS says he expects White House aides but even more the Pentagon to move into high gear in the coming weeks to at least slow down the withdrawal.

“The arguments will be that ISIS is not defeated in eastern Syria and if left alone could very well come back, and that the SDF are still being built up,” Heras says. “That’s the Pentagon’s gambit, which is to buy time.”

Indeed Heras says he expects Defense Department officials to have some degree of success in slowing the withdrawal – a view he is not alone in holding.

At his Thursday press conference, Mr. Putin said that while he supports Trump’s Syria withdrawal, he doubts it will actually happen – citing the continuing US military presence in Afghanistan despite a decision at one point of a full US pullout by 2014.

Dado Ruvic/Photo Illustration/Reuters

Facebook has become such an ubiquitous presence that many users find it difficult to withdraw from the platform.

Ask Facebook users about their relationship with the social network, and many will pick “it’s complicated.”

That’s because, even though Facebook helps people maintain vital social bonds, often providing the sole link to former classmates, colleagues, and distant friends, maintaining these connections on the social network comes at a steep price. A growing number of studies suggest that, on an individual level, Facebook is making people unreasonably sad, envious, and angry, and that excessive use can damage in-person relationships. On a societal level, the social network has been implicated in everything from spreading political propaganda in the United States to fueling a genocide in Myanmar.

In 2018, this relationship grew even more complicated. The year began amid unfolding revelations that the social network had facilitated the spread of Russian political propaganda; the year closes with news that Facebook bartered users’ personal data with some of Silicon Valley’s biggest firms, including a scheme that gave companies like Netflix and Spotify the ability to read users’ private messages. Along the way, users learned that the company handed the personal data of up to 87 million users over to a right-wing British political consulting firm, fell victim to a massive data breach that exposed the information of nearly 50 million users, and paid another consulting firm to push anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the media.

Accompanying these scandals are increased calls to boycott Facebook. The NAACP, for example, launched its #LogOutFacebook campaign, “in response to the tech company’s history of data hacks which unfairly target its users of color.” Big names in tech, from Elon Musk to veteran technology columnist Walter Mossberg, have announced that they are leaving the platform.

For many users, it’s clear that the time has come to quit, but Facebook has proven to be hard to break up with. A study published in the Public Library of Science on Tuesday found that you would have to pay the average user more than $1,000 to get them to deactivate their account for one year.

“Imagine you have a chocolate cupcake in front of you,” Ingrid Tulloch, a neuroscientist at Morgan State University in Baltimore who specializes in addiction. “It's always there. Everyone else is eating that cupcake. All the cool people are eating the cupcake.”

Professor Tulloch says that Facebook, and social media in general, is a little bit like that cupcake, in the sense that both promise to fulfill some basic biological need – nourishment in one case and meaningful social contact in the other – without ultimately delivering.

“Facebook  is fulfilling all of these roles that are evolutionarily advantageous – the social connections, the social interactions, the social comparisons,” says Tulloch, “but there is something missing. We are social animals who are used to physical interaction.”

Tulloch, who has a Facebook account but says that she hasn’t logged in in three months, says that over time, some Facebook users can become accustomed to online-only social interaction, and, when that is removed, they can feel lonely. “What they really need to do is just go out and get a coffee and talk to people,” she says.

Fear of missing out

Ryan Schurtz says that he quit Facebook twice, the second time for good. A regular user for about 10 years before finally giving it up, the Stevenson University social psychologist found that the social network was making him sad. 

“It creates sort of a posting arms race where we’re in this competition with our friends to get the most likes or have the largest group,” says Professor Schurtz, who studies how people compare themselves to others.

He initially wanted to delete his account permanently in 2015, he says, but he noticed that doing so would have also disabled Pandora, so instead he simply stopped using Facebook while keeping his account open.

Schurtz returned about nine months later, only to finally realize that he had been right to quit. “I came back to Facebook during the 2016 election,” he says. “That was a mistake.”

This time, it stuck. “For me,” writes Schurtz in a Nov. 19 op-ed for The Baltimore Sun, “quitting Facebook was a little thing that I found made me a lot happier.”

But giving up the social network didn’t come without its costs. “It helps us stay connected,” he says. “I wouldn’t say I lost a lot of friends, but I’d say I lost touch with a lot of friends.”

Overall, Schurtz now says that he’s happier, but somewhat lonelier, an experience consistent with at least one study that suggests Facebook nonusers tend to be lonelier than users.

Standing ground

Another reason Facebook is so hard to walk away from is that it has almost become a part of the plumbing of the internet. An array of apps, including Spotify or Tinder, have at some point in the past required a Facebook login to be able to use them. That means that deleting your Facebook account could result in wiping out your playlists and Tinder matches.  

Even if you don’t use these apps, all kinds of basic social functions, from organizing a political protest to polling friends on a podcast recommendation, are often most easily achieved via the social network.

“When I see [myself] leaving Facebook, I see dead dogs and cats,” says David Coursey, a writer who runs an animal-rescue Facebook page of just under 5,000 in Tracy, Calif. Mr. Coursey uses the social network to connect rescue animals to prospective adopters in his community. He says that, thanks to Facebook, he’s been able to find a lost pet’s home in seven minutes.

“There's no question in my mind that Facebook lies, cheats, and probably steals,” says Coursey, talking over the phone while driving a three-pound Chihuahua to its new home, but, he says he “can’t walk away from Facebook.”

Faith Cheltenham says she still loves Facebook. “I really think that Facebook is a good product,” says the self-described black liberation worker and vice president of BiNet USA, a nonprofit advocacy for bisexuals. “But I think that Facebook, like a lot of people, has an anti-blackness issue.”

Despite her affection for the platform, Ms. Cheltenham, who began using Facebook in 2004 as a beta-tester for the network, says that she supports the NAACP’s call for a boycott, which arose in response to revelations that the company facilitated Russian propaganda campaigns that targeted people of color.

Not everyone is in a position to join the boycott, she says, but “when I go back to that logged out screen and I think about getting back on Facebook honestly ... I think about Rosa Parks.”

‘A very difficult decision’

Those seeking to distance themselves from Facebook have many options. Like professors Tulloch and Schurtz, you can keep your account active and log into it rarely, or not at all. Alternatively, you can “deactivate” your account, which hides it but keeps it on Facebook’s servers in case you ever want to re-activate it.

And then there’s the nuclear option, which Larry Carvalho opted for in March.

“It was a very difficult decision,” says Mr. Carvalho, a research director at International Data Corporation in Mason, Ohio, on permanently deleting his account. “The thing I missed most were the local community groups. Somebody to fix your house or a handyman, references from a broader group who you could choose to trust.”

But he says that his interactions with people have become more pleasant as a result. Online, he says, “some people got argumentative with me. I’d rather sit down face to face with a person than argue on a digital forum.... I prefer to go and say, ‘Mike let’s go have a coffee.’ ”

Carvalho hasn’t completely ruled out returning to Facebook some day, but only if the company is willing to make some changes. “They have to significantly change their attitude from just being a profit machine to more of doing a social benefit for society,” he says. “They have to tighten their privacy laws and ... make money responsibly.”

Jasmine McNealy agrees that Facebook, like many tech companies, ought to shift its ad-driven business model.

“If your business model is ‘We make money off of personal data and selling it or licensing it,’ ” says the assistant professor of telecommunications at the University of Florida, “then that needs to change.”

The company is actually seeing a decline of users in Europe, and user growth in North America remains flat, as younger users move to other platforms such as Snapchat or Instagram (which Facebook owns). But the company is continuing to see its revenue rise, as it squeezes more money from each user profile and as it makes inroads into the developing world.

“Facebook has moved itself internationally,” says Professor McNealy. “While user younger users in the US feel like ‘It’s not for me, it's more for Auntie or, you know, Grandma and Uncle whatever,’ Facebook has moved to fertile harvests other places.”

Those other places may soon start experiencing the privacy breaches and invasive targeting that users in the West have become so accustomed to. “The data practices that they’re using that are really terrible here, they’re exporting those same if not worse data practices to the continent of Africa, attempting places in Asia,” she says.

Still, these practices are not enough to prompt McNealy to walk away from the site. The social bonds that the platform facilitates are just too strong.

“I’m still on Facebook,” she says. “It’s community, my mom, my family.”

If you are interested in cutting back time spent on Facebook or leaving the platform altogether, check out Rebecca Asoulin’s guide to breaking up with Facebook. 

For two years, voters in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been waiting to go to the polls to choose a new president, after 18 years under Joseph Kabila. The country has never had a peaceful transfer of power – let alone a democratic one. But on Thursday, three days before the long-awaited election was scheduled to be held, Congo’s voters learned the wait isn’t over. Officials have suspended the Dec. 23 election for a week, blaming logistical difficulties.

A low-grade civil war grinds on in the country’s east, and Congo is battling the worst Ebola outbreak in its history. Last week, a mysterious fire destroyed most of the new electronic voting machines for the capital, Kinshasa. Police force against protestors, and clashes between supporters of different candidates, have also escalated in recent weeks.

But the delay will likely prompt further doubts about the integrity of Congo’s potentially historic poll – when, or if, it happens. Here’s what you need to know.

First of all, why should I care what happens in a Congolese presidential election?

Congo is big, it’s central, and it’s a mess. Dozens of armed groups are still active in the east and along the country’s border. Repeated wars and waves of violence – some of them triggered by transitions of power – have displaced about 4.5 million people within the country of 81 million, and made nearly 1 million more into refugees. That puts it among the world’s largest displacement crises.

On a more personal level, chances are you have a piece of the Congo within your reach right now. Congolese cobalt – a crucial component in smartphone and computer batteries – accounts for two-thirds of the world’s supply. Most of it is mined under backbreaking conditions, by people who have historically had little power to decide how their country is ruled, or by whom. A free and fair election could help change that.

So, what are the chances it will be free and fair?

Unfortunately, not good. Before Thursday’s delay, Mr. Kabila had repeatedly pushed back the vote, which was actually supposed to happen in 2016. The government said those delays were necessary for logistical reasons, but the opposition and many ordinary Congolese say it was simply a ploy for him to stay in power.

Recent elections have been marred by accusations of widespread vote tampering, and members of the opposition argue the new electronic vote machines brought in from South Korea will make that kind of rigging even easier. On Wednesday, the governor of Kinshasa suspended campaigning in the city for security reasons, hours before a scheduled opposition rally, and police dispersed protestors with tear gas.

The voter roll is also contested, with electoral officials admitting earlier this year that it contained 6 million duplicates or names of children. Meanwhile, Kabila has resisted outside assistance in preparing for the elections and outside observers to monitor it.

OK. Who’s actually running for president?

Twenty-one candidates are vying to replace Kabila, who is stepping down due to term limits. But only a handful have a fighting chance. As in many countries, presidential politics here have long been a family affair. Kabila succeeded his father, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, after he was assassinated in 2001. And his main challenger throughout his presidency was Étienne Tshisekedi, an opposition politician and thorn in the side of every Congolese administration since the 1980s (well, all three of them). Mr. Tshisekedi died last year, but his son Félix Tshisekedi is running for president in his stead.

But to make things more complicated, much of Congo’s opposition has thrown its weight behind a different candidate, a former Exxon Mobil executive and relative political novice named Martin Fayulu. Kabila’s party, meanwhile, is fielding an obscure figure, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, a former secretary of the interior, who is under European Union sanctions for helping to delay elections and crack down on protesters. 

Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

Solders in the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo rest next to a road after an Islamist rebel group called the Allied Democratic Forces attacked the area around Mukoko village, North Kivu province, Democratic Republic of Congo, Dec. 11, 2018.

Is there likely to be violence?

There’s been a lot already. Several waves of anti-government protests – many led by the country’s Catholic Church – have been violently put down over the last year, resulting in dozens of deaths. Several people at rallies have been killed by security forces, and there have also been reports of violent clashes between supporters of different candidates.

Early in the morning of Dec. 13 a blaze in a warehouse in the capital, Kinshasa, destroyed 70 percent of the 10,000 voting machines meant to be used in the city on voting day. Both sides blame the other for the fire, which is under investigation.

Meanwhile, if a vote does go forward and Mr. Shadary wins – legitimately or otherwise – the opposition will almost certainly contest the vote, and mass demonstrations are likely. In the past, police and security forces have dealt with protesters with a heavy hand, and observers fear that post-election violence could spiral into wider conflict.

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, warned Thursday that growing tensions “could lead to the commission of grave crimes,” and that the ICC would “not hesitate to take action.”

Is there anything to be hopeful about?

“I think the emergence of three major political coalitions is a hopeful sign,” says Claude Kabemba, the director of the Southern Africa Resource Watch and an expert on Congolese politics. Whatever happens in this election, he says, those groups – each of which is intra-ethnic and cross-regional – could be the backbone of a more vibrant Congolese political scene going forward.

But the future of Congolese politics, he warns, is still a ways off.

“No one knows exactly what will happen” after the vote, he says. “Except maybe Joseph Kabila himself.”

Paul Joseph Brown/Courtesy of Youth Today

Da’Sean Harrison (r.) is honing his construction skills in Seattle. New legislation in Washington State will make it easier for young people connected with foster care to get apprenticeships by providing funding for necessities such as training and tools.

Working on a construction job in the Seattle area, Da’Sean Harrison marvels at the skills of a coworker and mentor he calls a “wizard.” He himself wants to be a general contractor, a master of all trades – a wizard.

“You would be hard to fire because you know so much,” the 22-year-old says with a slight chuckle. “My goal is to learn a lot about everything.”

The path to a trade became easier this year for Mr. Harrison and other young people connected with foster care or homelessness in Washington State, where a new law provides funding for apprenticeships. Considered the first of its kind, the legislation – which became effective in July – aligns with a national trend to reinvigorate the trades and meet the demands of rebuilding infrastructure in the United States. Washington is still sorting out how much each applicant will receive, but its idea is already prompting interest from lawmakers in other states. 

“One of the reasons it wasn’t something that many of us thought of years ago is that the data didn’t exist,” says state Sen. Kevin Ranker, a main sponsor of the law. “Politicians hadn’t been briefed on the fact that foster kids and then homeless kids are so much less likely to go to college or have an apprenticeship or have a career.... Now that the data is clear, it’s something that many of us want to act upon.”

Only 50 percent of young people in care complete high school by age 18, according to a summary of foster care education research published by the National Working Group on Foster Care and Education. That is lower than the national on-time graduation rate of 84 percent, based on the most recent measure from 2015-16. Of the more than 23,000 young people who age out of the US foster care system every year, just half will have a solid job by age 24.

In Washington, 30 to 40 percent of young people in care are interested in finding work or attending trade school directly after high school, says Dawn Rains, chief policy and strategy officer for Treehouse, a 30-year-old nonprofit in Seattle that serves youth in foster care and advocated for the law. According to the group’s research, 60 to 70 percent want to attend a two- or four-year college program.

“We need people in the trades,” explains Shaunessy Jones, associate director of community engagement for Treehouse, which works with approximately 7,300 young people in foster care across the state. “We have a lot of kids in our program that want to do that sort of thing, work for Boeing, or work at a bakery, or become a dental assistant. And those are things you don’t have to go to four-year college for.”

The state’s Passport to Careers program, which became law on July 1, includes two programmatic pathways: the Passport to College and the Passport to Apprenticeship Opportunities. The law, SB 6274, is the first of its kind in the nation, says state Senator Ranker, chair of the Higher Education & Workforce Development Committee. It enhances Washington’s 11-year-old Passport to College Promise Scholarship program for homeless youth and youth in federal care by adding an apprenticeship path. 

“I’ve been contacted by legislators in many other states actually considering the program now,” he says.

Moving forward, he wants apprenticeship training and trade school courses to count toward a degree. Specific legislation related to that failed to pass this past spring, he says, but he is hopeful it will be law in 2019.

Paul Joseph Brown/Courtesy of Youth Today

Shaunessy Jones (r.), associate director in community engagement for Treehouse, a 30-year-old nonprofit in Seattle that serves youth in foster care, works with Skyler Grandchamp, who is hoping to one day work as a chef. First of its kind legislation from Washington State provides funding for apprenticeships for students who are homeless or connected to foster care.

More than financial support

Young people in foster care who are 16 and have been in care for at least a year are eligible for the Passport to Apprenticeship Opportunities program. The legislation’s intent is to fund the mandate sufficiently so that young people can eventually get aid toward apprenticeship programs when they are 13. It extends financial assistance to any eligible applicant for a maximum of six years, or until the applicant turns 26. The Washington Student Achievement Council administers the expanded program and is still designing how the awards will be distributed.

In Seattle, Harrison is part of an effort that predates the new law, Treehouse’s Graduation Success program, which helps students focus on completing high school and what they will do next. He says tools on his jobs can cost more than $1,500, something his coworkers on job sites have helped him with so far. Tools are among the items the new funding will cover, along with other occupation-specific costs, such as clothes and tuition for classes. 

Skyler Grandchamp, also part of the Treehouse program, loves cooking. The 21-year-old has wanted to be a chef since he was 15. He plucks recipes off Facebook and whips up food for family and friends. But that is the extent of his opportunity right now. His dream: a two-story business with a cafe upstairs and a bakery downstairs.

“I think it is going to be very beneficial to a lot of kids who need financial support,” he says of the legislation, which he hopes will help him get the culinary training he needs. (Mr. Grandchamp, Harrison, and others in this story are featured in this video from Youth Today.)

Opportunities to study a trade can knock down obstacles for young people in foster care, Ms. Jones says. “They don’t have the luxury of being four years in college if they have nowhere to live or if they have to take care of a kid.” 

Apprenticeships are a way forward, but instructors need guidance on how to work with young people who have potentially experienced trauma, says Angelique Day, a national expert on youth in foster care and an assistant professor of social work at the University of Washington.

And there are other issues, adds Mike Pergamit, a labor economist at the Urban Institute whose research is focused on vulnerable youth. For young people under the age of 16, he wonders about transportation, since they can’t drive, and legal age requirements for worker safety and hazardous job sites.   

“Buying tools and uniforms, that’s great, but there will be some initial barriers like being housed that can interfere with taking a job of any kind,” Mr. Pergamit says. “Developing these apprenticeships, to be most effective, can’t be done in a vacuum. You have to work with child welfare and any other organization in creating the stability the youth needs.” 

Finding student strengths

As youths in foster care consider what the best post-graduation path is, a priority is making sure high school career counselors are successfully assessing them, says Ms. Day.

“They need to take tests to understand what their strengths are, what kinds of careers are right for them and focus on some things that address personalities,” Day says. “Those guidance assessment tools will ask ‘Do you prefer to work with your hands?’ ”

Sharon Stukalo of Seattle was in the foster care system in high school and says that discussions with the school counselor were difficult.

“I remember the academic adviser telling me in a meeting, here’s how you fill out the forms for food stamps, don’t get pregnant until you’re 19, and you have to leave my office right now because I have another student coming because they are going to go somewhere in life,” recalls Ms. Stukalo, now in her 30s. “It didn’t matter to her that I was in honors classes and took college prep courses. I had the stigma of a foster kid and that’s what she went off of.”

Stukalo was in the Marine Corps for five years and the Army Reserve for 10. Now in the fifth year of an electrician’s apprenticeship program, she is a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 46, the electricians’ union in Washington. Along with Local 46, she donates to the local shelter for homeless and at-risk youth. She escaped the grim economics of being in foster care, but she stays connected to the hardship.

“This legislation would have made a huge difference for me,” she says. “It would have meant a job, some training, a roof over my head, and not worrying, ‘Is my foster parent going to kick me out the next day because I’m over 18?’ ” 

She adds, “This would have been an awesome option for me out of high school.”

This yearlong reporting project by Youth Today, the national news source for youth-service professionals, is made possible in part by The New York Foundling, which works with underserved children, families, and adults with developmental disabilities. Throughout this project, Youth Today will maintain editorial independence. A version of this story can also be found on Youth Today’s website. 

Jasmine Heyward/Staff

At your last holiday meal, how did your family approach political discussions? Was there a firm prohibition on politics at the dinner table? Did one person come ready for a fight, to the exhaustion of everyone else?

If you’d rather drown in your great-aunt’s cranberry sauce than get into a political conversation with family, you’re not alone. A slight majority of Americans, 53 percent, find political discussions with people who don’t agree with them “stressful and frustrating,” according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. Only two years ago, almost the same share of people, 51 percent, found these conversations “interesting and informative.”

As all signs point to an increasingly polarized political atmosphere, it seems easier to just ban politics from the holiday dinner table in hopes of keeping the peace. It’s not like climate change or blue-collar job loss will be solved at a family meal anyway, right?

Perhaps they won't, but it’s possible that avoiding politics isn’t saving your family relationships either, says Jason Jay, coauthor of a book on breaking through gridlock. If we can’t talk about the issues that are important to us with our family, those relationships are guaranteed to be shallow, he says. But if we insist on talking about issues regardless of how family members react, they’re probably not hearing us, either.

“I think that choice, framed as an either-or choice, is the essential problem,” says Dr. Jay, who is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. “That idea that you have to choose either ‘keep the peace, but stall on the issue’ or ‘make progress on the issue, but, you know, steamroll over the people that I care about’ ... that’s a false dichotomy.”

Rather than choose one or the other, Jay emphasizes having conversations about important issues that are still considerate of the other person.

For writer Ann Leigh, conversations about politics have taken a toll. While the family members she sees often are liberal, like herself, they still make comments that are hard for her to stomach, such as asserting that former Sen. Al Franken, who was forced to resign after numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, was unfairly persecuted. She feels a responsibility to discuss issues that are important to her, but that involves a large emotional investment.

“I definitely don’t feel as excited as I used to in past years to see my family,” she says.

When to engage – or exit

It may be best to avoid conversations with someone who only wants to prove “your side” wrong, says Jenna Abetz, assistant professor of communications at South Carolina’s College of Charleston, who adds that such conversations won’t respect the participants or the issues.

“[If] the point is to prove you wrong in that way, or bait you in a way that pins you into a corner, you have to not engage with that,” she says.

Sometimes conversations will go off the rails, despite people’s best efforts. In that case, it’s important to know when to walk away. Jane Timmons-Mitchell, a professor of applied social sciences and psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, suggests regularly checking in with yourself during family gatherings. How do you feel mentally, emotionally, and physically?

“I think everybody should feel free to exit from the conversation if it passes where their comfort level is, as a matter of self-preservation,” says Dr. Timmons-Mitchell.

One important caveat: If a person’s identity is demeaned or considered up for debate, it may be best to avoid the gathering altogether, suggests Dr. Abetz. When political discussions shift to discussing someone’s right to exist, there is a risk of damaging mental or emotional health.

“There is such [a] thing as healthy family estrangement,” she says.

And while it’s easy to take fixed positions on political issues, that doesn’t usually foster understanding or collaboration. For example, calling the federal minimum wage of $7.25 “an embarrassment,” and questioning a business’s right to exist if it doesn't pay its employees more, is unlikely to lead to a conversation about solutions.

Instead, it can be helpful to personalize an issue, Abetz says. For example, sharing a story about a challenge that a friend working a minimum-wage job faced could help put a human face on a political issue.

Experts also suggest orienting conversations toward solutions by discussing interests rather than positions. What beliefs and experiences have caused you to take certain positions? You might believe that all Americans should be able to support themselves with 40 hours of work each week. And someone else may believe that small businesses should be able to make wage decisions with minimal government involvement because he or she believes those businesses hold value in a time when big-box stores are increasingly forcing them to close. 

When the discussion is around shared interests rather than positions, “there might be some middle ground,” Jay says. “There might be some new idea that neither of us could have come up with by ourselves.”

Charles Platiau/Reuters/File

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at a technology summit in Paris in May 2018.

More than a quarter of the 7.7 billion people on Earth, some 2 billion, are Facebook users.

Watching Facebook has become an incomplete but valuable proxy for understanding how the internet is reshaping human interactions, and especially how individual privacy has come under assault. 

This year the mega company has been the subject of government hearings in the United States and been scrutinized by Britain’s Parliament. Its chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg, and chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, have been grilled by public officials. Facebook is being sued by the attorney general of the District of Columbia for allowing improper access to users’ data and hiding that fact. The Federal Trade Commission is looking at the way the company handles user data.

Facebook has also had to defend itself against charges that Russian agitators used the online platform to spread disinformation and fuel distrust and anger during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Facebook’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year is ending with a New York Times exposé this week in which the company was shown to have shared mountains of data on its users with other companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify, without these users’ consent or knowledge. 

For years, some Facebook users have shrugged their shoulders and said in effect, “I don’t care about privacy. I’ve got nothing to hide.” They click a button essentially giving Facebook a right to do what it will with their information. Many others have tried to follow sometimes complex instructions on how to make their accounts more private. One new revelation is that even these efforts may not be enough and that information has been shared anyway with a bevy of Facebook partners.

The solution for some users has been to walk away, to shut down their Facebook account. Even then it’s not clear how much of their personal information has already been shared beyond the company or where it may still be lodged.

Facebook’s phenomenal growth has also told a much more positive story: The site has become a powerful way to share what’s important to individuals, from family news and personal interests to political and social views, with others living anywhere in the world. It has helped entrepreneurs reach customers with innovative ideas. Since it’s free of charge, the only requirement for participation has been an internet connection: Facebook has empowered and given a voice to hitherto powerless and voiceless people. 

While those advantages remain, more and more downsides continue to be exposed. Roger McNamee, an early investor in the company, told the Times flatly, “No one should trust Facebook until they change their business model.”

Mr. Zuckerberg has said that fixing the company will be a hard task, the work of many years, and that the problem may never be fully solved.

Whatever steps Facebook takes should be based on treating users not just as sources of valuable data to be mined and shared, but as clients to whom it owes a solemn obligation. The company should not place its business interests above the well-being of its users. That includes the need to protect their privacy.

If Facebook can turn around its image and become known for its high ethical standards, it could not only set a needed example, but give itself a competitive advantage against rivals seen as less trustworthy. 

The hard work of remaking Facebook as a more ethical entity could be a win for both the company and its billions of users.