During a hearing on her nomination to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Jennifer Sung hit a speed bump.

Republican Sen. John Kennedy from Louisiana, one of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s more acerbic questioners, had taken issue with a letter Ms. Sung co-signed in 2018 describing U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as “morally bankrupt.”

An Oregon labor lawyer who would be the first Asian American and Pacific Islander to serve on the 9th Circuit in Oregon defended the letter but said that if confirmed, “I would absolutely respect the authority of every Supreme Court justice, and all of its precedents, without reservation.”

“See, I don’t believe you,” replied Senator Kennedy. “I think you said a few years ago what you said about Brett Kavanaugh, and I think you believed it.”

Three months later, on Dec. 15, 2021, in a 50-49 party-line vote, the Senate confirmed her, along with another federal district court nominee. Later that week the Senate voted to confirm nine more district court judges, bringing President Joe Biden’s number of judicial appointments to 40.

Quietly, this has been one of President Biden’s most impressive achievements in his first year in office. No president since Ronald Reagan has gotten so many judges confirmed in his first year. Mr. Biden has also fulfilled a campaign promise by nominating perhaps the most diverse slate of judicial picks ever: 75% are women and 71% are people of color, according to FiveThirtyEight. Also important, court watchers say, is that the 40 new judges bring with them a wide backdrop of legal experience. Rather than prosecutors and Ivy League professors, these are public defenders, civil rights lawyers, and, as in the case of new 9th Circuit Judge Sung, labor rights lawyers.

In a year in which pandemic recovery, voting rights, and other legislative priorities have languished, Senate Democrats and the Biden administration have been ruthlessly efficient in trying to stock the federal judiciary with progressive judges likely to serve for decades.

Their blueprint for this finely tuned confirmation machine? The Republican Party, and in particular, the Trump administration.

“Modern presidents take appointing federal judges very seriously,” says Christina Boyd, an associate professor of political science at the University of Georgia. “But we’re seeing record speed and focus from the Biden administration on their federal judgeships in ways we probably haven’t seen, especially for a Democratic administration, maybe ever.”

Rod Lamkey/CNP/Sipa/Reuters

Jennifer Sung appears at her nomination hearing in Washington on Sept. 14, 2021, to be a judge for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Later confirmed by the U.S. Senate in a 50-49 party-line vote, she is the first Asian American and Pacific Islander to serve on the appeals court in Oregon.

“There definitely has been some learning” 

President Biden may also have been facing unprecedented pressure from his base to focus on judicial appointments.

In four years, President Donald Trump made more than 200 judicial appointments, including three Supreme Court justices and 54 appeals court judges – and they were mostly white men. The figures are striking – 84% were white and 76% were male – as was the speed of appointments. By the time President Biden was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2021, some 28% of active federal judges had been appointed by President Trump. That compares with 17% for President Barack Obama after his first term.

Watching the contentious confirmations of Justices Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – the latter just a month before the presidential election – “outraged” progressives, says Daniel Goldberg, legal director at the Alliance for Justice, which advocates for progressive judicial appointments.

“A galvanized public demanded that this president and the Senate prioritize putting on the bench judges who will protect the rights of all Americans, not just the wealthy and powerful,” he adds.

For both parties, appointing judges has become an important issue for base voters. Partisanship and gridlock, at least on major legislation, have taken a stronger hold in Congress, and the White House and the courts have become more active in driving policy changes – particularly when the presidency and Congress are divided.

And in the three branches of government, federal judges are the only members with life tenure.

“Once you get judges on the bench, they’re shaping law for decades,” says Gbemende Johnson, an associate professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, who studies judicial politics.

“As you see greater polarization, that has only added to the battles over these seats,” she adds.

President Biden, a former vice president and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is a veteran of those political battles. That experience has helped his administration build an efficient system for processing and confirming judges, but he would also have been aware of the criticism President Obama received over the low priority his administration gave to judicial appointments.

The speed with which President Trump was able to appoint judges “caused a lot of alarm for Democratic supporters,” says Dr. Johnson. “There definitely has been some learning.” 

The Trump administration had a team within the White House Counsel’s office focused on judicial nominations. They also worked closely with the conservative Federalist Society and senior Senate Republicans like Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairmen Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham.

Former President Trump and senior Senate Republicans “set up one of the most efficient assembly lines ever for judicial nominees,” says Mike Davis, a former aide to Senator Grassley and founder of the Article III Project, a group formed during the Trump administration to promote conservative judicial picks.

“President Biden is now benefiting from that,” he adds. 

Noting specifically the hiring of Ron Klain as chief of staff and Paige Herwig, a former Democratic staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, to the White House Counsel’s office, he says, the Biden administration “has assembled a very competent and experienced team to very quickly fill these judicial nominations.”

“I think Ron and Paige understood Democrats did a very poor job of filling judicial vacancies in the past,” says Mr. Davis.

Evan Vucci/AP/File

White House chief of staff Ron Klain (right) and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra listen as President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting in the State Dining Room of the White House, March 24, 2021, in Washington. Mr. Klain has played a key role in helping Mr. Biden fill federal judgeships.

A focus on experiential diversity

The Biden administration has not just been getting federal judges confirmed at a breakneck pace. The confirmations also represent a historically diverse slate of judges.

The percentages of women and people of color appointed are higher than for any president in history, but where the Biden administration has really been breaking new ground is in the professional diversity of its judicial picks.

Traditionally, federal judges have often come from careers as federal prosecutors or lawyers in big law firms. But only a quarter of President Biden’s judges ever worked as prosecutors, and about half had careers in public defense or advocacy, according to FiveThirtyEight.

“This is probably the first time we’ve seen a presidential administration actively focus on getting more experiential diversity on the federal courts,” says Dr. Boyd of the University of Georgia.

People who have represented indigent defendants or who have fought the government or big corporations in court bring valuable perspectives and experiences to the bench, experts say. A former public defender may have a better understanding of ineffective assistance of counsel claims (which argue that poor defense representation probably affected the decision); an environmental lawyer may have a better understanding of the harms industrial activity can have on people and wildlife.

“Just because you’re a prosecutor doesn’t mean you’re completely unsympathetic to those things,” says Dr. Johnson from Hamilton College. “But it’s in these other areas that [President Biden] is going to find nominees that are more likely to align with [his] policy and legal priorities.”

It’s unclear how professional diversity affects the outcome of actual cases, according to Dr. Boyd. But there has been extensive research on the practical effects of racial and gender diversity in the federal courts.

Studies have found that a trial judge’s sex and race have very large effects on their own decision-making and the decision-making of their colleagues. (In appeals courts, where judges often handle cases in panels of three, the latter effect can be particularly significant.) Women and nonwhite judges also write longer and more detailed opinions, according to a study last year.

“It might be just five out of 500 defendants see a different outcome,” says Dr. Boyd, “but I think the likelihood we get different outcomes will be there.”

There could be a looming challenge, however. 

Most of the judicial vacancies still to be filled are in purple and red states. During the Trump administration, the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee did away with the “blue slip” tradition, which allowed state senators to weigh in on appeals court nominees in their home states. Current Senate Judiciary Chairman Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, has said he is not going to reinstate the courtesy. But as the midterm elections draw closer, Senate Republicans may fight harder to keep vacancies open, hoping to win back control of the chamber in November.

With the Supreme Court deciding only about 60 or 70 cases a year, appeals courts deliver the final verdict on most cases in federal courts. Former President Trump’s speed with regard to appellate judges helped him create Republican-appointed majorities on five of the 13 appeals courts and expand majorities on three. So far, President Biden has been able to shift the ideological majority on one appeals court – the 2nd Circuit – and he has the opportunity to flip the 3rd Circuit this year as well.

One certainty is that many people, on the right and the left, will be watching.

“We’re definitely getting a lot of attention on the judiciary these days,” says Dr. Boyd.

President Biden’s judges “are going to be there for 30 or 40 years. This is going to be a long stamp on federal law and policy,” she adds. “Senators are seeing that, and the public [is] seeing that.”

Adi Itin is a high school senior whose days are packed not just with schoolwork and babysitting, but assessments and tryouts for what position she’ll have in the Israeli army when she’s drafted this summer.

She’s been tested for her readiness for pilot training (she didn’t get accepted) and computer programming (she’s waiting to hear back). But what she’s hoping for most of all is to be selected as an instructor in a tank battalion.

She’s looking forward to the day her parents drop her off at a military draft base where she will be officially inducted, given an Israel Defense Forces identification number, outfitted with an olive-drab uniform and black leather boots, and bused to a base to begin her training.

“I feel ready for this new phase of my life. I think it’s important to serve in the army both for my own personal growth and to contribute to my country,” says Ms. Itin, 17, from Beit Herut, a village in central Israel next to the Mediterranean Sea.

Throughout Israel’s history, such attitudes toward military service – as a national rite of passage connecting the individual to Israeli society as a whole – have helped make the battle-tested IDF one of the world’s most effective fighting forces.

The mandatory military draft has long enjoyed consensus support for its core contribution to Israeli identity, with the IDF celebrated as a “people’s army” that breaks down social barriers, increases social mobility, and fosters a sense of a shared national burden. Most Jewish 18-year-olds are conscripted – men and women, rich and poor, from every part of the country.

But in recent years there’s been a significant shift in thinking among the public about whether or not the army needs to draft everyone or should become a smaller, volunteer, professional army, a transition that most Western countries have made.

Demographic shifts

Fueling that shift are a range of factors: a larger population to draw from to fill the military’s ranks; youth who are more individualistic and driven more by capitalist aspirations than a communal ideology; and a backlash against the very notion of a “people’s army” when 49% of the draft age cohort is exempted from serving.

The bulk of those exempted are ultra-Orthodox Jews or Arab citizens. Many modern Orthodox young women have a waiver, performing civilian national service instead. Others seek exemptions, often citing mental health reasons.

Not serving was once highly stigmatized, but no longer.

Courtesy of Adi Itin

High school senior Adi Itin outside her home in Beit Herut, a village in central Israel. She says she's looking forward to being inducted into the Israeli army this summer. "It's important ... both for my own personal growth and to contribute to my country," she says.

A recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 47% of Jewish Israelis now think that the IDF should make that transition to a professional army.

This rising new public sentiment, “tells us that the army is no longer the flag around which everyone is gathering,” says Tamar Hermann, a senior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute who conducted the survey.

Aside from recent bursts of fighting with vastly outgunned Palestinians in Gaza, and some broader earlier offensives in southern Lebanon, it has been almost 50 years since Israel fought a massive ground war against conventional armies on multiple fronts: the 1973 October War against both Syria and Egypt. The specter of mass call-ups of infantry and tanks rolling across borders to repel an existential threat appears less likely in an era in which the military is increasingly reliant on airpower and hi-tech and cyber warfare.

That, too, is changing the equation regarding individual sacrifice and the common good.

“A system that temporarily denies young men and women their freedom, imposing forced labor on them to deal with an external threat that is seen to be gradually diminishing, and imposing this unequally, is a contradiction in a society where liberal civic values and neoliberal economics are growing stronger,” Yagil Levy, an expert in military-civilian relations, wrote in the Haaretz newspaper.

Nevertheless, most experts in Israel have concluded it still cannot afford a volunteer force given its security threats, arguing that it needs both the manpower and the most capable among its recruits for key jobs in combat and intelligence. Without a draft, they warn, those with better options outside the military would choose not to serve.

Identity and collective security

Shifting attitudes toward identity are also in play.

Some see the pushback against the draft as Israelis feeling less attached to once-hallowed notions of the collective. The country was founded to grant safe refuge to the Jewish people, enabling a historic ingathering after 2,000 years of Diaspora life.

But in Israel today there’s talk of the country breaking down along “tribal” lines dividing national religious, secular, Arab, and ultra-Orthodox populations. That makes it harder to articulate common security needs.

“Part of that is the loss of trust in political leadership. The feeling that [security] decisions are being made on the basis of politics,” says Ehud Eiran, a political science professor at Haifa University, who fears something fundamental will be lost if the draft is scrapped. He himself served in combat and intelligence roles, and values the experience.

Among those also wistful as they imagine an end to what has been a core principle of Israeli life is Noah Efron, host of “The Promised Podcast” about Israeli politics and society.

“There’s something sad to me about this sense of commitment to the broader whole no longer being an axiom of society,” says Dr. Efron.

His service in the infantry introduced him to a cross section of other Israelis, an experience that continued for two more decades of annual mandatory reserve duty.

Riding in a jeep patrolling the country’s borders, and sleeping outside next to people from backgrounds entirely different from his own, he says, “entirely altered my understanding and experience of the country. I would be a very different person and citizen without that experience.”

Dr. Efron’s son, who recently completed his own army service and requested that his name not be used, was one of the few of his graduating class from a Tel Aviv high school to become a combat soldier.

Most of his counterparts sought out spots in noncombat roles. Most coveted of all: a place in the 8200, an elite intelligence unit known for its use of cyber skills. It’s considered a training ground for high-tech jobs later.

Defense Ministry reforms

There’s a tension within the IDF itself: Does it see itself exclusively as a fighting force defending its citizens, or a key institution serving Israeli society as a whole?

Those internal contradictions have only intensified. Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, the IDF’s chief of staff, harshly criticized a billboard sponsored by a company that runs cyber-skills competitions for young people that reads, “The cream of the crop to cyber,” an appropriation of an Air Force recruiting slogan.

Oded Balilty/AP/File

Ultra-Orthodox Jews block a highway to protest the detention of a member of their community who refused military service, in Bnei Brak, Israel, March 12, 2018. Military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men have long been a source of resentment among the secular majority who are required to serve in the Israeli army.

The preference of some recruits to serve in cyber-intelligence roles over combat, he said, “reflects a loss of values and weakens the foundations of society.” Recalling threats Israel faces on various fronts, he said, “the best are first of all the fighters, measured by their willingness to contribute to the country and sacrifice their lives to protect others.”

At the Defense Ministry, plans for possible reforms are underway. The goal is both for a more efficient army and to create a situation that changes the current dynamic so that everyone in the post-high school cohort adheres to the ethos of serving the country.

As the population of ultra-Orthodox and Arab youth swells, there’s a fear within the defense establishment that in approximately 15 years, when only 40% of 18-year-olds are expected to be drafted, there will be more reluctance to serve when so many visibly do not.

Getting to that stage, says a defense official on condition of anonymity, would be “a security disaster.” He also cited research that people who serve their country perform better in their lives later on and feel more connected to their country. “We want to foster equality and strengthen the military, that is the vision.”

Defense Minister Benny Gantz, a former IDF chief of staff, has already said he supports adopting a model whereby everyone is drafted, but then selected for either civilian or military service.

Pushback is expected, but the plan is that religious women would continue in nonmilitary national service and be joined by ultra-Orthodox and Arab youths, along with others of draft age deemed more suited to contributing via work with youth, in hospitals, or at community-run charities.

“We want them to feel they are part of the Israeli story,” the defense official says.

Courtesy of Javona Brownlee

Javona Brownlee, shown with her children, was receiving $850 extra per month due to an expanded child tax credit – “a big difference,” she says. The Fairfax, Virginia, mother of three has a cleaning business, and the additional money helped her with car payments, groceries, and other expenses. Without the money, she is planning how to cut back.

Over the summer, Danette Mahabeer had a problem familiar to most parents at one point or another: Her daughter, Soheila, was “sprouting,” Ms. Mahabeer says. “Growing out of everything she owned.”

Clothes that fit were suddenly tight. So was money. As for food, Sohelia was ravenous.

For Ms. Mahabeer, a single mother in Nashville, Tennessee, increased costs for food and clothing for a growing child posed real financial challenges. But from June to December, like clockwork, $300 appeared in her bank account. The Biden administration almost certainly hadn’t anticipated Soheila’s penchant for eating Cap’n Crunch multiple times a day – both as breakfast and an afternoon snack – but the checks were earmarked for those exact kinds of child-rearing expenses.

The money came from the expansion to the federal child tax credit – a signature Biden initiative that is now expiring despite what many policy experts see as promising results in easing financial strains on U.S. families. 

Since its 1997 inception, the child tax credit has aimed to give America’s families a boost through the tax code. But the expansion last year dramatically enlarged that goal, recasting the program as more of a child allowance than a tax refund – so it puts cash even in the hands of the poorest households that owe no federal income tax.  

As part of a pandemic relief bill, the revised credit also boosted the maximum amount of money each family could receive to as much as $3,600 per child, up from $2,000 per child before. And the payments began flowing out in monthly deposits or checks, rather than as an annual lump sum when taxes are filed.

Taken together, the changes were costly but also slashed poverty and pioneered the concept of widespread cash payments to working-age households as a potential centerpiece of federal social welfare policy – letting households choose where the money is most needed.

“It was reducing child poverty. It was reducing food insufficiency. It was increasing families’ ability to meet their basic needs,” says Megan Curran, policy director at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. 

The payments helped reduce child poverty by 29.4%, keeping 3.8 million children from slipping into poverty in November alone, according to the center’s estimates. Those effects will now be running in reverse.

Nick Roll

Danette Mahabeer poses for a photo in Nashville, Tennessee, on Jan. 14, 2021. Ms. Mahabeer was receiving $300 a month under the expanded child tax credit, which she used for clothing and food for her daughter. Ms. Mahabeer, who runs a photo studio and is a certified life coach, is now turning to side jobs to make up for the expiration of those payments.

The expansion was only good for 2021. A renewal was included in President Joe Biden’s wide-ranging domestic spending bill, known as Build Back Better, which has failed to pass Congress. Payments that were arriving in the middle of every month from June to December have stopped materializing. Jan. 15 came and went like any other day.

Some higher-income families, whose more solid monthly earnings mean they didn’t qualify for the full benefit, probably won’t notice an odd $150 or so missing from their books each month. Those earning up to $150,000 could still qualify for the full credit. But for legions of others, the cash – up to $300 per child under age 6 and up to $250 for other children under 18 – was a lifeline, and family budgets are being redrawn.

“Working myself to the bone”

Javona Brownlee was receiving $850 a month until payments stopped – “a big difference,” says the Fairfax, Virginia, mother of three. The money went toward car payments, groceries, bills, and gas. “And sometimes I would use it for a night out with the kids – maybe a movie theater, a dinner, depending on if I had it to spare,” she says. “I needed it more for important things – bills – than fun.”

Without the money, Ms. Brownlee is already planning on how to cut back. She plans to hold onto her car for as long as she can, and then have it repossessed – voluntarily, she hopes, if she can stretch out her finances until tax time, when she hopes to downgrade to a used car she can buy outright.

Courtesy of Javona Brownlee

Javona Brownlee of Fairfax, Virginia, poses for a photo with her children. With the expiration of the expanded child tax credit, secondary income beyond her cleaning business becomes more important. She’s hoping to find a new part-time job, after having part-time work at a hotel recently.

“I’m back to working myself to the bone,” on top of caring for her three elementary school-aged children, says Ms. Brownlee, who runs a cleaning business. She’s hoping to supplement her income by finding a part-time job elsewhere, which, until last month, she had been doing with a job at a hotel. 

“When we were receiving [the payments] it provided security. I was looking forward to receiving that payment every 15th,” says Ms. Brownlee, who is living in a shelter after her condo developed a mold problem in November. “It wasn’t something that I had to go and pick up an 11-hour shift, or 12 hours. It was something that allowed me to spend time with my kids. ... I’m really, really sad, and I hate to see it go.”

A move toward a child allowance?

There have long been both liberal and conservative arguments for child allowances – sometimes as an alternative to universal child care – including recent legislation from Republican Sen. Mitt Romney. 

In a Morning Consult poll in December, 44% of registered voters who got the credit said it had a “major impact” on their finances. Another 41% said the credit had at least a “minor impact” for them.

Still, despite its theoretically bipartisan appeal, the child tax credit expansion failed to win clear majority support from the public over its short lifespan. In the December poll, 47% of respondents supported extending the program, while 42% were opposed. Some critics – like Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, whose opposition to Build Back Better killed its chances of passing – questioned the cost of the program. Mr. Manchin also voiced skepticism around giving out unconditional money, especially without work requirements.

“I have been guilty of that [line of thought], to some extent,” says Sunnie Johnson-Lain, senior director of services at the Cincinnati branch of the Society of St. Vincent DePaul, a nonprofit. Yet Ms. Johnson-Lain points out that the organization saw a drop in requests for services when stimulus checks went out. A similar trend held with monthly child tax credit payments: Typically, half of the households coming to the charity’s food pantry didn’t have children, while half did. Over the period when monthly payments were going out, those numbers shifted to a 55-45, or even 60-40 split at times, which Ms. Johnson-Lain calls “significant.” Research from Columbia found that families spent the money “first and foremost” on food.

Other critics have worried about the economy, with some projections showing the payments could dissuade people from pursuing work – thus dampening, though not completely erasing, the tax credit’s overall effect on fighting poverty. But a number of researchers say effects on labor supply are modest to negligible, with the credit providing a cushion against instability rather than a disincentive to work.

“Once you get to real-world data,” argues Ms. Curran at Columbia, “basically there’s been no evidence that shows any sort of employment effects.”

Courtesy of Maria Kraemer

Maria Kraemer is a Cincinnati mother who holds down two jobs, one as a home health aide and another in which she works at a company that produces parts for fire safety equipment. Yet inconsistent hours mean goals can be hard to reach. Payments from the expanded child tax credit – to the tune of $250 a month – helped her and her son, Charlie.

“Back to the basics”

Maria Kraemer holds down two jobs, one as a home health aide and another working at a company that produces parts for fire safety equipment. Yet inconsistent hours mean the Cincinnati single mother’s aspirations are difficult to reach. Payments from the tax credit, however – to the tune of $250 a month – changed things for her and her son, Charlie.

Ms. Kraemer is caught up on her bills. She set aside money in a savings account for the 11-year-old, a first. The rest of the money typically went to food and his school tuition – and sometimes “extracurriculars,” like a trip to the movies, with popcorn.

“That money helped free up other money that I could [then] use, instead of paying directly for hospital bills or medicine,” Ms. Kraemer says. Neither she nor Charlie has health insurance.

The ending of the program won’t ruin her finances, she says, “but now it’s back to the basics.”

In Nashville, Ms. Mahabeer, who runs a photo studio and is a certified life coach, has turned to side jobs to make up for the $300 monthly payments – nannying, teaching Zumba lessons, driving for Uber and Lyft. 

“Spontaneous things to help to cushion those costs, because those costs are still here,” she says. She made things work before the monthly payments. But they gave her a leg up, and showed her new possibilities. “I’ve kind of gotten into that zone where that extra $300 was coming in.” 

Now, she’s doing “anything to bring that extra income in on top of what I already make, so that I can still comfortably provide for my child.”

When my wife and I hired some painters to freshen up several rooms of our home, one of the men who showed up was surprised by what he found.

“This guy is old school,” he whispered to his friend, pointing to the full bookshelves in our family study. “There are books everywhere.”   

I am, I have to admit, an old-school reader, with tastes that lean toward the antique.  

Put simply, I love old books, which puts me in the company of a long line of readers who often prefer them. 

“I am not much taken by the new books,” Michel de Montaigne declared in the 16th century. “The old ones seem to have more meat and sinew.” That quote is in a cheap vintage copy of his essays that I picked up in 1986, the start of my adventures in secondhand literature.

Alone in a new city to take my first daily newspaper job, I was feeling vaguely anxious as I dipped into a used bookstore to soothe my mind. The musty shelves, richly redolent of the past, quickly calmed me. One of the occupational hazards of journalism, my chosen profession, is an itch to stay on top of the Next Big Thing. With their cracked spines and yellowed pages, the tattered titles in the shop usefully pointed me toward the longer view. “No need to get too worked up over today’s fad or headline,” they seemed to say. “There is not much new under the sun.”

The words I’ve found in the old books I’ve bought routinely prove the point. Montaigne’s laments about overheated politics still ring true, as does his confession about overindulging his pets. “I cannot refuse to romp with my dog,” Montaigne tells us, “even though he invites me at the most inopportune time.” 

In my single years, stung by the thought that just about everyone else was paired and happy, I bought a dog-eared paperback of Charles Lamb’s writings from nearly two centuries ago just to enjoy his eye-rolling essay “A Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behavior of Married People.”

Lamb didn’t begrudge spouses their happiness, but he grumbled that “they perk it up in the faces of us single people so shamelessly.”

These days, despite 27 years of happy – though I hope not ostentatiously happy – marriage and two healthy grown children, I can still get a little down, like anyone who reads the news. My venerable volume of the grandly Elizabethan Francis Bacon’s essays is always a ready antidote: “Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes,” Bacon wrote, and “adversity not without many comforts and hope.”

For me, that comfort and hope often come from a secondhand book. Sometimes, what the previous owners have scribbled in the margins is at least as edifying as what the authors have to say. 

In my worn copy of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” an earlier reader had frequently penciled in “integrity” to describe Woolf’s vision. With so many sentences annotated by applause, I felt that my own enthusiasm for the book had been affirmed.

My frayed edition of Joseph Addison’s 18th-century essays has “good” written in lovely cursive near a paragraph in which Addison argues that reading deeply from the past can be at least as instructive as following the day’s news. Don’t worry, he adds, about missing out on the latest gossip. “All matters of fact, which a man did not know before, are news to him,” he writes, regardless of when the facts were minted. That’s reason enough, I guess, to pull Addison from the shelf again and give him another go.

That’s the thing about old books: Their jackets might be stained and their chapters brittle. But at their best, they draw me in for the same reason they beckoned other eyes before mine. They provide an opportunity, within their weathered pages, to catch up on news that never fades.

Tyler LaRiviere/Chicago Sun-Times via AP

A Chicago police officer hands out pamphlets at a Nov. 29 town hall meeting on how to anonymously give information to police that could help in solving crimes.

In recent weeks, police officers in New Haven, Connecticut, have been given a new rule to follow on the beat. In dangerous situations, they must not only use deadly force as a last resort but also “employ de-escalation and mitigation techniques to the greatest extent practicable.” It is an example of police reform reflected in more than 140 new state laws since the eruption of protests in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd and other controversial killings by police.

New Haven’s new policy, as in many places, comes with a deeper message for police. It also requires officers “to recognize the sanctity of human life and respect every person’s rights and dignity.”

Such new ethics in police departments come as the hotter passions of public protest have yielded to the quieter, consistent work of practical reform. The reforms may be creating a unique moment of transformation. More candidates for police chief positions, for example, are women and people of color. More public hearings are enabling citizens to be involved in the hiring process. A different generation of leaders is emerging.

The shift is more than demographic. Demand for a new compact between a community and those who protect it is bearing fruit. “We’ve gone from a militaristic, us vs. them, good guys vs. bad guys mentality,” says Brian O’Hara, public safety director of the Newark Police Department in New Jersey. “Today that culture doesn’t exist. Training in the past emphasized use of force. Now we do scenario-based training. We screen folks for the right mindset and values. They have to know how to de-escalate. That’s a totally different skill.”

Newark illustrates how law enforcement is evolving from within. In 2014, a U.S. Department of Justice investigation found a long pattern of civil rights abuses by the department, targeted overwhelmingly at Black residents. Under the leadership of a new mayor elected three weeks earlier, the city worked closely with federal officials to transform the department, starting with a campaign to hire hundreds of new officers. In a city that is 53% Black and 34% Latino, 80% of the new officers are Black or other people of color and 22% are women. Female Muslim officers are allowed to wear hijabs.

Long before “defund the police” became a protest slogan, Newark had already formed community partnerships to “rethink what policing looks like,” says Mayor Ras Baraka. “Violence reduction is not a police matter alone. Police can’t solve social issues. For us, ‘defund’ means ‘re-imagine.’”

Community partnerships are finding a role in recruitment as well. The St. Louis Police Department (SLPD), for example, works with outside specialists to ensure that military veterans training to be police officers leave the battlefield mentality behind.

“We’re not in combat,” says Sgt. Christy Allen, head of SLPD community engagement and recruitment. “We want our officers to understand that the most powerful way to relate to the people we serve is to talk to them. Relate to them. Learn their names. Offer them resources. That may seem small, but it is powerful. Many situations don’t have to end with handcuffs.”

Moving law enforcement officers closer to the high ideals of a community sometimes requires more than a nudge. Better recruitment and new styles of training are helping to lift the thinking of many officers to a better ethic of restraint and community inclusion.