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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally, an essay by author Richard Ford.

His latest book, “Between Them,” is a memoir of his parents’ lives, and, tonight, he shares his Humble Opinion about taking note of their love.

Have a listen.

RICHARD FORD, Author, “Between Them: Remembering My Parents”: Goodness knows, there are lots of reasons to write a memoir, to render testimony, to bear witness, to make sense of a recollected life that had failed to make sense before, to turn to the mysteries of memory and improvise a continuous narrative of our own life, and, in that way, substantiate ourselves to ourselves and others.

St. Augustine told us, memory is a faculty of the soul.

Writing a memoir about my parents, Parker and Edna Ford, didn’t seem so much to be writing about myself as about them, although I was their only child, and the only one remaining to say that they’d even existed.

So, here is another reason to write a memoir: to utter what must not be erased.

I wrote about my parents because, decades after their deaths and when I was no longer young, I realized that I plainly missed them and wished, in some way, to draw them near me again. Writing about them would do that, I thought. And it is worth saying that such an emotion, missing them, is possible, and can be acted upon, even long after it might be supposed that enough time has passed for longing to subside.

My parents were wonderful parents, though, other than causing me to happen and making each other blissful for 32 years, they set little in motion and were, as most of our parents are, all but unnoticeable in the world’s disinterested eye.

And yet it’s fair to say that, because they were who and how they were, being their son seemed a privilege. And, almost mysteriously, they opened for me a world of immense possibility.

The choice to make fictional characters of my parents, which would seem to be what many novelists do, simply didn’t occur to me. Fiction’s reliance on artifice, its necessity to suspend disbelief in order to assure trust, its engrossing arbitrariness, and its foundation in the provisional, all of these orchestrations of fiction threatened to overpower my parents.

What I wanted, as their son, wasn’t for disbelief to be suspended, but for it to be abolished, and for belief in my parents and their lives to become absolute.

Facts, with their blunter, more specific hold on truth, seemed to me the better way to represent my parents as they were, and a better way for me to say that, because of how they were, not in spite of it, they merited the world’s attention. That’s worth saying, too.

Age is a winnowing process. And, sometimes, what gets sifted out as we seek to know the important consequence of lives are the actual lives themselves. Odd to think that we could, even for a moment, overlook such rudiments or take them for granted.

Memoir is for that, too, its great virtue being to remind us that, in a world cloaked in supposition, in opinion, in misdirection, and often in outright untruth, things do actually happen.

My parents’ lives did take place. And it is here, in the incontrovertible truth that facts provide, that our firmest beliefs must first take hold.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Finally: We are headed into commencement season, and each week seems to bring a new fight over whose ideas should be heard.

Tonight, Trinity College President Joanne Berger-Sweeney shares her Humble Opinion that universities are exactly the place for these difficult conversations.

Have a listen.

JOANNE BERGER-SWEENEY, President, Trinity College: These days, you can’t miss the criticism aimed at higher education.

We hear it: We’re a bunch of intolerant elites. Our students are precious snowflakes. As educators, we’re stifling speech and thought, and we’re not preparing students for the real world.

Frankly, I get it. Lately, some campus protests around the country have gone awry in truly ugly ways. Now it’s commencement season. Are controversial speakers going to be uninvited and ceremonies halted by protests?

If so, all of us in higher education should be ashamed. It’s our job as educators to uphold free speech and to teach the responsibilities that come with that freedom. And, yes, we must provide safe spaces, spaces that are safe for speech, not from it.

But it seems more than ever that we’re just refusing to hear one another. Maybe that’s because listening to the other side can hurt. Let me tell you, as an African-American woman, I have heard it all, and a lot of it has hurt.

I didn’t have to agree with it, like when I was told a black girl couldn’t be a scientist, but I didn’t have the option of not hearing it. And now I’m the first woman, the first person of color, the first neuroscientist to be president of Trinity College.

But guess what? I’m not representing just African-Americans, or women, or neuroscientists. I’m representing Trinity College, a community with a variety of points of view.

I have to be true to myself, but I can’t be a responsible leader without teaching students this important lesson: Silencing voices and refusing to listen harms us all.

That’s why, for my first commencement as president in 2015, I awarded honorary degrees to both a retired Air Force general and a renowned peace advocate.

And that’s why, this year, we will hear a commencement speech from philosopher Daniel Dennett, a well-known atheist, beside the statue of our founding president, an Episcopalian bishop, exposing students to different perspectives and helping them bridge divides.

This work is deeply personal to me. It may be the most important work I will do as president. When we teach students how to analyze an opposing argument and sharpen their own, how to relate across differences, how to listen and be heard, we are preparing our students for the real world. In fact, we’re giving them the tools to make our world a lot better.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: One of the core tenets of the American dream is the belief that any individual, regardless of their background, can make it big.

Millionaire tech entrepreneur Jason Ford has done just that, but he believes that he and other successful people get a lot of help they don’t often acknowledge.

He explains in tonight’s edition of In My Humble Opinion.

JASON FORD, Entrepreneur: Everyone loves a good success story. It’s the American dream, working your way up from nothing, armed only with your wits and a strong work ethic.

And for those who make it, it feels great to think you got there all on your own. I should know: I’m a millionaire, the first in my family, one of those tech entrepreneurs who built a software business and sold it for a fortune.

I didn’t inherit my wealth. I created it.

But look a little deeper, and it turns out that version of my success story is a lie. Yes, my family background is rather humble. Both of my parents were teachers. I grew up in hand-me-down clothes from our neighbors.

But, before I was born, my parents got help from their parents to buy a house in a safe neighborhood with good schools. When my grandmother passed, she left each of her grandkids some money, not a fortune, but enough that I made it through college without school debt.

My wife’s nana was a school teacher as well. She and her husband saved their humble income and bought land decades ago. And when I started my business, she believed in me enough to sell her land and invest the money in my start-up.

So, we can blow up the myth that I’m a self-made success. Sure, I had something to do with it, but I also had some serious help.

Now, one way to interpret this story is that the generations before me worked hard to provide the best possible future for their kids and grandkids. And that interpretation is true, but it leaves out some harsh realities rooted in history.

You see, if my ancestors had not been white, it is almost certain that I wouldn’t be where I am today. My grandfather would have found it nearly impossible to climb to the top of the corporate ladder like he did. This was the mid-’70s, when almost every executive in a role like his was a white man.

As a result, my parents likely wouldn’t have bought the House They did, with the good schools that prepared me for college. And two generations ago, lending discrimination would have made it similarly impossible for nana to buy that land that ended up funding my business.

Just as not everyone is qualified to be an astronaut, it takes a special kind of person to be an entrepreneur. You need discipline, intelligence, extreme dedication. But the best astronaut in the world can’t fly to the moon unless someone gives them the rocket.

It’s time for more entrepreneurs like me to stop telling stories about how they climbed their way to the top, to stop taking credit for flying to the moon all by themselves, as if the entire support structure they were born into had nothing to do with it.

And it’s time for all of us to find more ways to empower the world’s highest-potential entrepreneurs with their own rockets, so they can show us the stars.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Something to think about.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight, Adam Alter, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the author of “Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology,” shares his humble opinion on our addiction to technology.

ADAM ALTER, Author, “Irresistible”: In 2004, I left my family and friends in Sydney, Australia, to begin a Ph.D. in psychology at Princeton.

I was lucky to find a group of close friends, but we were all busy, and at the end of most days, I would return to my room alone. One night, I stumbled on a primitive online slot machine game called Slots. U.S. law prohibited online gambling, so I wasn’t playing for real money, but I found the game impossible to resist.

Instead of winning money, I would win small rewards in the form of bells and flashing lights.

Bells and flashing lights may sound like trivial rewards, but, in those moments of loneliness, they scratched a psychological itch. I played so often that I started to imagine the reels on the slot machine spinning during the day.

Meanwhile, in one of my classes, we were learning about a series of experiments on isolated caged pigeons. When the birds were trained to peck a button that sometimes delivered food, but sometimes delivered nothing, they pecked the button hundreds of times, even when they were no longer hungry, because their isolation was soothed by each gamble.

This was a eureka moment for me. I was behaving a lot like these birds. Slots wasn’t nourishing, but I played for hours. My obsession lasted six months, only ending when I started dating a classmate.

I learned that addiction isn’t only about injecting a drug or playing a game compulsively. It also has to scratch a psychological itch. For me, that itch was loneliness. For someone else, it might be depression numbed with narcotics or boredom numbed with a video game.

Now, the world has changed a lot since I stopped playing Slots more than a decade ago. Many of us have those psychological itches that need scratching, from anxiety to stress to low self-esteem. And we have access to relief in the form of smartphones and tablets.

Wherever we go, those devices bring us social networks, games, e-mail, and text messages, each delivering or withholding rewards in the form of replies, shares, and likes, just as that small button did for the caged lab animals and slots did for me.

For most of us, it’s difficult to avoid the screens that deliver addictive experiences altogether, so the key is to live part of each day screen-free.

Lock your smartphone and tablet in a drawer from, say, 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. You will know you’re succeeding if, for at least part of the day, you can’t tell that it’s 2017 based only on what you can see.

When you’re looking out at the ocean or standing in a forest or having a conversation with someone, it could be 2017, but it could also be 1950 or 1700.

The key is to make at least a thin slice of every day timeless.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight, the latest installment in our series of essays.

Tom Nichols, author of the book “The Death of Expertise,” shares his Humble Opinion on the demise of experts.

TOM NICHOLS, Author, “The Death of Expertise”: A few years ago, a mischievous group of pollsters asked American voters whether they would support bombing the country of Agrabah.

As you might expect, Republicans tended to support military action, while Democrats were more reluctant.

There’s only one problem: Agrabah doesn’t exist. It’s from the animated Disney film “Aladdin.” Only about half the people surveyed figured this out, and liberals and conservatives gleefully pointed fingers at each other.

For experts in foreign affairs, however, there was no way around the alarming reality that so many Americans had a well-defined view on bombing a cartoon.

I’m one of those experts. I teach both civilians and military officers about national security affairs. In my career, I have advised the Pentagon, the CIA, and political leaders from both major parties.

Increasingly, however, laypeople don’t care about expert views. Instead, many Americans have become insufferable know-it-alls, locked in constant conflict with each other, while knowing almost nothing about the subject they are debating.

How did this happen? How is it that people now not only doubt expert advice, but believe themselves to be as smart, or even smarter, than experienced professionals? Parents who refuse to vaccinate a child, for example, aren’t really questioning their doctors. They’re replacing their doctors. They have decided that attending the university of Google, as one anti-vaccine activist put it, is the same as going to medical school.

People who have no idea how much the United States spends on foreign aid think that they’re the peers of experienced diplomats. Experts in almost every field can tell similar stories.

There’s a lot of blame to go around for all of this. The smartphones and tablets that we carry around all day that we think can answer anything are only part of the problem. The American educational system, from grade school to graduate school, encourages students to think of themselves and their views as special. An A is now a common grade.

The news media, while trying to tell people what they need to hear, must compete for ears, eyes, and clicks, and so are also forced to ask them what they’d like to hear.

And even if we manage to avoid the intellectual saboteurs of the Internet, we’re still all too likely to get our news and views from social media, where a silly meme from your aunt Rose in Schenectady competes for your attention with actual information.

We need to find our way back from this ego-driven wilderness. Historically, people return to valuing expert views in times of trouble or distress. We’re all willing to argue with our doctors until our fever is out of control.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. But that’s where we’re headed. And unless we start accepting the limitations of our own knowledge, then each of us is failing in our obligation to participate in our democracy as involved, but informed citizens.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And you can find more expert views from our series In My Humble Opinion. That’s on our Web site.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight: reflections on coming to the United States from author Alia Malek, who considers the various journeys Syrian refugees take on their many roads from Damascus.

ALIA MALEK, Journalist: In September 2015, I felt I had to drop everything and go to Turkey to report on Syrians as they hurriedly made their way to Europe, trying to beat the rapidly closing borders.

As a Syrian-American, their fate was one I had only accidentally been spared.

As I accompanied them on this journey, I couldn’t help thinking of how different their circumstances were from how my own Syrian family had ended up in the diaspora, of how my mother, pregnant with me, herself had left Damascus.

Unlike the dangerous Mediterranean Sea crossings and the trek through the Balkans, her trip itself wasn’t treacherous, and it wasn’t undignified. She was traveling to Baltimore to join my father, a medical resident at the University of Maryland.

While emotionally painful, her journey couldn’t have been easier. She wasn’t facing imminent death or displacement, as people are today. In fact, both my parents meant to eventually return to their homeland.

But when it became clear what life would be like under the Assad regime, they gave up their dream to return. Years after all their children were born American, they too finally became naturalized Americans.

When my family arrived here in the ’70s, being Syrian wasn’t a barrier to becoming American. Even if Arabs weren’t well-perceived generally, Syrians specifically didn’t hold much of a place in the American imagination or consciousness.

In fact, I remember the best a schoolyard bully could do was tell me that, as a Syrian, I ate too much cereal. Oh, for those days.

In these past six years, as Syria has disintegrated, taken over the headlines, and as Syrians have become the foreign menace of the day, I have often thought about the vagaries of fate, of how accidental and unintended occurrences are what separate me from the Syrians unfairly maligned, banned, and banished today, how our lot depends on when we decided to leave, where we landed, and how we got there, whether we boarded flights with regular tickets and visas, or were piled on top of each other on flimsy rafts and left to drift across the sea unguided, how our future depends on what suffix happens to follow Syrian on arrival.

Is it refugee? Is it immigrant? Is it American? I’m lucky to be that last one.

A Syrian mother I was traveling with across Europe worried at each new border, what would happen to her children? In Syria, they had been comfortably working class. Her husband was a baker, and she was a stay-at-home mom.

At the beginning of the trip, her children were horrified to have to relieve themselves outdoors and in public. Within days, though, she was pained to see how they had quickly adjusted to their new reality.

I instead approached each crossing with a guilty confidence of a passport-carrying American. I was completely aware that my fortune was in large part by chance and circumstance.

But, rather than make me unique, I imagine that makes me like many other Americans whose families were also once upon the time among the lucky, favored by fate to have made it to these shores when and how we did.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And that’s a perspective we need to hear, Alia Malek.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight, doctor and author Andrew Lam offers his Humble Opinion of how affirmative action in college admissions should evolve.

DR. ANDREW LAM, Author: There are lots of stereotypes about Asian Americans. I probably fit some of them. I did well in school. I played a couple instruments. I went to Yale and became a doctor.

I now volunteer to interview Yale applicants each year. My ties to the college are strong, especially since my dad also went there in the 1960s. At the time, there were only about 10 Asians in his class. Today, Asians make up about a fifth of the students on campus.

In fact, there are now so many Asians at elite colleges that many Asians fear affirmative action makes colleges hold them to a higher standard.

Asian students straight out ask me if being Asian will hurt their chances, or if it’s better to mark their race as other, instead of Asian.

Seriously? We have reached the point where kids are afraid to admit their own ethnicity? It’s true.

And, sadly, it appears their concerns are not unfounded. One study showed Asians had to score higher on the SAT than all other ethnicities to get into top colleges.

In a recent lawsuit, Harvard was accused of using race quotas and maintaining a cap on Asian enrollment for decades. To me, the worst part of this isn’t that some kid who looks like my son won’t get into the Ivy League. It’s that truly disadvantaged Asians get lumped in with model minority Asians.

There are economically disadvantaged students from Laotian, Cambodian and Hmong communities. There are Pakistani and South Asian students whose parents scrape by working 100-hour weeks. Affirmative action has the potential to hurt these individuals most of all.

But let’s be fair. Colleges’ intentions are good. They use affirmative action to craft diverse classes because we all benefit from exposure to people of different races and backgrounds. I strongly agree with this.

Would I have preferred to go to a Yale that was predominantly Asian? Absolutely not. So, I support affirmative action. But I also know we could do it better. We should assist students based on socioeconomic disadvantage, no matter their race. There are rural white kids who deserve special preference, but aren’t getting it.

There are affluent minority students who may not need that help to succeed. Doing this wouldn’t make sense if it reduced racial diversity. But it doesn’t have to.

A detailed study of colleges that switched to socioeconomic factors showed the majority had stable or increased black and Hispanic enrollment.

One student I interviewed worked at a fast-food restaurant to help support her family. Another had to care for two younger siblings, an obligation that prevented him from doing extracurricular activities.

I could tell you their races, but should it matter? You can’t judge someone’s accomplishments until you appreciate the obstacles overcome to achieve them. And if this could be a better way of doing affirmative action, rather than simply looking at someone’s skin color or a box they check, maybe we should give it a try.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Dr. Andrew Lam.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Nato Thompson is a curator of public art, and the author of the recent book “Culture as Weapon.”

Tonight, he offers his Humble Opinion on the confusion created by charitable advertising.

Have a listen.

NATO THOMPSON, Author, “Culture as Weapon”: Like many of us, I was brought being told I should make the world a better place.

As a curator of contemporary art in our public spaces, I often work with artists who share this basic common value. We want to rectify social injustices and to help our fellow humans. Call it do-gooder art, for lack of a better term.

I have seen a growing interest in corporations wanting to support public art. And while I too want to go after the money, sometimes, I have to stop and ask, is corporately funded art just an advertisement? Am I being paranoid? Am I a pawn in someone else’s game?

I don’t think it is just me. I suspect we must all admit a bit of confusion over what is an advertisement and what is actual social good.

For example, every October, a particular color arrives that epitomizes this phenomena: pink. It is the color of breast cancer awareness. And, believe me, I can’t imagine a more important disease to fight. So, please, don’t take my criticism of pink to be a critique of the actual work fighting breast cancer.

But I have also seen, as I am sure you have, a lot of sponsors jump on the pink bandwagon. Sports teams have literally turned pink, from cleat to helmet. Soup cans turn pink. Bowling balls turn pink. Even military fighter jets have turned pink.

Now, I’m all for awareness, but, certainly, some businesses see the pink color as an opportunity to appeal to the female consumer market.

Now, I’m just guessing here. This approach actually has a name. It is called cause-related marketing. One could easily call it a win-win, and, sometimes, my artists and I are the lucky recipients. Social justice causes get, well, money, and sponsors get the benefit of looking moral.

For those of a more cynical persuasion, they might see such efforts as a bit of a shell game, where a company distracts with the image of doing good to take the eyes off practices that are not.

You notice this even at the Academy Awards of advertising, the Super Bowl. A lot of those ads seem to have this feeling as though they are actually out to do good in the world. Maybe they are. Maybe they are not.

The world is a complex place. Wanting to make the world a better and actually doing it are not the same thing. Let’s just be aware of how susceptible we are as consumers to images.

I suggest we should focus on all of the practices of companies vying for our attention, in order to make a better judgment.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Curator Nato Thompson, in his Humble Opinion.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight, “Atlantic” magazine writer Derek Thompson, author of the recent book “Hit Makers,” looks at how stories help us understand and even change the way we see the world.

It’s the latest installment in In My Humble Opinion.

Have a listen.

DEREK THOMPSON, Author, “Hit Makers: How Things Become Popular”: One thing I learned writing a book about pop culture hits in entertainment is that stories are weapons, for good or ill.

Movies like “Frozen” can teach us female empowerment. Movies like 1915’s “The Birth of a Nation” can teach us prejudice.

For example, take one of the most ancient and universal myths, vampires. For hundreds of years, people didn’t understand death or disease. Why did people get sick in bunches? Why did people often die after their friends did?

So, all over the world, different civilizations made up the same story: Death comes from the undead.

Before the 1800s, the belief in vampires stretched from Transylvania to China. Albanian vampires ate intestines, while their Indonesian brethren drank blood. In Eastern Europe, they discriminated against people they thought might become vampires, including the disabled, atheists, and even seventh children.

Today, we know germs exists and vampires do not. It’s tempting to say it was just a stupid story, but the truth is that vampires were the perfect story. It didn’t just explain the mystery of death. Even more, it explained the chaos of life with a spectacular tale that empowered villagers by telling them that everybody had the capacity to fight evil with potions, garlic, prayers, chastity, stakes, swords, and fire.

We have come a long way since vampires. Or have we? Even today, society is bound by the stories that we tell each other. In an office, loud women are bossy, but loud men are assertive. An outspoken white person is authoritative, but an outspoken black person is threatening.

Are men smarter than women, or whites smarter than other races? There is no scientific basis for these ideas. They are stories that had to be invented, constructed, told, and believed.

From the time we are children, we hear stories about the way the world ought to work. Who should we trust? Who should we fear? These are social narratives passed down, like bedtime stories, across generations, telling us how to live and what to expect.

Science finally killed the folk belief in vampires, but how do we drive a stake through misogyny or prejudice? History is full of men and women who successfully championed justice and equal rights. Empathy and equality are powerful stories. They need equally powerful storytellers.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Finally, an essay from Emily Esfahani Smith. She is trained in psychology, and author of the recent book “The Power of Meaning.”

An editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, tonight, Emily offers her Humble Opinion on what we should search for.

EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH, Author, “The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters”: In recent years, psychologists have started looking more closely at how the single-minded pursuit of happiness affects us, and they have come to what seems like a counterintuitive conclusion: Chasing happiness and obsessing over it, the way our culture encourages us to do, can actually make people unhappy and lonely.

But it’s different when we set another goal for ourselves, when we search for and pursue meaning in life.

Human beings are creatures that yearn for meaning. When we look up at the stars, for example, we don’t see random balls of fire. We see swans and bears, we tell stories and myths, and we wonder about where we came from, our place in the universe, and how we can make our lives count.

The same questions lie at the center of much great art, literature, and philosophy. The first great work of human literature, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” is about a hero’s quest to figure out how to live, given the fact that he will die.

And in the centuries since Gilgamesh’s tale was told, that quest has remained as urgent as ever. We all want to know that our lives amount to more than the sum of our experiences. We all need a why to help us get through the good and the bad of life.

So, what is a meaningful life? Social science points to one defining feature. You connect and contribute to something beyond yourself. That could be your family, your work, nature, or God.

And when people say their lives are meaningful, it’s because three conditions have been satisfied: They believe their lives matter, they have a sense of purpose that drives them forward, and they think their lives are coherent and make sense.

It sounds like a lot, but that last point is something you can do right now. People tell me the simple act of storytelling gives meaning, or can at least clear the path to it. That, I think, might explain the rise of rap and hip-hop and the popularity of the radio series “StoryCorps” and “The Moth.”

Making a narrative out of the events in your life provides clarity. It offers a framework that goes beyond the day-to-day. It’s the act itself, and not necessarily sharing their story with others, that helps people make sense of themselves and their lives. And we all have the power to tell or to re-tell our life story in more positive ways.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally, as the world’s Christians begin Lent, a six-week period of introspection in preparation for Easter, reflections from Casper ter Kuile, a researcher at Harvard University, who shares his humble opinion on the soul survival happening outside America’s churches.

CASPER TER KUILE, Harvard University: I grew up never going to church.

And as a 30-year-old married man, I still don’t, not because I don’t value reflection, community, even the experience of the divine. I do. But traditional religious congregations don’t appeal to me. And I’m not alone.

Millennials are turning away from religion faster than any other age group. And according to the Pew Research Center, more than a third of Americans between 18 and 35 are now unaffiliated, meaning, when asked on a survey what religious identity they hold, they answer none of the above.

But what’s really interesting is that the overwhelming majority of us nones aren’t necessarily atheists. Two-thirds believe in God or a universal spirit, and one in five even pray every day.

We aren’t young people who hate religion. It’s a growing group that feel like they have been left behind by religious institutions.

In a move that confused a lot of my friends and family, I have found countless examples of other millennials creating new forms of community that often fulfill the same functions that a traditional religious group would have.

And they come in all shapes and sizes. It might be a regular meal with strangers to share honestly one’s experience after losing a loved one, like the organization The Dinner Party. Within a few years, The Dinner Party has spread to 116 cities across the U.S. hosted by volunteers who create sacred spaces for their guests.

It might be lifting weights and climbing ropes five mornings a week like at CrossFit. And if you have a friend involved in a CrossFit, you will know how evangelical that community is.

Or it might be experiencing healing and forgiveness through movement and meditation at Afro Flow Yoga.

Each of these communities and others like them shape participants’ world views, ethics and behaviors. And in a culture where many are hungry for connection, these communities offer the experience of being part of something bigger than themselves, what some theologians might describe as experiencing the divine.

Now, you may dismiss these communities as simple entertainment, but we’re convinced that this is the new face of religious life in America. Just as you would expect in a religious congregation, people in these communities build friendships and drive one another to the hospital when they need a ride.

They help each other raise money to fight cancer. And some are even getting involved in struggles for more affordable housing. While a few thousand churches close every year, many fewer open. So, as you drive through your town and notice an empty house of worship, pay attention next time you see a community workspace, a climbing gym or a micro-brewery.

They may just be the new center of soulful community that you have been looking for.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight: perspective on America’s elderly from a once-worried daughter.

America’s aging population continues to explode and will double, from 46 million today to 98 million by the year 2060.

This week’s IMHO, In My Humble Opinion, features Annabelle Gurwitch. the author of the book “Wherever You Go, There They Are.”

ANNABELLE GURWITCH, Author, “Wherever You Go, There They Are”: When my sister and I stepped in to help our declining parents, there were finances and insurances to detangle.

We wanted them to move nearer to us, but they needed to stay close to their doctors. Now, the aging-at-home option has been touted as a cost saver, but it doesn’t address the isolation and loneliness that marks life for many seniors.

So we started looking for the next place. It turns out there are few resources for the middle class. We found palatial residences like the one I think of as villa grande with wine tastings and white table dining, or villa even more grande with personal butlers and architectural layouts named for Picasso and Renoir. The Michelangelo was the size of New Hampshire.

I started waking up in the middle of the night just to search the Web. Just how much are kidneys going for these days?

My parents had champagne taste, but were on a box wine budget, and the place that we found was something of a letdown. It wasn’t the most up-to-date. It was hard for them to get used to the traffic sounds and the bright lights outside the facility.

My parents were Jewish, but not observant. And my father was caught on more than one occasion smuggling bacon into the kosher cafeteria, while my mother found it upsetting that, at the exercise class, which included people in wheelchairs, they played the song “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”

There were small victories. My mother lobbied for K.C. and the Sunshine Band, so the still ambulatory residents could shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake their booty every Tuesday and Thursday morning.

But my mother still had trouble making friends, because depression can keep you trapped inside your shell. Now I was waking up in the middle of the night wondering if I should move closer to them, but my son was in high school, and I’m a writer and performer who is often on the road.

And then something remarkable happened. My father’s health deteriorated, and this community rallied around them, visiting, helping out, making sure that my mother had someone to have meals with.

One night, my mother’s new BFF, Helen, and I went for a stroll, and she took my arm. And I had no idea what had happened in Helen’s life that had brought her to the same place as my mother, who she loved or who loved her, but I took my first deep breath in months.

Villa grande wouldn’t have been right. My house wouldn’t have been right. They found a family, which was more than what any of us could have hoped for.

The post When you know your aging parents have found home appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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ANTONIO MORA: Finally tonight, a look at the subtle ways our society often equates being white with what’s normal.

It comes from Peter Kim, who was a member of Chicago’s famed Second City comedy troupe.

It is the latest edition of IMHO, In My Humble Opinion.

PETER KIM, Comedian: When you hear the phrase white supremacy, what picture comes to your mind? Maybe it’s Adolf Hitler screaming into a microphone. Maybe it’s white-hooded figures marching around a burning cross.

For me, it’s a lot less dramatic and a lot more commonplace. So, if I may, I would like to offer an updated definition of white supremacy. It’s the idea that white is the ideal, and we are all consciously and subconsciously working to achieve whiteness.

For example, I’m an actor. And, once, I was sitting in the waiting room of a casting agency with a fellow actor who happened to be white. And I was telling him how I keep getting called in for roles looking for all ethnicities, but are clearly written for a white man, like characters named Vincent Daniels.

And he says to me, “Well, Peter, you’re almost white.”

OK, let that sink in for a second. If you haven’t flinched yet, you should take a deep look inside of yourself.

Me, an Asian-American, being almost white? Meaning what? That I’m not black or Latino or any skin complexion darker than white?

In saying so, he’s assuming that white people are the default race in this country, that I am almost normal.

And this isn’t some ignorant racist. This is a liberal creative person living in Chicago.

You see, this happens to me all the time, even in places I never thought would exist. See, I’m a Korean man who’s also gay. And when I finally came out and downloaded the dating app Grindr — spoiler alert, ain’t nobody dating on Grindr — I was overwhelmed by profiles saying no fems, no fats, no Asians.

And I would say to myself, well, that can’t be me, because, according to my mom, I’m not fat, I’m husky.

I have been lucky enough to travel and perform all around this country. And when I get asked the question where are you from, and I respond, oh, New York, most of the time, well-meaning white people get upset and ask, you know what I mean. Where are you from-from?

My boyfriend, who is from Minnesota, whose family has roots in Sweden, never has to explain where he’s from-from.

So, my definition of white supremacy is embedded in the fabric of our everyday lives. It’s in our schools, in our movies, and on our televisions.

Look, we all need car insurance, but you will likely never see someone like me in ad for something like that. It’s clear to the average American that it’s more persuasive to be sold insurance by a cheeky foreign gecko than a fabulous husky gaysian.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, we’re going to remember that one.

ANTONIO MORA: Yes.

The post The white supremacy of being asked where I’m from appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally tonight: What we can learn about life from those facing death?

Chaplain Kerry Egan’s new book is called “On Living” and is the latest edition in our essay series In My Humble Opinion.

KERRY EGAN, Author, “On Living”: When people learn that I’m a hospice chaplain, they usually have one of two reactions. They either say they could never do that job and change the subject completely, or they have questions, lots of questions.

One of the questions I hear more often than I would have thought is about people’s last words. People are enormously curious about what people who are actively dying talk about.

Have you ever heard anything really amazing? What’s the craziest deathbed confession you have ever heard? Should I plan out my last words?

That last question seemed really odd to me the first time someone asked, but I have been asked it at least a dozen times, so it’s obviously on some people’s minds.

The questions don’t actually match up with what typically happens when someone is dying. Instead, I suspect they’re coming from a sort of Hollywood movie or television idea of what dying should be like, clean, calm, bizarrely romantic, always with the good sense to close your eyes before taking a long sigh and limply tossing your head to the side, and beautiful, urgent, life-altering utterances.

So, if this is what you think happens in death, I can see how you would feel a lot of pressure to get it right.

When someone asks me if they should plan their last words, the short answer is: No. People who are dying are often unconscious for days before they die. Sometimes, they’re in pain. They’re often highly medicated.

Honestly, most of the last words I have heard are so mundane, I can’t even give an example.

When you know you have a terminal diagnosis, death often takes a person by surprise. You might not even know that your last words are your last words.

But there’s a longer, more complex answer too. If you had something so important to tell your loved ones that you feel the need to plan out what to say, then why would you wait to say it? If it’s so important that you’re worried about it now, then say it now. Ask for forgiveness now. Say you love someone now. Share whatever wisdom you have with the world right now.

Here’s the thing. When people ask me about dying words, what they’re really asking is, what is so important in this life that it should be the very last thing we talk about?

So, instead of asking, what do other people talk about, ask yourself, what do I really want to talk about now? And that’s a really good question. That’s a really good thing to ponder.

JUDY WOODRUFF: A lot to think about there.

And you can watch more of our series In My Humble Opinion on our website.

The post Don’t wait till your dying words to say what’s most important appeared first on PBS NewsHour.

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JUDY WOODRUFF: Finally: Professor Christopher Emdin teaches at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

He explains why there are so few African-American males teaching our children in tonight’s In My Humble Opinion.

CHRISTOPHER EMDIN, Columbia University Teachers College: So, when “NewsHour” asked me to write and deliver this essay about why there are so few black male teachers, I was excited. I agreed.

But I then realized that I needed to discuss this issue by presenting it in a way that kind of exemplifies the problem.

And the problem is that no one’s really listening. So, for this essay, you’re going to have to listen, but do so in a little bit of a different way.

See, like some other black cultural values and modes of expression that black male teachers and their students share and have in common, hip-hop is demonized by the public, and then it is devalued in schools.

So, whether we’re talking about dance, dress, slang, entertainment, we have these forms of culture that need to be accepted, with some limits, of course, in schools. And we do that to engage students and then to retain teachers.

When they are not accepted, students underperform, teachers get frustrated, and then they leave.

See, black youth drop out, get suspended at higher rates. Schools react about that fact, so they hire a black face. Black male went through hell, dodged a cell, got a degree. School is excited he got hired. They gave him some mentees.

Now, these mentees breeze through P.E. with ease, but at best see C’s if the course talks degrees or ratio, proportions, because math is boring, the language is anguish. They languish in their performance. Frustrated, they updated their thug image, stuck in the sewage cultural irrelevance created.

Poor instruction, boring structures. Then I’m called in to rupture. And I’m overwhelmed.

Yes, I’m black. And the kids are black, too, but what I know is right to do means breaking the school’s rules. So we leave the profession in every major city, 40 percent in Chicago, 19 in Philly, really. We can’t stand being the teachers that we hated, but they made us suspend them and punish them with bad grades.

The school system is more diverse than ever, but I never see myself amongst the faculty. And whether I do or not doesn’t make much of a difference if you hire me, retire me, and do not change the system.

Listen, like 50 percent of public school students of color, right? Eighty-two percent of those teachers are, the other, white. Less than 2 percent of those who teach are black males. One in 15 of those same males end up in jail.

Schools criminalize, and society despises us. For the black male teacher, frustrations rise in us. Now, students respond in anger and hate schools. Then the teachers respond and start tightening up the rules.

Test prep begets yet even more frustration. I prep them for a test they detest, so they fail it. Then I get blamed and nailed to the cross, as if I’m the cause of it. So, of course, I feel I’m forced to quit.

The source of this often sits at the precipice of pessimists who get to spit a less legit hypothesis about my grit, when it’s obvious that I am forced to fit in a system.

So, I quit.

The post The failure cycle causing a shortage of black male teachers appeared first on PBS NewsHour.