What Is the Jefferson Bible?

Alyssa Roat

"Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, served as the third American president, and is widely considered one of the most influential Founding Fathers of the United States of America.

However, many do not know that Thomas Jefferson also created his own version of the Bible. Taking a penknife, he pored over the biblical text in Greek, Latin, French, and English and cut and pasted passages to create what we call The Jefferson Bible.

So what exactly is Jefferson’s Bible? And is it, in fact, a Bible at all?

Thomas Jefferson in the Age of Enlightenment

Thomas Jefferson was firmly rooted in Enlightenment thought. The Age of Enlightenment, which lasted through most of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, centered around human reason as the measure of all things.

The Enlightenment brought about revolutions in government, political thought, science, and philosophy, but it also brought traditional Christianity into question. The focus on reason and the human mind, as well as cultural reactions against the checkered history of the European church, threw the supernatural into question.

With a worldview that focused on man’s ability to improve his own self through reason and virtue, many Enlightenment thinkers found it unreasonable and superstitious to believe in miracles and other such supernatural phenomena. Many turned to Deism, a belief system in which God metaphorically “flipped the switch” to get the universe started, then left it to run on its own. Jefferson was one who held to Deism.

The Faith of Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson considered himself a Christian, but he didn’t agree with many of traditional Christianity’s views. In a letter in 1803, he wrote:

“To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all  others; ascribing to himself every humanexcellence; & believing he never claimed any other.” (A letter to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803, Library of Congress).

Jefferson viewed Jesus as strictly human. He also believed that Jesus Himself ascribed to a more deistic belief system. In another letter to Benjamin Rush, he wrote: “I should proceed to a view of the life, character, & doctrines of Jesus, who sensible of incorrectness of their ideas of the Deity, and of morality, endeavored to bring them to the principles of a pure deism.” ( A letter to Benjamin Rush, April 9, 1803, Library of Congress).

Jefferson viewed Jesus as a great moral teacher but believed that His claims to deity and the stories of His miracles were later agenda-driven additions by Jesus’ followers.

Creating the Jefferson Bible

The Jefferson Bible began in 1804 when Jefferson compiled what he called The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth, which focused on Jesus’ teachings organized by topic. This 46-page work was lost, and all record of it lies only in Jefferson’s correspondence.

Though this project did not survive, Jefferson put together a more ambitious project that did. The Jefferson Bible, which he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, was an 84-page work finished in 1820 that contained both the moral teachings of Jesus and those passages about Jesus’ life that Jefferson considered reasonable. He made it in four columns with Greek and Latin pasted on one side and French and English on the other.

Of this process, Jefferson wrote, “I made, for my own satisfaction, an Extract from the Evangelists of the texts of his morals, selecting those only whose style and spirit proved them genuine, and his own: and they are as distinguishable from the matter in which they are embedded as diamonds in dunghills.” (A letter to Francis Adrian Van Der Kemp, April 25, 1816, The National Archives).

So proud was he of this work that he wrote to John Adams that through his paring he had trimmed away “the corruptions of schismatizing followers” (The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth) to arrive at “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man” (letter to John Adams, October 12, 1813, National Archives).

Is the Jefferson Bible biblical? 

Jefferson had to be intimately familiar with the Gospels in order to cut and paste them to his preference. However, this does not mean that he had a clear biblical understanding.

From the beginning of the Israelite nation to the end of the Bible, all the intermediate text is sandwiched between these directives from God:

• “Do not add to what I command you and do not subtract from it, but keep the commands of the Lord your God that I give you” (Deuteronomy 4:2, emphasis mine).
• “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll. And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll” (Revelation 22:18-19, emphasis mine).

If the Bible is to be considered true, subtracting unwanted passages from the Bible is a serious crime in the eyes of God.

Is it rational?

However, Jefferson appears to have thought that the Bible was corrupted and that Jesus’ followers made up the miracles and deity of Christ. But if Jesus is to be considered a wise man, as Jefferson believed, this leads to absurdity.

All of the Gospels are thought to have been written by the end of the first century, and probably within thirty years of Jesus’ death. Thus, when the Gospels were first written and circulated, hundreds and perhaps thousands of people would still be alive who had seen Jesus speak.

These people would have easily been able to disagree with the writers who wrote that Jesus claimed to be God. But… they didn’t. No one at the time tried to say that Jesus didn’t believe He was God. This claim was, in fact, the reason He was killed (see Matthew 26:63-66). Whether He was actually the Son of God was up for debate in the ancient world, but the fact that He claimed to be so was universally acknowledged.

This leaves Jefferson with a problem. Jesus claimed to be God. Jefferson didn’t believe He was. But Jefferson also believed He was the greatest moral teacher.

In the words of C. S. Lewis,

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to” (Mere Christianity).

The Legacy of the Jefferson Bible

Though Jefferson’s Bible is not widely used today, his cut-and-paste mentality remains strong. It is important to remember that the Bible was never intended to be a buffet to pick and choose the most delectable parts; it was meant to be taken as a whole, or not at all (Deuteronomy 4:2, Ezekiel 3:1-3, Revelation 10:10, Revelation 22:18-19). The Jefferson Bible serves as a reminder of what can happen when we take our own preferences to the extreme: we’re left with no Bible at all.

Alyssa Roat is a literary agent at C.Y.L.E., a professional writing major at Taylor University, and a freelance editor with Sherpa Editing Services. Her passions for Biblical study and creativity collide in her writing. More than a hundred of her works have been featured in publications ranging from The Christian Communicator to Keys for Kids. Find out more about her here and on social media @alyssawrote.

Photo Credit: ©Getty/AlexLMX"

What Is the Jefferson Bible?

Johnson attributes prayer to Thomas Jefferson, but there’s no proof he said it - The Washington Post

Johnson attributes prayer to Thomas Jefferson, but there’s no proof he said it

"According to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, there’s no evidence that the third president of the United States ever recited a prayer for the nation, as Mike Johnson suggested.

Azi Paybarah

January 4, 2025 at 5:39 p.m. ESTYesterday at 5:39 p.m. EST

House Speaker Mike Johnson addresses the chamber on Friday. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

Shortly before Mike Johnson was sworn in as House speaker on Friday, he stood in front of the incoming members of Congress and offered what he said was “a prayer for the nation” that was said every day Thomas Jefferson was in the White House and “and every day thereafter until his death.”

Johnson attributed that detail to a program distributed at a bipartisan interfaith church service where he spoke earlier that day.

Johnson told the lawmakers, it is “quite familiar to historians and probably many of us.”

“Endow with Thy spirit of wisdom those whom in Thy name we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that through obedience to Thy law, we may show forth Thy praise among the nations of the earth,” Johnson said, reading from a piece of paper.

Historians do know the quote — because it has been falsely attributed to Jefferson for years. There is no proof Jefferson ever said it, according to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which has a page on its website dedicated to correcting this notion, a Voice of America reporter noted on X.

“We have no evidence that this prayer was written or delivered by Thomas Jefferson. It appears in the 1928 United States Book of Common Prayer, and was first suggested for inclusion in a report published in 1919,” the foundation writes.

Furthermore, the organization said reciting a prayer like this is not something Jefferson would have ever done.

“Ultimately, it seems unlikely that Jefferson would have composed or delivered a public prayer of this sort,” the organization said. “He considered religion a private matter, and when asked to recommend a national day of fasting and prayer, wrote, ‘I consider the government of the US. as interdicted by the constitution from intermedling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises.’”

Emails seeking comment sent to a spokesperson for Johnson and the group that organized the interfaith prayer service were not returned.

On Saturday, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-California) wrote on X that the House speaker’s misrepresentation of a Founding Father was part of a wider problem.

“To be clear, I object to his false attribution of the prayer to Jefferson — part of the endless Christian nationalist campaign to remake Jefferson into a devout Christian when he was actually an enlightenment era freethinker who thought religion should remain private and out of government,” the congressman said in reply to a reporter who cited his first post."

Johnson attributes prayer to Thomas Jefferson, but there’s no proof he said it - The Washington Post

How Much Alcohol Does it Take to Raise Your Cancer Risk? - The New York Times

How Much Alcohol Does It Take to Raise Your Cancer Risk?

"The surgeon general cautioned the public on Friday that even light or moderate drinking is harmful.

Jan. 3, 2025

T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

The surgeon general of the U.S. Public Health Service warned on Friday that even light or moderate alcohol consumption can increase a person’s risk of cancer.

In a new report, Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, said that alcohol use had been directly linked with at least seven types of cancers, including those of the mouth, throat, larynx, esophagus, breast, liver and colon and rectum. Globally, 741,300 cancer cases were attributable to alcohol consumption in 2020.

But public awareness of the link is low: Only 45 percent of Americans believe alcohol has a significant effect on whether someone develops cancer, according to a 2019 national surveyby the American Institute for Cancer Research.

Research has shown that the more alcohol a person drinks — particularly the more a person consumes regularly, over time — the greater the risk of cancer. The association is true for all types of alcohol: beer, wine and spirits.

But even what we think of as “light” or “moderate” drinking — up to one drink per day — increases the risk of some cancers, like those of the mouth, pharynx and breast.

“There is no safe level of alcohol when it comes to cancer risk,” said Dr. Ernest Hawk, the vice president and head of the division of Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

The amount you drink affects your risk.

The surgeon general’s report defines a standard drink as containing 14 grams of alcohol — about the amount in a 5-ounce glass of wine, a 12-ounce beer, or a 1.5-ounce shot of liquor. The report looked at the evidence on cancer based on how much people consume every day or week.

Less than one drink per week: Research on the relation of very light drinking to cancer is limited. The surgeon general’s report looked at what’s known as the absolute risk — or the chance of a certain outcome happening in a given time period — of specific cancers at various levels of drinking. To do that, it looked at data from an Australian study of nearly a quarter-million adults published in 2020.

On average, the report found, about 17 in 100 women who consumed one drink a week or less would develop alcohol-related cancers over the course of their lives. About 11 in 100 women would develop breast cancer, which is considered an alcohol-related cancer. Research suggests alcohol can increase estrogen, a sex hormone linked to breast cancer.

Men who consumed less than one drink per week had an approximately 10 percent chance of developing any alcohol-related cancer over their life span.

The researchers considered this “less than one drink per week” group the reference group, against which they compared higher levels of drinking. Like many studies, they did not include non-drinkers to avoid what is known as the “sick quitter” effect — which happens when a study’s data is muddled by those who stopped drinking because of an illness.

One drink each day: For years, it was widely thought that low or moderate amounts of alcohol were good for you, particularly for your heart. But in recent years more research has shown that even one drink a day is linked to greater health risks.

The surgeon general’s report said the lifetime risk of developing any alcohol-related cancer jumped to 19 percent (19 of 100 women) among those who consumed one alcoholic drink each day (seven drinks a week). At this level, the lifetime risk of breast cancer increased to 13.1 percent, or 13 of 100 women.

The surgeon general’s report said that among men who had one drink per day, about 11 out of 100 on average would develop an alcohol-related cancer during their lifetime.

Though the absolute increases in risk may sound small, they reflect a notably increased relative risk compared to people who drink less alcohol.

A 2013 study in the Annals of Oncology that specifically looked at the association between “light drinking” and cancer found that compared to people who did not drink, those who drank up to one alcoholic beverage a day had a 30 percent higher chance of developing esophageal cancer, a 17 percent higher chance of developing cancer of the oral cavity and pharynx and a 5 percent higher chance of developing breast cancer.

Two drinks per day: At two drinks each day (14 per week), the share of women who would develop alcohol-related cancers over their life span increased from 16.5 (among the “less than one drink per week” group) to nearly 22 percent, according to the surgeon general’s report. The share of those who would develop breast cancer increased to 15.3 percent.

Among men drinking at that level, the share who would develop alcohol-related cancer over a lifetime increased to 13 percent.

Four or more drinks a day: In addition to being associated with cancers of the mouth, oropharynx, larynx, esophagus, breast and colorectal area, heavy drinking — generally defined as four or more drinks a day — is linked to cancers of the liver, stomach, gall bladder and pancreas.

A large meta-analysis comparing light, moderate and heavy drinkers to non-drinkers and occasional drinkers found that heavy drinkers had more than a twofold higher relative risk of liver and gallbladder cancer compared with non-drinkers and occasional drinkers. Their risk of stomach, lung and pancreatic cancer was about 15 to 20 percent higher.

Consuming four or more drinks in a two-hour sitting is considered binge drinking for women, while having five or more drinks qualifies as bingeing for men. While binge drinking has many known harms, most studies in humans haven’t looked at the differences in cancer risk between drinking a lot all at once or drinking the same amount stretched over several days, said Dr. Timothy Naimi, director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research at the University of Victoria. “It’s an area of need in terms of future research.”

Your other risk factors matter, too.

While the report looks specifically at drinking levels, many other factors — including sex, genetics, diet and family history — also play a role in how alcohol consumption affects cancer risk.

For instance, it takes less alcohol to negatively affect women’s health than it does men’s, possibly because women take longer to metabolize alcohol and it remains in their system for longer periods of time.

Anyone with genetic mutations or family histories that predispose them to these types of cancers would be starting out at a higher base line risk of cancer, experts said.

Certain behaviors and lifestyle choices could also exacerbate the risk of alcohol-related cancers. Drinking and smoking cigarettes, for instance, is known to compound the risk of head and neck cancers, said Elizabeth Platz, a cancer epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. And drinking alcohol when you have poor diet and exercise habits can further raise the risk of becoming overweight or developing obesity, another disease associated with cancer.

Drinking less cuts (some of) the risk.

A working group of the International Agency for Research on Cancer recently found that long-term quitting or reducing alcohol consumption was linked to a reduced risk of oral and esophageal cancer. But it’s not clear whether or when cutting back brings the risk back down to base line, the surgeon general’s report said.

Dr. Naimi said that even for people who drink more heavily, cutting back the amount of alcohol they consume somewhat will have health benefits in the long run. “Less is better,” he said."

How Much Alcohol Does it Take to Raise Your Cancer Risk? - The New York Times

Opinion | Chris Hayes: I Want Your Attention. I Need Your Attention. Here Is How I Mastered My Own. - The New York Times

Opinion | Chris Hayes: I Want Your Attention. I Need Your Attention. Here Is How I Mastered My Own.

Jan. 3, 2025

Illustration by Mathieu Larone.

"I try to hold people’s attention for a living. For more than 13 years, I’ve been hosting a cable news show, and when I’m not doing that, I spend a lot of time alternating between reading the internet and obsessively posting my takes to various social media platforms. I tell myself that this is for my job, that I must, as a professional duty, keep up on the news, but it’s a little like a tobacco executive with a two-pack-a-day habit.

“Why am I like this?” I ask myself. What I want to say is that it’s not just me.

From my perspective as both an attention merchant and a compulsive customer, it’s clear that the difficulty of sitting in one’s “own chamber” — as the philosopher Blaise Pascal described the freedom to sit undisturbed with one’s thoughts — is greatly exacerbated by the form of attention capitalism we are enmeshed in.

Our attention is a wildly valuable resource, and some of the world’s most powerful corporations extract it at scale in increasingly sophisticated ways, leaving us feeling like bystanders to our minds. You might say we’ve built a machine for producing boredom and then entertainment to fill it in an endlessly accelerating and desperate cycle.

Boredom lurks around every corner in our lives. I’ve come to view it, specifically its avoidance, as the silent engine of modern life. Attention, where we put our conscious thoughts in any given moment, is the substance of life. We are painfully aware of the constant claims on our attention — the buzz and zap of the phone and push notifications and texts and little red circles that alert us that there’s more to pay attention to that we haven’t even gotten to yet.

Under this assault, it’s easy to feel that we’re trapped in an age that leaves no space for us to simply sit and think. But it’s worth noting that as much as the current forms of attention capitalism exist to take our attention, there is some very deep part of us that wants it taken.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s second electoral victory, a viral tweet from October 2016 once again started circulating: “i feel bad for our country. But this is tremendous content.”

That probably seemed funnier before child separation and Covid. (Indeed, in 2020 Darren Rovell, who wrote it, posted, “Four years later. There is nothing tremendous about this content. I’m just sad.”) But for many millions of Americans, perhaps including the crucial slice of swing voters who moved their votes to the Republican nominee in 2024, Mr. Trump is the consummate content machine. Love him or hate him, he sure does keep things interesting. I’ve even wondered if, at some level, this was the special trick he used to eke out his narrow victory: Did Americans elect him again because they were just kind of bored with the status quo?

Of all the fates that might befall us, from madness to illness to the trauma of war, being bored seems, at most, trivial. We tend to associate the experience of boredom with childhood — zoning out in class, long summer days at home with nothing to do. But that’s just because as soon as we get old enough to control our time, we do everything possible to make sure we never experience boredom. What parents haven’t had the experience of rejecting a child’s request for screen time and then catching themselves immediately going back to scrolling their phones?

And yet boredom — unlike, say, hunger — isn’t a universal human experience. Anthropologists who work with Indigenous peoples who live outside industrial modernity from Fiji to Ecuador to Australia report that these societies spend oceans of time doing nothing, without complaints of boredom. Their languages often don’t even have a word for boredom. One anthropologist who works with the Warlpiri Aboriginal people in Australia noted that the lexeme for the concept is an import, writing, “When Warlpiri people referred to boredom, they used the English word, usually embedded in otherwise Warlpiri sentences.” It turns out boredom is a constitutive experience of modernity.

Yet we feel this restlessness; we lament our shrinking attention spans. But to focus on a relatively narrow question of technical measures of our attention span misses a deeper truth. The restlessness and unease of our times aren’t simply, in my experience, the vertigo of distraction and distractibility. No, that experience is itself a symptom caused by some deeper part of the unsettled self. The endless diversion offered to us in every instant we are within reach of our phones means we never have to do the difficult work of figuring out how to live with our own minds.

For many years I have, like an old man, taken a daily constitutional. I began in my early 20s, when I was a freelance writer, which meant working all day either at home or in coffee shops. I found it useful to go for a walk and clear my head. I’d go even on the bitterest days of a Chicago winter, when the wind slices at your face like a blade. I started doing this before the days of the smartphone and even before the days of podcasts on the iPod. During the walk I would just … think. I’d let my mind wander. Almost without exception, my best thinking happened on these walks. I would come back to my laptop, sometimes almost racing up the steps to my apartment, to get the thoughts down.

There are many terms to describe the mental state I so loved during those walks: daydreaming, reverie, mind wandering, lost in thought. And to be clear, there are variations that are less or more pleasant. Obsessively looping through an anxious review of one’s financial situation is the bad kind; thinking through possible destinations for an upcoming trip is the pleasant kind.

Ironically enough, having an intellectual project to work on (like writing a book about attention) now serves as my antidote to mental restlessness. It’s a place to put my attention when I am alone in my own chamber. It provides, in its strange way, the kind of comfort I derived from thinking of baseball stats or comic book characters in the idle hours of my childhood. It provides a framework for structured daydreaming, mind wandering with a purpose.

Daydreaming is a central experience of being alive and also a casualty of the attention age. Years ago, podcasts came to fill my ears during my walks, conditioning me to feel a little panicked without one. But as I’ve spent more time thinking about attention, I’ve begun to force myself to just walk and let myself be with my thoughts. I’ve also developed a set of routines, habits and hobbies that can provide the framework for a form of modified idleness, just enough to focus on to keep myself rooted and present while allowing my mind to wander. Chopping wood, making handmade pasta, going to the dog park with my canine-obsessed 6-year-old — these are all in the happy but endangered category of things to do that are neither work nor looking at my phone.

In 2014, psychologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard University set about to investigate people’s experience of boredom. Subjects were asked to simply sit alone in a room doing nothing for six to 15 minutes and were later asked about their experiences. They hated it. The researchers then tested just how much the subjects hated it. The authors askedwhether the subjects would rather do an unpleasant activity than no activity at all.

In one study, participants were given the “opportunity to experience negative stimulation (an electric shock) if they so desired,” the researchers wrote. And guess what. “Many participants elected to receive negative stimulation over no stimulation — especially men: 67 percent of men (12 of 18) gave themselves at least one shock during the thinking period,” compared with 25 percent of women. In fact, one participant appears to have spent basically the entire time shocking himself, administering 190 shocks in what I can only guess was a desperate bid to avoid being alone with his thoughts.

You may be saying to yourself, “That’s deranged,” or your reaction may be, “Oh, I could see myself doing that,” and most of us will never know because we’re never quite given such stark choices. But you’ve probably had the experience of walking into a coffee shop with a long line and instinctively reaching for your phone, only to discover you left it in the car or at home. You are now stuck. What follows is a brief but intense flicker of claustrophobic panic.

At one level this is an example of the addiction we have to our phones, but those of us of a certain age remember a similar feeling long before the smartphone: getting to the bathroom with nothing to read or sitting at the breakfast table before school, bleary-eyed, reading the back of the cereal box because it was the only thing available to occupy your mind. While the state of constant interruption of the attention age may be unwelcome, it grows from a desire that long predates contemporary life. “When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men,” Pascal observed in “Pensées,” his collection of essays published in 1670, “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”

Pascal’s primary concern was the status of men’s souls. He wanted to understand why men (and he meant men specifically, much like the experimental subjects most inclined to shock themselves) are tempted to undertake the hazards of war and conquest and all manner of dangerous and sinful activity rather than simply enjoy what they have. The root of it, he proposed, is an aspect of the human condition upon which so much today depends: the restlessness of our minds, the craving for diversion. “Hence it comes that men so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible.” I’ve returned quite a bit to Pascal’s writing on this subject because of how relatable it feels these many centuries later, a testament to how deep and enduring the problem is.

This craving, he contended, emanated from spiritual angst about our mortality, “the natural poverty of our feeble and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can comfort us when we think of it closely.” So powerful is this angst that no amount of wealth or earthly power and comfort is a shield against it. This is even true for kings.

It seems the king’s mind should be at ease, for unlike nearly everyone else in the kingdom, the king is not required to engage in brutal toil for his subsistence. And yet that ease is its own kind of prison: “When we imagine a king attended with every pleasure he can feel, if he be without diversion, and be left to consider and reflect on what he is, this feeble happiness will not sustain him,” Pascal wrote. “He will necessarily fall into forebodings of dangers, of revolutions which may happen, and, finally, of death and inevitable disease; so that if he be without what is called diversion, he is unhappy, and more unhappy than the least of his subjects who plays and diverts himself.”

Boredom is something far graver than the child’s complaint that there’s nothing to do. The unoccupied mind can be a feral beast, and much of our lives, in Pascal’s view, is spent trying to tame it. I’d hazard we’ve all had occasion to find ourselves trapped with our thoughts in a way that makes us feel like a captive in a lion’s cage. And today we find ourselves in the king’s position: surrounded by endless sources of diversion and yet none of it ever quite enough to truly escape the terror of boredom.

I’d love to offer some tips, but the brutal truth is that I’m not great at navigating this myself. My go-to solution is to make sure I’m always doing lots of different things; I host a TV show and a podcast, just wrote a book and have three kids ages 6 to 13. When acquaintances and friends say, “How have you been?” I reply, almost out of instinct, “Good! Busy!” But maybe busyness is just another attempt at a diversion. Writing two centuries after Pascal, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard observed, “The busiest workers of all, those who in their officious buzzing about most resemble humming insects, are rather the most boring of all.” Ouch.

Kierkegaard, like Pascal, saw boredom as a moral menace and even “the root of evil.” But he contrasted boredom with idleness, which he saw as an elevated state, the highest good. “Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; quite the contrary, it is a truly divine way of life, so long as one is not bored,” Kierkegaard wrote. “Indeed, one can say that any human who lacks appreciation of it proves he has not raised himself to the level of humanity.”

My mind is too restless and unsettled to be quite comfortable with true idleness. But anything worth doing in life requires a bit of work and struggle and intention. It may seem a paradox to train yourself to do less, but Jenny Odell’s book “How to Do Nothing” offers a starting point. She proposes a “plan of action” that includes a kind of “dropping out not dissimilar from the ‘dropping out’ of the 1960s” as well as “lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us” and a “movement downward into place.”

Millions of people use prayer and meditation and other forms of spiritual and psychological practice toward the same ends. What these practices have in common is the cultivation of an inner discipline to resist that feral desire to distract oneself. Kierkegaard called it the “principle of limitation, which is the only saving one in the world.” He added, “The more you limit yourself, the more resourceful you become.”

We’re trying various solutions to this problem, which is both new and a version of a very old remedy. There are mindfulness apps and endless self-help gurus beckoning from Instagram Reels and TikTok, promising ways to soothe our itchy minds. Together this does little to settle a restless and uneasy public, one that’s been conditioned to be easily bored by the constant thrum of diversion. We’re stuck in the king’s paradox. We’re chasing diversion with ever more ferocity, conditioned over time by the content slot machines in our pockets to need more and more to pay attention to.

One can imagine Pascal’s king finding himself requiring his court jesters to bring him ever more extreme, perverse and humiliating entertainment just to keep his interest, temptation similar to what is sitting there in the amusement devices in our pockets, a similar temptation to the one offered by a politician who will keep things interesting, no matter how cruel or offensive he has to be to maintain the public’s interest.

You can’t busy yourself out of boredom or amuse yourself out of it. Neither work nor constant entertainment provides a solution. Not for the king or for us. The problem we face is existential and spiritual, not situational. We cannot escape our own mind; it follows us wherever we go. We can’t outrun the treadmill. Our only hope at peace is to force ourselves to step off whenever we can. To learn again to be still."

Opinion | Chris Hayes: I Want Your Attention. I Need Your Attention. Here Is How I Mastered My Own. - The New York Times

Trump Sees the U.S. as a ‘Disaster.’ The Numbers Tell a Different Story. - The New York Times

Trump Sees the U.S. as a ‘Disaster.’ The Numbers Tell a Different Story.

"President Biden is bequeathing his successor a nation that by many measures is in good shape, even if voters remain unconvinced.

Jan. 5, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET

Eric Lee/The New York Times

To hear President-elect Donald J. Trump tell it, he is about to take over a nation ravaged by crisis, a desolate hellscape of crime, chaos and economic hardship. “Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!” he declared on social media last week.

But by many traditional metrics, the America that Mr. Trump will inherit from President Biden when he takes the oath for a second time, two weeks from Monday, is actually in better shape than that bequeathed to any newly elected president since George W. Bush came into office in 2001.

For the first time since that transition 24 years ago, there will be no American troops at war overseas on Inauguration Day. New data reported in the past few days indicate that murders are way down, illegal immigration at the southern border has fallen even below where it was when Mr. Trump left office and roaring stock markets finished their best two years in a quarter-century.

Jobs are up, wages are rising and the economy is growing as fast as it did during Mr. Trump’s presidency. Unemployment is as low as it was just before the Covid-19 pandemic and near its historic best. Domestic energy production is higher than it has ever been.

The manufacturing sector has more jobs than under any president since Mr. Bush. Drug overdose deaths have fallen for the first time in years. Even inflation, the scourge of the Biden presidency, has returned closer to normal, although prices remain higher than they were four years ago.

“President Trump is inheriting an economy that is about as good as it ever gets,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics. “The U.S. economy is the envy of the rest of the world, as it is the only significant economy that is growing more quickly post-pandemic than prepandemic.”

Those positive trends were not enough to swing a sour electorate behind Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election, reflecting a substantial gap between what statistics say and what ordinary Americans appear to feel about the state of the country. And the United States clearly faces some major challenges that will confront Mr. Trump as he retakes power.

The terrorist attack by an American man who said he had joined ISIS that killed 14 people in New Orleans early on New Year’s Day served as a reminder that the Islamic State, which Mr. Trump likes to boast he defeated during his previous term, remains a threat and an inspiration to radicalized lone wolves. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are daunting challenges even without U.S. troops engaged in combat there.

Thanks in part to Covid relief spending by both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, the national debt has ballooned so much that it now represents a larger share of the economy than it has in generations, other than during the pandemic itself. Families remain pressed by the cost of living, including housing, health care and college tuition. The cost of gasoline, while down from its peak, is still about 70 cents per gallon higher than when Mr. Biden took office.

Moreover, Americans remain as divided as they have been in many years — politically, ideologically, economically, racially and culturally. As healthy as the country may be economically and otherwise, a variety of scholars, surveys and other indicators suggest that America is struggling to come together behind a common view of its national identity, either at home or abroad.

Indeed, many Americans do not perceive the country to be doing as well as the data suggests, either because they do not see it in their own lives, they do not trust the statistics or they accept the dystopian view promoted by Mr. Trump and amplified by a fragmented, choose-your-own-news media and online ecosphere.

Only 19 percent of Americans were satisfied with the direction of the country in Gallup polling last month. In another Gallup survey in September, 52 percent of Americans said they and their own family were worse off than four years ago, a higher proportion than felt that way in the presidential election years of 1984, 1992, 2004, 2012 or 2020.

It was in Mr. Trump’s political interest, of course, to encourage that sentiment and appeal to it during last year’s campaign. He was hardly the first challenger to emphasize the negative to defeat an incumbent president.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Dwight D. Eisenhower disparaged the state of the country when he first ran in 1952, much to the irritation of President Harry S. Truman, only to have John F. Kennedy do the same to him when running in 1960. Kennedy hammered away at a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union that did not exist, then after winning declared that America was in “its hour of maximum danger,” in contrast to Eisenhower’s view of his security record.

“This is a contrast you oftentimes find,” said Michael Beschloss, a historian who has written nine books on the American presidency. “Candidates who are running against incumbent presidents or sitting governments make it sound much worse than it is.”

Still, few have been as extreme in their negative descriptions as Mr. Trump, or as resistant to fact-checking. He has suggested falsely that immigration, crime and inflation are out of control, attributed the New Orleans incident to lax border policies even though the attacker was an American born in Texas and as recently as Friday called the country “a total mess!”

Yet Mr. Trump is moving back into the White House with an enviable hand to play, one that other presidents would have dearly loved on their opening day. President Ronald Reagan inherited double-digit inflation and an unemployment rate twice as high as today. President Barack Obama inherited two foreign wars and an epic financial crisis. Mr. Biden inherited a devastating pandemic and the resulting economic turmoil.

“He’s stepping into an improving situation,” William J. Antholis, director of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which has studied presidential transitions, said of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Antholis compared the situation to President Bill Clinton’s arrival in 1993, when he took over a growing economy and a new post-Cold War order. While the country had already begun recovering from recession during the 1992 election, many voters did not yet feel it and punished President George H.W. Bush.

“The fundamentals of the economy had turned just before the election, and kept moving in the right direction when Clinton took over,” Mr. Antholis recalled.

Much as it did for the first Mr. Bush’s team, the disconnect between macro trends and individual perceptions proved enormously frustrating to Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris, who failed to persuade voters during last year’s election that the country was doing better than commonly believed. Rattling off statistics and boasting about the success of “Bidenomics” did not resonate with voters who did not see it the same way.

“Of course, not everyone is enjoying good economic times, as many low-middle income households are struggling financially, and the nation has mounting fiscal challenges,” said Mr. Zandi. “But taking the economy in its totality, it rarely performs better than it is now as President Trump takes office.”

Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said the latest reports demonstrated that Mr. Biden’s policies are working and argued that Republicans should not seek to repeal them once they take control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.

“After inheriting an economy in free-fall and skyrocketing violent crime, President Biden is proud to hand his successor the best-performing economy on earth, the lowest violent crime rates in over 50 years, and the lowest border crossings in over four years,” Mr. Bates said.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, responded by citing the election: “Americans delivered an overwhelming Election Day rebuke of the Biden-Harris administration’s abysmal track record: communities being overrun with millions of unvetted migrants who walked over Biden’s open border, lower real wages, and declining trust in increasingly politicized law enforcement agencies that are unable to even publish accurate crime data.”

Mr. Trump does not have to share a positive view of the situation to benefit from it. When he takes office on Jan. 20, absent the unexpected, he will not face the sort of major immediate action-forcing crisis that, say, Mr. Obama did in needing to rescue the economy from the brink of another Great Depression.

Mr. Trump instead will have more latitude to pursue favored policies like mass deportation of undocumented immigrants or tariffs on foreign imported goods. And if past is prologue, he may eventually begin extolling the state of the economy to claim successes for his policies.

He has already taken credit for recent increases in stock prices even before assuming office. He has a demonstrated skill for self-promotion that eluded Mr. Biden, enabling him to persuade many Americans that the economy during his first term was even better than it actually was.

At the same time, with unemployment, crime, border crossings and even inflation already pretty low, it may be difficult for Mr. Trump to improve on them significantly. Mr. Trump obliquely seemed to acknowledge as much when he noted in a post-election interview with Time magazine that he may not be able to live up to his campaign pledge to lower grocery prices. “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” he said. “You know, it’s very hard.”

On the contrary, Mr. Trump faces the risk that the economy goes in the other direction. Some specialists have warned that a tariff-driven trade war with major economic partners could, for instance, reignite inflation.

N. Gregory Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard and chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under the second Mr. Bush, recalled that even his former boss faced significant challenges when he took office in 2001 as the economy was already heading into a relatively mild recession following the bust of the dot-com boom.

“There are no similar storm clouds on the horizon right now,” Mr. Mankiw said. “That is certainly lucky for Mr. Trump. On the other hand, all presidents must deal with unexpected shocks to the economy. We just don’t know yet what kind of shocks President Trump will have to handle.”

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker"

Trump Sees the U.S. as a ‘Disaster.’ The Numbers Tell a Different Story. - The New York Times