Letters & Opinions

I love “Gladiator.” I love “The Godfather Part II.” I love all the “Fast & Furious” movies. But my heart completely belongs to Bond. You know … James Bond.

To speak our language these days with enlightenment is to harbor an ongoing sense that there are words and expressions that come to mind but that, upon reflection, we shouldn’t utter. I refer not only to terms like the N-word — an easy case for self-censorship — but also to an eternally morphing assemblage of locutions that pedants, our kids, human resources and the Twitter herd say we shouldn’t use anymore. Terms that are hardly egregious but maybe just aren’t the best look.

To paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy, if you feel a shiver of excitement when “school shooting” trends on Twitter, you just might be woke. Last Wednesday, Erica -- a nurse and “humanist” -- proved her wokeness in spades.

The forever war between America’s pharmaceutical industry and America’s public interest is approaching a climactic moment. At stake is whether Big Pharma and its allies will keep drug prices zooming upward, or whether the federal government can slow that rise by negotiating prices for some expensive drugs taken by Medicare beneficiaries. The U.S. House of Representatives is poised to vote on legislation requiring such negotiations in the next few days as a crucial element of the $3.5 trillion budget plan, and the drug industry is in overdrive to make sure that doesn’t happen.

One possible way to read “The Facebook Files,” The Wall Street Journal’s excellent series of reports based on leaked internal Facebook research, is as a story about an unstoppable juggernaut bulldozing society on its way to the bank.