5 Big Ideas for 2025

When we talk about the teen mental health crisis, we often focus on the teens themselves — but as Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code and Moms First, points out, the well-being of moms is deeply intertwined with that of their children. "The two groups that are suffering the most from anxiety and depression are teens and moms," Saujani says. “The kids are not alright because the moms are not alright." In a country with no paid leave and minimal investment in childcare, the pressure on parents — especially mothers — is relentless. One in four women return to work just two weeks after giving birth, she points out, a reality that compounds stress and exhaustion.

Saujani highlights how misaligned systems, like the gap between school and work hours, set families up for failure. If we want to address rising anxiety and depression among teens, she argues, we need to start by supporting their caregivers. “We have to fix childcare in this country. Period.” By investing in moms, we create the foundation for healthier, happier kids and a society that truly supports families.

In a time when political division feels sharper than ever, Utah Governor Spencer Cox and Colorado Governor Jared Polis are championing a new initiative of the National Governors Association: Disagree Better. It "doesn't mean you sacrifice your deeply held values. In fact, it's in many ways a more elevated way of expressing those values," says Polis. “Disagreements are important. Our founding fathers profoundly disagreed." The key is to recognize that we can hold onto our most precious values while still finding common ground in our shared loves for family, community and country.

Cox emphasizes the small but powerful gestures that help mend divides. “Maybe shaking hands isn't a big deal,” he says. “But when you start to hack away at all of those norms over time, we get to a place where we don't trust each other anymore.” Trust, he suggests, can grow from something as simple as asking, “Tell me more about why you believe that.” This kind of curiosity can cut through the noise of partisanship and reveal surprising points of agreement.

For Cox, our bitter partisan divides began when we started elevated political identity above all else. “When I was growing up, I didn’t know who the Republicans or Democrats were in my congregation,” he reflects. What he did know were people's favorite sports teams, or their favorite place to ski in Utah, or their mom's prized casserole recipe. Rebuilding those overlapping points of identity, he argues, can help us have hard conversations without losing respect for one another. In a landscape driven by outrage and what Cox calls “conflict entrepreneurs,” developing those bonds of trust may be one of the most radical things we can do. By finding common ground before diving into tough political conversations, Cox and Polis believe we can begin to disagree without descending into hostility.

There’s a tendency to see technological innovation — especially AI — as something that emerges from pure ingenuity, untouched by the past. But as Sherrilyn Ifill, civil rights lawyer and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, reminds us, history is always present, whether we acknowledge it or not. “We forget that what we have managed to stitch together has been powerfully fought for — in the courts, in the streets, everywhere,” Ifill says. The rights and opportunities many of us take for granted today weren’t inevitable, so what happens when we build AI without that awareness?

“The internet is the perfect example,” she explains. Designed without fully reckoning with how societal issues might translate into a digital environment, it has amplified some of our deepest divides. Ifill urges us to ask: Who is in the room where AI is being created, and how much do they know about the hard truths of our country? Our finest moments as a society have come from confronting difficult issues, not avoiding them. True innovation requires not just technical brilliance, but an awareness of the societal frameworks that shape and constrain progress, Ifill argues, and we must embed this knowledge into AI development and decision making.

For his latest book, "Supercommunicators," Charles Duhigg dives deep into the psychology and neuroscience behind the art of connection. He explains that there are three main types of conversations — emotional, practical and social — and that the key to truly connecting with another is to have the same kind of conversation at the same moment. When that alignment happens, it creates a spark — what psychologists call the matching principle. “That’s when suddenly you feel that sense that this person knows you,” Duhigg explains.

Consistent supercommunicators ask 10 to 20 times more questions than the average person. It’s not about winning a debate or proving a point, Duhigg emphasizes, but about meeting people with genuine curiosity. “I want to go into this conversation just to understand how you see the world, just to match you and invite you to match me." By doing this, we tap into what Duhigg believes is homo sapiens's superpower. Communication is what has propelled our species forward over hundreds of thousands of years, and "our nation and our world has always been at its best when we prioritize connection over everything else," he says.

Hope, as Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber describes it, isn’t something we summon from sheer willpower — it’s better drawn from a deeper, more enduring source. “If I place my hope in my ability to be hopeful, then it doesn’t work out for me." For Bolz-Weber, that source is faith, a vast reservoir built from thousands of years of stories and experiences. “It creates a load-bearing structure for me in times of collapse,” she says. When life feels overwhelming, it’s this broader perspective that keeps her grounded, placing her struggles in the context of something much larger.

She points to a text in her scripture that talks about hope, and importantly, it doesn't start with optimism. It actually starts with suffering: "Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint." Bolz-Weber likes teaching this because she feels these steps are more realistic, grounded in life's ups and downs.

Bolz-Weber also discusses the moments when hope feels elusive. “Sometimes when I have a hard time finding hope, it’s because I’ve placed my trust in things that aren’t worthy of my trust,” she reflects. It’s a call to focus on things that are under our control to cultivate: community, family, friends, shared values. In a culture that often celebrates self-reliance, she reminds us that we’re not meant to hold it all on our own. And when we tap into something greater than ourselves, hope has a way of finding us again.