It was hard to know what to believe this past year. In the old days, there were conspiracies about the moon landing. These days, it feels like there’s a conspiracy about everything — that the truth is up for grabs, alongside crusty government datasets.

Some people chose to verify what they heard with multiple sources, including legacy media. Others followed a podcaster or Substack writer who they thought had the corner on truth. And some just asked ChatGPT.

One of the rallying cries of our conspiratorial age is “do your own research.” But that’s not easy at the best of times. Some data require expertise and context to interpret. And this year, some reliable government datasets disappeared altogether. Others are incomplete thanks to 2025’s Democrat-led government shutdown, the nation’s longest.

Yes, long-delayed numbers from that shutdown are now emerging — like high GDP growth and lower-than-expected inflation. But this new information is only adding to the confusion. The data is incomplete and partially being drawn from other sources, making comparisons difficult. It shows how damaging even temporary losses in government data can be.

It’s true that not all government statistics are perfect. Take the Census Bureau’s poverty math, as my friend and former AEI colleague Andrew Biggs has warned. Figures from 2023-2024 report that the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) for seniors increased from 9.7% to 9.9%. This is not so far off from the poverty rate of working-age adults, until you remember that seniors are getting monthly Social Security checks and free healthcare.

But Biggs points out that the Census OPM inexplicably doesn’t include ‘irregular income,’ such as withdrawals from 401(k)s. Accounting for this, the real poverty rate of seniors drops to 5.9%. The Census knows this and reports a new, supplementary way of calculating the poverty rate called “the NEWS,” but headlines of rising elderly poverty steal the show.

Or take maternal mortality rates. It’s long been said that the U.S. has the highest rate of maternal mortality in the developed world. But as I wrote in National Affairs, the U.S. also changed its measure of how to calculate maternal mortality. In 2003, the CDC began including a pregnancy check-box on death certificates even if the cause of death was not necessarily pregnancy-related.

This is widely recognized to have inflated the numbers. (In 2013, the pregnancy checkbox was used 187 times in deaths of people over age 85, according to economist Emily Oster.) Tighter definitions of maternal mortality rates strictly related to childbirth show U.S. rates to be elevated, but roughly on par with peer countries such as Canada and the UK, though maternal mortality rates for Black American mothers remain significantly higher.

What to make of these differences in government calculations? Some people might allege conspiracy — that someone inside the agency is massaging numbers. The books are cooked!

But the boring truth is that some things are harder to measure than they’d seem. And there are trade-offs in what and how we count. (For example, the “pregnancy box” was added because we were likely undercounting pregnancy-related deaths before.) Even in cases where we’ve come up with a more accurate way to measure something, there can be benefits to keeping consistent standards — they help us see trends over time.

This year, the Trump Administration often stoked the former approach. President Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after a lackluster jobs report in August. “We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. He similarly accused Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell of slowballing rate cuts to make him look bad and misreading inflation data: “There is no Inflation, and every sign is pointing to a major Rate Cut.”

Other data simply disappeared on his watch, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration no longer tracking billion-dollar weather disasters (which seem to be increasing) and delayed data rollouts from the Department of Education (which slows sliding student scores).

This mentality essentially means it’s all up for grabs. If you don’t like the data, you can fire the accountant, ignore the spreadsheet, delete the database. And you better believe that the next accountant will keep your happiness in mind when crunching the numbers.

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But then how will we know what’s true? And if we lose our ability to tell, then what?

As Thomas Sowell wrote in Knowledge and Decisions: “The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.” This surely includes our embrace of and advancements in science: the relentless search for objective truth outside ourselves.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t improvements to be made in data collection. It is the responsibility of data collectors not to lock blindly into the old ways of doing things, but to constantly seek to make the data more holistic and transparent. Where there are alternative measures that can be used — for the poverty rate, or maternal mortality, or jobs numbers — they should publish them alongside the traditional metrics. The Congressional Budget Office, for example, releases multiple projection scenarios with each of its reports based on different assumptions that are spelled out.

And for us, it’s our responsibility to wrestle with numbers that challenge our assumptions, whether we’re journalists, policymakers or news consumers. But we must resist the belief that the entire federal data infrastructure is corrupt. While I don’t doubt that there are bad actors now and again in government, or that incentives within bureaucracies can become bloated and misguided, we should be slow to throw out data systems and older ways of tracking things, not quick.

Turning our back on data would remove any outside accountability, leave policymakers driving a car without map or road, and lead the country to a place where the titillation of conspiracy and cherry-picked numbers become the only barometer of what’s real.

This year, we came closer to that point than any time I can remember.

Abby McCloskey is a columnist, podcast host, and consultant. She directed domestic policy on two presidential campaigns and was director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

On a recent Friday in late November, Eric Hauge spotted a wave of new eviction filings across Minnesota, many but not all of them related to public housing authorities in the Twin Cities.

“We saw 246 cases filed in a single day,” said Hauge, co-executive director of HOME Line, which tracks court-based eviction filings statewide and provides free legal advice for renters. “We haven’t seen anything like that since before the pandemic.”

Of those filings, 74 traced back to the St. Paul Public Housing Agency, and some were for as little as $300 in unpaid rent. Hauge called that startling, given that court filing fees alone cost just as much. Across the river, the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority had as of Dec. 1 executed more than 100 evictions for the year, more than double the total from 2024.

Related: Crackdown on social service providers leaves some without housing assistance

“As a federal housing authority, we are prohibited from waiving old back rent,” explained Drew Halunen, a spokesperson for Minneapolis Public Housing, in an interview.

While MPHA has created an internal team to help direct tenants to rent assistance, the state has sunset a major rent-help program and Hennepin County has tightened eligibility and individual spending limits on others, even as it has put more money toward emergency rent relief.

‘Record level’

For St. Paul Public Housing, most eviction filings do not result in an actual eviction, noted Sean Whatley, general counsel for the agency. In terms of actual writs of removal, “we’re on track this year to be at or less than we were last year,” he said.

That’s still a large number for actual evictions. Organizations that monitor residential eviction filings say they expect 2025 may set or approach statewide records, with most of the court filings stemming from both public and private housing providers throughout the Twin Cities, the center of the state’s rental housing stock.

“We continue to hear from the court that filings are at a record level, and our case numbers certainly reflect that, as well,” said Heather Mendiola, lead housing attorney for Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services, a legal aid nonprofit based in St. Paul.

Hauge and others in the industry say the economy likely plays the largest role in the uptick, as rent increases continue to outpace income gains. With federal pandemic relief aid expended by early 2023, some public housing agencies turned to county programs for assistance in helping them offer rent relief to vulnerable tenants, but that’s gotten harder to do as demand climbs and counties face their own financial stresses.

On top of that, Hauge said landlords that owned property during the pandemic seem to file more often and perhaps quicker than before, with some expressing a lack of trust toward tenants after negative experiences. More attorneys appear to be treating evictions as a business opportunity, and technology plays a role, as online hearings make it possible for lawyers to handle different cases in multiple counties on the same date.

State cuts to social service providers may factor in, as well, following recent federal fraud investigations into Minnesota’s Medicaid-backed services. Another possible explanation: a growing percentage of corporate or out-of-state landlords with no personal connection to their tenants have fewer qualms about proceeding to eviction.

“It’s a tough thing to track and share a coherent story with confidence,” said Will Lehman, Hennepin County’s area manager for homelessness prevention, “but certainly it’s related to economics — 90% of eviction filings are due to non-payment of rent.”

Taking a different tack, Cecil Smith, president and chief executive officer of the Minnesota Multi Housing Association, which represents apartment owners, noted that an uptick in filings doesn’t necessarily translate to a major increase in evictions, and that the numbers need more analysis.

Vacancies are relatively high compared to previous years, so if anything, he said, landlords have a financial disincentive to remove tenants and increase turnover.

For filings, “the numbers are higher,” Smith acknowledged. “It’s been that way ever since the eviction moratorium ended. They went to a new base level. The eviction moratorium changed things — it changed renter behavior. … People got used to not paying rent and the government stepping in and filling the gap.”

‘I had exhausted all the resources’

Employee turnover also could play a role. Tenants at St. Paul Public Housing’s Valley Hi-Rise on University Avenue in downtown St. Paul are expected to pay about 30% of their income toward monthly rents. For seven months while she was out of work, Ivy Ana reported her income as zero, but the rent bills kept coming. So did the public housing authority’s eviction notices, which she successfully fought in court three times.

“They were charging me $600 or $700 per month. I was applying to different programs, but I had exhausted all the resources,” said Ana, who found work in 2025 as a paraprofessional at a charter school.

“It’s been a hassle with St. Paul Public Housing,” she said. “I’ve done everything they asked me to do. They asked to report a job starting or stopping within 10 days. I’ve done that, but they have such a high turnover of property managers. … You had almost 12 months of paper trail of me providing the documentation they asked for.”

Her latest court appearances took up every Thursday in October and November through Nov. 21, exhausting her paid time off at work, but Ana said the case ended in her favor, with the housing agency owing her money and the legal filings expunged.

Ivy Ana, a St. Paul educator, outside her St. Paul apartment on Wednesday, Dec, 24, 2025. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“When we work with a client, we do our best to incorporate into the settlement record an expungement, and end the case with that record no longer being public,” Mendiola explained.

Her situation is not unique. Hauge said that prior to 2020, Minnesota averaged about 15,000 eviction filings annually. State and federal eviction moratoriums instituted during the pandemic had fully expired by mid-2022, when cases began to climb toward new records, and not in a good way.

This year, “we’re above 23,000 cases,” said Hauge, toward the end of November. “We’ve never seen that many eviction filings before. … Prior to the pandemic, we averaged about 15,000 cases per year. We’re well over 30% greater.”

Another data source, Princeton University-based Eviction Lab, cites slightly lower numbers, in the vicinity of 21,000 statewide filings as of Dec. 1, but Hauge points out that Eviction Lab uses a court-based data file that does not include cases that have been expunged.

Tenant protections

HOME Line advises more than 20,000 renters annually over the phone or by email on any kind of question related to disputes between tenants and landlords. During the pandemic, renters began inquiring about financial assistance in record numbers, leaving his agency at a loss for how to best respond.

“That is not really a legal question. We’re not really set up for that,” Hauge said. “This year, we’re over 1,100 requests, probably a 40% increase in clients asking about financial assistance, and that’s not really our role. I wish we did have emergency assistance to hand out.”

The state, as well as individual cities and counties, has instituted a handful of changes aimed at helping renters. Among them, said Hauge, Minnesota last year finally caught up to most other states in requiring a pre-eviction notice, forcing landlords to inform tenants 14 days before they open an eviction court file. The notice includes referrals to potential rent help.

“It’s meant to provide an expedited procedure for the tenant to secure funds, but there’s just not enough emergency rental assistance out there,” he said. Still, the advance notice could help a tenant avoid wracking up a legal history, which can make finding another apartment difficult. “They can just vacate if they don’t want that on their record.”

Minneapolis and St. Louis Park have expanded the 14-day notice to 30 days, and St. Paul’s 30-day requirement will take effect May 14, alongside a series of additional citywide tenant protections, including new rules around security deposits and screening criteria. In addition, St. Paul recently launched a $1 million effort to provide landlords with up to $2,500 in one-time grants to cancel out evictions in progress.

St. Paul’s Emergency Rental Assistance and Eviction Prevention Program, which opened Nov. 12, has received 520 applications as of mid-December, and the city’s Planning and Economic Development Housing Team receives, on average, 56 phone calls and 78 emails daily about the program, said City Council Member Cheniqua Johnson, who was instrumental in launching the effort.

Johnson, whose East Side district is generally the epicenter of evictions in St. Paul, said the average request for assistance for individuals who have court dates scheduled is more than $4,200, which far exceeds the $2,500 aid cap. For those without court dates, the average request is about $2,300.

“It is anticipated that all of the fiscal year 2025 appropriated funding will be expended before the end of the year,” said Johnson, in an email.

The city has allocated another $1.3 million toward the program in 2026.

St. Paul Public Housing Agency eviction filings

Officials with public housing agencies in St. Paul and Minneapolis note that a relatively slim percentage of eviction filings actually result in writs, or final court orders for a tenant to be removed by law enforcement. An eviction filing is often used as a procedural step — still far more serious than a written warning — after other efforts have been exhausted.

The St. Paul Public Housing Agency owns and manages more than 4,200 affordable rental units throughout the city, from townhomes to affordable apartments and scattered-site housing.

For fiscal years running from April 1 to March 31, there were 271 SPPHA eviction filings for nonpayment in fiscal year 2024, resulting in 48 evictions, for an execution rate of about 18%. In fiscal year 2025, there were 393 filings for nonpayment, resulting in 66 evictions, for an execution rate of about 17%. In the current fiscal year, there have been 191 filings from April 1 to Dec. 1, resulting in 43 evictions to date, an execution rate of about 23%.

Officials with St. Paul Public Housing say they expect the 2026 fiscal year to end up somewhere between 2024 and 2025 in terms of eviction volume.

Project-based assistance

In 2020, St. Paul Public Housing completed a “rental assistance demonstration” conversion, shifting most of its public housing units into the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s project-based rental assistance program, which directs federal housing funding to a particular location, as opposed to a tenant. The project-based rental assistance limits the agency’s ability to consider rental history, or lack of rental history, when determining rental eligibility.

The conversion to project-based assistance happened just before the pandemic, so some of the practical effects of the new screening rules were not immediately apparent, according to officials, as COVID-related protections halted evictions for nonpayment for two years. Even when those two years were over, the agency had to sort through a backlog of cases.

“We are only now beginning to see what our ‘normal’ post-(conversion) eviction patterns look like, and it is still too early to draw firm conclusions about long-term trends,” said Whatley, the agency’s general counsel.

Whatley said staff work at length with residents to “resolve balances, establish payment agreements and prevent displacement wherever possible. A court filing is the last step in a long progression of outreach and problem-solving, not an indicator of a shift in PHA philosophy or approach.”

Minneapolis Public Housing Authority eviction filings

The Minneapolis Public Housing Authority, which at over 6,000 housing units constitutes one of the largest landlords in the state, executed 107 eviction writs for the year through early December, more than double the 39 eviction writs executed in all of 2024. About 20% of its 544 eviction filings this year proceeded to an actual eviction, up from less than 9% last year.

Officials say that increase has rolled out despite their best efforts to avoid it. During the pandemic, MPHA launched an internal housing stabilization team dedicated to connecting residents with back-owed rents to various financial and service supports. The team is designed to help residents solve both their immediate financial needs and make lasting changes to ensure continued rent payments, Halunen said.

Throughout the pandemic, they assisted nearly 750 families in receiving more than $2.5 million in rent relief through RentHelpMN, the state’s targeted assistance program. When the state ended the program this year, the team shifted to Hennepin County’s rental and emergency assistance initiatives, the chief one being Rent Help Hennepin.

With Rent Help Hennepin funds unlikely to last the year due to high demand, the Hennepin County Board added $1.5 million to the program in October, bringing the total budget to $11 million. That’s helped 3,000 people avoid eviction, but it’s still nowhere near the estimated $50 million that would be necessary to assist every Hennepin County household falling behind on their rent, said David Hewitt, Hennepin County’s director of Housing Stability.

Out of budget necessity, “we have prioritized preventing eviction for families with children, seniors and people with disabilities,” Hewitt said.

In 2023, the public housing authority helped residents complete more than 450 applications to receive more than $800,000 in rent relief payments from Hennepin County’s programs. In 2024, that increased to 600 applications and more than $1 million in rent help. Through early December, the team had helped residents complete more than 380 applications for more than $500,000 in rent relief.

In the spring, however, Hennepin County’s rent relief programs went through what housing authority officials have described as an abrupt change, reducing the number of MPHA residents eligible to receive emergency rent assistance. Lifetime limits of $10,000 or 10 months in rent rolled out seemingly overnight, and to qualify, residents would have to pay off half their balance if they’re four months or more behind on their rent.

Perhaps the most surprising requirement of all, “before you can apply for rent help, there needed to be an eviction filing,” Halunen said. “It prevented us from getting residents connected to rent help (early). … Our team was surprised. We were surprised.”

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Agency officials say they never received formal correspondence from the county, and were only informed verbally about the changes after they had already taken place.

Hewitt noted that the purpose of emergency housing relief is just that — one-time emergency aid — and it’s not the same as an ongoing rent subsidy. Coming out of the pandemic, Hennepin County also expanded the role of Adult Representation Services, a county department that provides independent legal representation to low-income clients in civil matters, to include housing cases.

Filmmaker David Lynch (Sara Hirakawa/The New York Times)

However their lives began, the creative figures who died this year soon enough made their way to our stages, our galleries, our cinemas, our book shelves. Their ideas and personalities helped shape our culture, and they still have plenty to tell us. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their voices.

“People are like detectives and our lives are filled with clues.”

— David Lynch, director, born 1946

“I’m still on the search of finding myself.”

— Malcolm-Jamal Warner, actor, born 1970

“My father’s advice — ‘if you want an interesting life, bloody well go out and get one’ — was good.”

— Frederick Forsyth, writer, born 1938

“I’ve been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson. If everybody said I sounded like one person, I’d worry. But when they say I sound like them all, I know I’ve got my own style.”

Frank Gehry (Erik Carter/The New York Times)

— Roberta Flack, musician, born 1937

“In the early days when I was playing guitar, I knew the world didn’t need another B.B. King, Chet Atkins or Les Paul. So, what are you gonna do now? I thought: ‘Just be yourself and do your thing. Don’t go changing.’”

— Steve Cropper, musician, born 1941

“I don’t consciously think about creating a style that people would follow. I’m trying to respond to time and place with the God-given abilities I have.”

— Frank Gehry, architect, born 1929

“Being oneself is better than pretending to be somebody else.”

— Richard Chamberlain, actor, born 1934

“I don’t know how else to be but raw and honest.”

— Marianne Faithfull, singer and actress, born 1946

“Just be honest, say something that means something, and amuse yourself.”

— Rosalyn Drexler, artist, born 1926

“You cannot play a lie. You must play some kind of truth.”

— Gene Hackman, actor, born 1930

“An audience recognizes truthful performance.”

— Joan Plowright, actress, born 1929

“I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life.”

— Tom Stoppard, playwright, born 1937

“I’ve never been shy of copying things.”

— Robert Grosvenor, artist, born 1937

“I know no one’s really going to copy me, because it’s too much trouble.”

— Jackie Ferrara, artist, born 1929

“You are not yourself in front of the camera. You can live many lives, instead of one.”

— Claudia Cardinale, actress, born 1938

“What drives me is that I constantly want to learn, better myself as an engineer, better myself as a person. I’m constantly looking for the next best thing.”

— Rebecca Heineman, video game designer, born 1963

“I like being who I am.”

— Sly Stone, musician, born 1943

“I am just reflecting what I see, and coming at it with my attitude, which is absolutely guilt-free.”

— Madeleine Wickham, writer under the name Sophie Kinsella, born 1969

“All I’ve ever done is say, ‘Is this something that is an extension of me?’ For ‘Stand By Me,’ I didn’t know if it was going to be successful or not. All I thought was, ‘I like this because I know what it feels like.’”

— Rob Reiner, director, born 1947

“I remember people would stand up and leave — and often did. But I had work to do, I performed the work no matter what.”

— Alison Knowles, artist, born 1933

“These are human beings onstage. You’re a human being in the audience. There is humanity on both sides, and it’s your job to complete the work as you see it.”

— Carolyn Brown, dancer, born 1927

“Art does not ride on a political crest. If you have something to say, you will say it even if you have to be indirect and use the language of an Aesop fable.”

— Yuri Grigorovich, dancer, born 1927

“I’ve never been very happy about the world. So what makes me tick is this obsessive need to figure out what isn’t here that I want to be here. I make plays — or whatever you want to call them — to try to fill that great big void.”

— Richard Foreman, playwright, born 1937

“There’s always more to discover. That’s what makes me tick.”

— Per Norgard, composer, born 1932

“I write because I live.”

— Ngugi wa Thiong’o, writer, born 1938

“I believe in the relationship between ritual and theater.”

— Pierre Audi, director, born 1957

“I am convinced that religion is the kernel of all art.”

— Sofia Gubaidulina, composer, born 1931

“My God is my composer.”

— John Nelson, conductor, born 1941

The musician D’Angelo in Oakland, Calif., June 6, 2015. However their lives began, the creative figures who died this year soon enough made their way to our stages, our galleries, our cinemas, our book shelves. (Zackary Canepari/The New York Times)

“I learned at an early age that what we were doing in the choir was just as important as the preacher. It was a ministry in itself.”

— D’Angelo, musician, born 1974

“The direction of a melodic line, the stringency and resolution of a harmony — they were riddles to me that I wanted to spend my whole life solving.”

— Charles Strouse, composer, born 1928

“Once I saw ‘Company,’ I thought, ‘That’s not a bad way to spend a life.’”

— William Finn, musical theater writer, born 1952

“When I was 5, and we had gotten a TV, I remember acting out the first movie I had seen, which was ‘Cinderella.’ After that, I would put on shows in our garage and charge people a nickel.”

— Loni Anderson, actress, born 1945

“If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down.”

— Fanny Howe, poet, born 1940

“We were born astonished. We should never grow out of our astonishment.”

— Andrea Gibson, poet, born 1975

“I’m proud of my accomplishments. When my mom calls me and says, ‘I saw a great picture of you in that magazine,’ I know I earned that.”

— Michelle Trachtenberg, actress, born 1985

“Nothing’s going to be handed to you. You have to fight like a dirty rotten dog.”

— Diane Ladd, actress, born 1935

“I’m a lunatic by nature, and lunatics don’t need training — they just are.”

— Ozzy Osbourne, instrumentalist, born 1948

“I consider it mandatory to be rude in every painting at certain points.”

— Jo Baer, artist, born 1929

“Onstage, I’m a warrior. And the dancer is my best enemy.”

— Eddie Palmieri, musician, born 1936

“Success is something to shadowbox with, not embrace.”

— Robert Redford, actor and director, born 1936

“Prepare for the unexpected, and go with it.”

— Jack DeJohnette, musician, born 1942

“It is a weird thing that actors have people applaud when they’re done working. I still find that entertaining.”

— Val Kilmer, actor, born 1959

“It’s never perfect, and it should not be.”

— Christoph von Dohnanyi, conductor, born 1929

“It is OK to get lost! You don’t have to understand every second. I think that’s the problem. Let the audience get lost. It’s OK.”

— Robert Wilson, playwright and director, born 1941

“I want the meaning to dawn on the viewer, not bludgeon them.”

— Mel Bochner, artist, born 1940

“In a society that’s constantly yelling, maybe it’s a strong whisper that can best be heard.”

— Dara Birnbaum, artist, born 1946

“I make myself available to possible audiences. I have found that if you do that and if your work is good, you don’t have to sell yourself. You don’t have to sell your work. You merely have to let people know that you exist.”

— Fred Eversley, artist, born 1941

“We’ve jumped off a lot of cliffs.”

— Ricardo Scofidio, architect, born 1935

“When I come through the door, I bring a community with me. I want there to be others after me.”

— Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, artist, born 1940

“Every breath I take is an accounting. Every word I write is an accounting. And the braver we get about speaking our truths about where we’ve come from, under what conditions we were made, the more folks have to confront the truths about who their people were or are.”

— DéLana R.A. Dameron, writer, born 1985

“Your deepest sense of duty and obligation is to history and to the people you knew and loved.”

— Edmund White, writer, born 1940

Carla Maxwell performs in the revival of José Limón’s “Dances for Isadora” at the Joyce Theater in New York, Nov. 14, 2006. However their lives began, the creative figures who died this year soon enough made their way to our stages, our galleries, our cinemas, our book shelves. (Andrea Mohin/The New York Times)

“We have to be mindful of what we let go and what we keep on.”

— Carla Maxwell, dancer and choreographer, born 1945

“I don’t think about the passage of time — just what I’m doing with it.”

— Loretta Swit, actress, born 1937

“I accept a lot of things, but I also fear a lot of things. I fear a lot of things I accept.”

— Graham Greene, actor, born 1952

“The one thing I don’t want to know ever is where I’m going before I get there. I follow the orders of the book. The book tells me where it wants to go, and I write, and I draw accordingly.”

— Jules Feiffer, cartoonist and writer, born 1929

“I do think it important to stress that writing involves hard work and a routine that should be sacrosanct. And, most importantly, tenacity, since it is an act of faith — the belief that things will come right in the end — well, mostly. If only I always followed my own advice.”

— Zoë Wicomb, writer, born 1948

“The subject chooses the writer.”

— Mario Vargas Llosa, writer, born 1936

“They say I was an ‘aesthete of misery’ and tried to impose beauty on the poor world. But why should the poor world be uglier than the rich world? The light here is the same as there. The dignity here is the same as there.”

— Sebastião Salgado, photographer, born 1944

“I went through a lot of hardships, but it taught me that anger will never accomplish anything. You really have to accomplish something with a sense of humor, a sense of self-criticism all the time.”

— Christine Choy, filmmaker, born 1949

“Having the ability to transmute personal pain, trauma into something expressive is an enormous gift.”

— Claire van Kampen, musician and playwright, born 1953

“I’d like to be remembered not for the highs I’ve reached but for the depths from which I’ve risen. There were exhilarating highs and abysmal lows. But it was fighting to get out of those lows that I feel most proud of.”

— Connie Francis, singer, born 1937

“I’m so thankful for good health, the misshapen hands that still keep going and the comfort of the alternative fictional worlds I inhabit. I have a rather better time there, I think, than in what’s called ‘the real world,’ which has always seemed a bit of a fiction, to me anyway.”

— Jane Gardam, writer, born 1928

“I create fiction out of reality.”

— Martin Parr, photographer, born 1952

“The best music that I play is right here at home.”

— Garth Hudson, musician, born 1937

“When I’m not making a movie, I’m home, in pajamas, watching ‘The Rifleman’ on TV, hopefully with my 12-year-old making me a cheeseburger.”

— Michael Madsen, actor, born 1957

“Being called a musical genius was a cross to bear. Genius is a big word. But if you have to live up to something, you might as well live up to that.”

— Brian Wilson, musician, born 1942

“You always want to leave them begging for more.”

— George Wendt, actor, born 1948

“I learned I couldn’t shed light on love other than to feel its comings and goings and be grateful.”

— Diane Keaton, actress, born 1946

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Beyond the state of the economy and the cost of housing, it’s unclear the degree to which a notable uptick in statewide housing evictions can be linked to a drop in state funding for social service providers amid sweeping allegations of Medicaid-backed financial fraud.

Some housing coordinators and assistance programs backed by state dollars have found themselves audited repeatedly, if not cut off from state funding, as the state cracks down on eye-popping social service frauds.

Related: Eviction filings may reach statewide record in 2025

Before the program’s inaugural year, the Minnesota Department of Human Services predicted its Housing Stabilization Services for the disabled would cost about $2.6 million annually. Instead, the initiative paid out more than $21 million in claims in 2021, a figure that quickly ballooned to $104 million in 2024.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Minnesota recently charged Anthony Waddell Jefferson, 37, and Lester Brown, 53, both of Pennsylvania, with repeatedly flying to Minneapolis to file $3.5 million in HSS claims without providing promised services. Those are just two of the latest among a growing number of federal defendants linked to housing-related frauds tied to Medicaid services.

The HSS program, a medical assistance initiative that helped people with disabilities and mental illness find and maintain housing, was shut down entirely on Oct. 31. On top of that, DHS has partially frozen payments to its Integrated Community Supports program, which funds in-home services for the disabled.

Suzy Fischer, 45, was enrolled in both programs for the last four years, allowing her to live at the Donegan, a downtown St. Paul apartment complex where she paid $400 toward a total rent bill of about $1,700.

“I had been on lists, waiting for housing help for so long,” said Fischer, who grew up in St. Paul and said she suffers from a type of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. “I love it. It’s a great place. I got so lucky.”

That housing assistance recently ended, leaving her at a loss for what to do next. She worries the state is over-correcting, eliminating funding for worthy providers and vulnerable tenants in the name of preventing benefits abuse.

Fischer, whose partner died seven years ago, walks dogs and provides in-home pet care, but it’s not enough to make up for the loss of housing aid, which was administered through Maple Grove-based American Home Health Care.

A spokesperson for DHS said in an email Friday they could confirm they are withholding payment for the provider, but “to protect the integrity of our investigations, DHS cannot provide any specific information about the basis for a payment withhold.”

Unable to access state reimbursement, American Home Health Care has put all of its services on hold.

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“The state had no plan for what to do with all the people who would be affected by that,” said Christianna Finnern, an attorney with Minneapolis-based Winthrop & Weinstine, which is representing American Home Health Care in efforts to regain its state backing.

“We are evaluating what options there are,” Finnern said. “DHS has no plan for what to do with all these people who are losing housing and services. It’s really putting people who need these services in a very, very difficult position. It’s really tragic.”