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Youth is a time of idealism and energy except, perhaps, when it comes to voting in the mid-term elections.

A new Harvard Institute of Politics poll found that interest in voting in the November 2014 elections among 18-to-29-year-old voters is lower now than just several months ago — and even lower than it was at a similar point in 2010.

Only 24 percent of those polled said they would definitely be voting, according to the survey. That was a drop of 10 percentage points since last November and a seven point drop from four years ago.

These are the kind of polling results guaranteed to raise Republican hopes and give Democrats sleepless nights. Younger voters tend to vote Democratic. If they are significantly less inclined to vote this year than they were in 2010 — when Democrats lost the House — Election Day 2014 could be very gloomy indeed for Democrats.

The other piece of bad news for the president's party in the Harvard poll was something we've seen elsewhere — there's more intensity among Republican voters than Democrats.

The poll found 44 percent of the 18-to-29 year olds who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 say they definitely plan to vote this fall. That compared with 35 percent of President Obama voters who said they planned to vote in November 2014.

While these numbers are obviously bad for Democrats, they're not necessarily determinative, as least not according to Sasha Issenberg, author of "The Victory Lab," which explains techniques campaigns use to motivate their voters to go to the polls.

In a recent New Republic piece, Issenberg, a fellow at UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs, writes that Democrats may be able to drive up turnout numbers if they use proven methods that motivate a portion of "unreliable" voters — like young people — to go to the polls.

The challenge is those methods, like sending canvassers out to targeted voters or dropping direct mail in the right mailboxes can be costly. It requires donors and activists to stay engaged which is easier said than done, Issenberg says.

There was a time in Eastern Europe when the landscape was dotted with wooden synagogues, some dating back to the 1600s. Inside, the walls and ceilings were covered with intricate painted designs. Almost all of these structures were destroyed during the Holocaust, and with them a folk art. But in Burlington, Vt., a synagogue mural has been uncovered where it lay hidden for a quarter century.

Aaron Goldberg grew up in a section of Burlington known as Little Jerusalem. His family was among the Jewish immigrants who settled there in the late 1800s, mostly from Lithuania. Goldberg first saw the mural in the 1970s when he was in middle school and accompanied his mother to a carpet store.

"I have a distinct memory of going up to the second floor to look at the carpet rolls and the remnants with my mother and seeing a painting on the back wall," he says. "It was surreal."

The store, it turned out, had once been a synagogue. Shoppers could see rays of sunlight, a crown hovering above a tablet with the Ten Commandments and a throne supported by two lions of Judah — all part of a mural stretching 10 feet high and 18 feet wide. It had been painted in 1910 by an immigrant artist named Ben Zion Black.

Years later, Goldberg and another member of his synagogue learned that the carpet store had been sold and the new owner was going to convert the building into apartments.

"She allowed us about a month to see if we could figure out a plan to get the mural out," he says. "So we called museums, hospitals, colleges, commercial warehouse storage spaces all over the East Coast and we could not locate a space. So we asked her if she would consider walling up the mural."

The owner agreed and for 25 years tenants lived in an apartment not knowing what was behind the walls.

An Exuberant Work Of Art

Two years ago, the Ohavi Zedek Synagogue, where Goldberg serves as archivist, started renting the apartment. It tore down the wall that had been erected to protect the mural and hired art conservator Connie Silver to help restore it.

"This is a really exuberant work of art," she says.

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As has become the recent custom over at CBS, when Craig Ferguson decided to announce his departure from The Late Late Show on Monday, he had a self-deprecating joke ready.

"Thanks everybody! That was quite convincing!" he said, as the audience groaned at news he would leave the network's 12:35 a.m. show in December. "I'll go and do something else. Probably, I'm thinking, carpentry."

Some fans might assume Ferguson is leaving because CBS hired someone else to take the top job in the network's late night universe, handing Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert the hosting gig on the 11:35 p.m. Late Show when host David Letterman announced his retirement weeks ago.

But the Scottish-born comic told Variety that he had planned to leave his show long before Letterman shocked the showbiz world by unexpectedly announcing his retirement April 3. Once that happened, Ferguson had to keep his mouth shut while the world reacted to Letterman and CBS announced Colbert as his successor.

I believe Ferguson, because when I visited his show for a feature story in 2007, he told me he couldn't see sticking with the program past his then-six-year contract. "I just don't know if I like being that visible," he said, musing a bit about a post-Late Show life spent writing standup bits and books from a seaside bungalow in Florida. "I don't know if I would want to ramp that up any more, you know. And people here find that, I think, quite difficult to (understand)."

If what Ferguson says is true, then the network surely has a succession plan in mind for him as well. And given how quickly they moved on announcing the Colbert hire, it might not be long before we're talking about how the next guy (or gal, hopefully) is going to help reinvent late night TV on the network of NCIS and CSI.

But first, let's take a moment to give props to Ferguson, a wildly talented performer who succeeded – and failed – because he insisted on creating a late-night talk show for people who hate most late-night talk shows.

Basically, Ferguson busted up the rigid formula of late night TV wherever he could, producing a show that could split sides one moment and leave you wondering if you stumbled on a celebrity-studded acid trip in the next.

Some of the stuff is obvious. Early in his tenure, Ferguson jettisoned a mostly-planned monologue for a stream-of-consciousness way of speaking to the camera that was more genuine and more funny. Sometimes the program would begin in a "cold open" with a puppet rabbit interrogating an audience member; other times, he spoke openly about the life and death of his father or explained why, as a recovering alcoholic, he would pass on poking fun at the debilitating meltdowns of Britney Spears.

He never had a backing band – in part, early on, it was likely a money thing. But even after CBS upgraded his studio, Ferguson avoided the bandleader sidekick and live music, instead trading banter with a skeletal robot voiced by one of the show's writers offscreeen and with two people in horse's costume. Really.

As interviews began with guests, Ferguson would symbolically rip up his blue note cards as a way of signifying that what was coming wasn't really planned. Sometimes, that brought a lot of empty riffing with a celebrity who just couldn't keep up. But sometimes, you got this (warning: parts of this are a little NSFW).

Ferguson took over The Late Late Show in 2005 from Craig Kilborn, himself a refugee from Comedy Central's Daily Show. CBS actually tried a succession of guest hosts in the job after Kilborn failed, and Ferguson was the unlikely-yet-compelling permanent choice.

Where Kilborn was smug and overly scripted, Ferguson was genuine and spontaneous (Kilborn has the dubious distinction of hosting two shows which were turned into creative successes after he left them). And when Ferguson occasionally got serious – in talking about race relations or staying sober or dealing with death – it was because he was interested in whatever he was talking about in that moment.

This was a show created by a star who chafed at all the typical conventions of a late-night talk show. The result was an unpredictable program which was often funny, sometimes amazing and occasionally just strange and not quite complete.

Small wonder that more traditional shows hosted by Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers beat The Late Late Show in ratings. And it's also no surprise that Ferguson might get tired of re-inventing the form every night and just move on (he already has his next TV gig lined up: hosting his syndicated game show Celebrity Name Game).

Beyond hoping they don't hire yet another white male, I'm crossing my fingers that CBS succeeds Ferguson with someone just as willing to blow up conventional ideas of what a late night talk show can and should be.

As legacies go, that might be the best one yet, especially for a host who often called himself "TV's Craig Ferguson" – an offhand description that seemed equal parts ironic jab and grudging admission of his circumstance.

And as final tribute, please enjoy 13 minutes of Ferguson-centered craziness, courtesy of YouTube.

It's early evening on a Thursday and you're at a networking event, balancing a small plate of appetizers in one hand. Someone comes up to you to say hello. She acts like you've met before, but you can't recall where.

"It's Jackie Barnes," she says.

"Jackie Barnes," you repeat her name like you remember. "It's been a while."

As you say her name, a little device in your ear picks it up. The device does a search and microseconds later it feeds you the info it's found on the Web: the college she attended, her current company, that she has two kids and is an avid runner.

That's right, she's a former coworker from a few years back.

"How's the new job?" you ask, relieved.

Here, in the hyper-connected world of wearable technology, such as Google Glass or Fitbit watches, enter hearables, a small device you wear in your ear. If one forecaster watching this market closely is correct, hearables are about to hit the market in a big way. If that happens, what could this mean for how we interact with the new technology — and with each other?

First, let's look at what a hearable could do. There are some on the market, like the Dash, a fitness-focused product from a German company called Bragi. As the technology advances, adoption could become a lot more widespread, wirelessly connecting with your smartphone, for example.

"It's discreet in your ear and it's helping in some way," says Piers Fawkes, president of think tank PSFK Labs. "There's an opportunity for it to be a personal adviser ... whispering going on, giving you directions, telling you that you're late for a meeting."

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