Common sense, no evidence required

When skepticism becomes a belief system that can’t be corrected

Winning power is not the same thing as knowing how to use it.

How ignorance, outrage, and contempt became content

The cost of staying awake in a country that won’t stop demanding our attention.

The shining city on a hill has become a place the world is learning to avoid.

The Product Is You. The Loss Is Us.

The issue isn’t whether reporters are entitled to access. It’s whether access can become political punishment.

The issue isn’t whether reporters are entitled to access. It’s whether access can become political punishment.

Who pays, who benefits, and who gets to decide?

Trump wanted 1 percent interest rates. The Federal Reserve under the chairman he chose just raised them instead.

They’re not just piling up; they’re now arriving in bunches.

The problem is not who deserves a ballot. It’s what we have done to the citizens’ obligation to think.

An audio portrait of a morning that changed American life forever.

An audio portrait of a morning that changed American life forever.

What have we done to ourselves in response to what was done to us?

From Trutherism to QAnon to stolen-election narratives, the post-9/11 story we’re not telling

An elegy for those who died, those who remember, and the day that will one day exist only in memory.

The fraud claim is the pretext. The ballot portal is the mechanism. Is the political payoff chaos, or something worse?

What do we owe people who will live with the consequences of decisions we make but will never personally experience?

You cannot understand political history by treating party names as permanent ideological identities.

Why certainty, belonging, and grievance can become more valuable than being right.

But it DID make it easier for him to try.

On em dashes, Christopher Hitchens, and the machines that want to make humans more human

What happens to a democracy when it can no longer distinguish the prosperity of its most successful citizens from the well-being of the country itself?

On the triumph of aggressive ignorance, the invention of threat, and the politics of permanent grievance.

When certain words become reflex, thought becomes harder to hear.

When Losing Isn’t an Outcome but an Insult to Be Overcome

Part III: How power learned to live with Trump

Part II: How Trump turned anti-intellectualism into belonging

Part I: How performance became power—and the Republican Party became the supporting cast

Can a democracy built for deliberation survive an age of acceleration?

Redemption, opportunism, and the uneasy question of who belongs in the American fold.

A Sunday reflection on why the decline of reading matters to democracy.

When Trump blamed Minnesota instead of Iran for the water system cyberattacks, he revealed something deeper about the presidency—and what happens when a president puts ego over the safety of a nation.

A democracy doesn’t fail because experts are imperfect. It fails when expertise itself becomes a political liability.

A democracy doesn’t fail because experts are imperfect. It fails when expertise itself becomes a political liability.

A democracy doesn’t fail because experts are imperfect. It fails when expertise itself becomes a political liability.

A democracy doesn’t fail because experts are imperfect. It fails when expertise itself becomes a political liability.

How a lazy meme narrows language and turns history into moral anesthesia.

What happens when wars begin without a theory of termination.

What happens when wars begin without a theory of termination.