As just one of so many people troubled by the division in our country, I’ve written many times about the source of our disharmony: the reality that America no longer has a shared reality. It is, for example, impossible to have a constructive dialogue with someone who not just disagrees with my perspective on the proper role of government, but also suspects I’m a pedophile (or at least a pedophile sympathizer). Where do you go from there?

The looming presence of a shapeshifting alternative reality remains our Problem #1 — the single issue who’s solution is a prerequisite to addressing…

In the face of a worldwide pandemic, massive economic upheaval, a nationwide reckoning with systemic racism, and a loss of a shared reality, according to Fox News and everyone who takes their word as gospel, our most urgent existential threat right now is something called cancel culture. Before we address the disingenuity of the term itself, let’s first acknowledge that this dynamic of blaming and shaming is nothing new.

Although I’m not a biblical scholar, I have seen the movies, and I know enough to assert with some authority that the first major incident of cancel culture emerged when Moses…

It’s been six months since I last wrote to you. Some of you no longer fall into the category of those who love Donald Trump, but some of you probably still do. Which side you now belong to is something I don’t know, and I’m responsible for that. Why? Because up until this point, I didn’t want to know, or more specifically, I have been afraid to know. Let me explain why.

For so many Democrats like me, Trump was a known quantity from the start. It all began in 2011 with birtherism and descended from there, to his attacks…

Here in Georgia, the definition of insanity is counting the votes from an election over and over and expecting a different result. It’s calling the Republican governor a hapless moron and a nutjob because he didn’t sufficiently suppress the vote, and it’s having that same governor authorize an investigation of voter fraud that doesn’t exist to win back the favor of the president and his disgruntled followers.

For the anti-democracy Republicans — which includes Donald Trump — no amount of proof of a fair and honest election is sufficient. Many have long been led to believe that their emperor would…

It appears that we are now, finally, at a point along the arc of the moral universe where we are ready to properly address how ‘we the people’ enforce the law, maintain order and ensure justice for each other. Even considering our raw political divisions, finding some optimal middle ground between the extremes of completely defunding and completely militarizing the police seems both reasonable and achievable.

There are best practices to addressing a problem like this one. In my previous life developing applications in the early days of the internet, we would begin with a list of business requirements: the…

January 20th 1981 was a monumental day in American history. I was home for college on winter break the day that Ronald Reagan took office, a day when 52 American hostages were simultaneously being released from more than a year of captivity in a newly hostile Iran. The synchronicity of these two events cemented in our national mythology the belief that this new president had been solely responsible for springing them free.

Our nation had just weathered a decade of international humiliation — Watergate, a military vanquishing in Vietnam, waiting in lines for gasoline, and the disorienting powerlessness we felt…

In their desperate attempt to gaslight the nation during our recent impeachment trial, the lawyers of our former president utilized their client’s favorite go-to tactic to create a postage stamp sized fig leaf for the anti-democracy wing of the Republican Party. What-about-ism, both-sides-ism, false equivalencies — in a word: Conflation.

Conflation, as it was employed by the defense team on February 12, 2021, was a distraction effort inspired by bad faith, and, as we have so often seen in the past, the volume and breadth of nonsense used to distract is proportional to the severity of the crime. The big…

When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act soon after he took office in 1933, it marked one of the most wide-reaching and audacious responses of an American government to the ravages of disease and destitution. The TVA was a massive depression era hydro-electric project that brought electricity, jobs and prosperity to a large swath of the American southeast. What was once a region of dirt floors, devastating floods, malnutrition, malaria and soil erosion was transformed into an industrial powerhouse — homes with electricity and modern appliances, agricultural best practices, well-paying jobs and a dynamic economy.

The…