David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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What To Write About?

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More than usual, I faced a blank screen when I sat down to write yesterday.  

On the usual Saturday, I have an outline in my head, some sources down, and a bead on a compatible image or two.

Maybe, probably, it was the holiday, since I still haven’t completed everything I usually do on this day, like ruminating on those things I’m most grateful for in the past year. 

When I came upon a recent list amidst the recipes, I had to laugh when I saw that I’d made note of this one: the occasional accuracy of my intuitions. Because when you put your wiriting out there, you can never even begin without some measure of confidence. 

Which brings me to the related topic I landed upon today: How I decided what to write to you?

Some of it comes from the choices made by others.

Even though I’m reading fewer books, I still pour over the year-end booklists—for this reason of course, and also (I suppose) to feel guilty about not reading more tomes and chronicles that sound essential or fascinating.

As luck would have it, the “NYT’s 100 Notable Books for 2025,”  “WSJ’s 2025 Guide to Holiday Gift Books,” and “The Economist’s Best Books of 2025” brought me to short reviews about John Updike’s 1989 memoir “Self Consciousness” and Susan Orlean’s 2025 memoir “Joyride.” (I ordered both “for the pile,” so my guilt can be closer at hand.)

Of couse, Updike was one of America’s pre-eminent writers during much of my lifetime. I read, but didn’t get, “Rabbit Run” in high school, part of his series of droll & insightful takes on suburban life & love. As I started living what he’d written about, I grew to appreciate his Rabbit & other novels, but even more to value the economy of his wisdom when he’d pen an essay someplace or get candid in an interview and then proceed to bowl me over.

(That’s Updike, over-coming his bad teeth, psoriasis & ever-present shyness in the picture above.)  

So I was overtaken again when I came upon the following about (essentially) where he begins as a writer, describing his childhood sense “of an embowering wide world arranged for my mystification and entertainment.”

His subject matter was set out for him like a buffet, in all its “embowering” (or “embracing,” in the way that trees would) possibility, with his job to make what he could of it all, a kind of bird’s eye view one minute, more closely-observed the next, but all there for his “mystification and entertainment”—and eventually ours.

If I were so inclined (in other words), all I had to do was look at the world around me and see what’s tickling my fancy.

Author Susan Orlean in the middle of one of her buffets.

Since I already knew Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief” and the non-fiction essays in the New Yorker that spawned both it and other absorbing romps, I quickly zeroed in on the review of “Joyride,” because that’s exactly what her job as a writer always felt like to me whenever she invited me along

Orlean, like Updike, confesses that she too “believe[s] the world has something to tell [her],” and her amazement at what she heard is one of the qualities that makes her writing so infectious.

For example, “The Orchid Thief” is broadly about her reporting of the 1994 arrest of an horticulturist and members of the Seminole nation for poaching rare orchids in the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve in South Florida.  But beyond its colorful cast & humorous asides, it is also brought Orlean, for the first time, face-to-face with true obsession, in this instance, that horticulturist’s quest to find & clone the rare ghost orchid for profit. 

Demonstrating how she finds what to write about, her memoir reveals that she happened upon the seeds that became “The Orchid Thief” on an airplane, where a day-old copy of the Miami Herald had been left in her seat pocket. Buried inside was a story about an upcoming trial over some valuable plants. Within days, Orlean was in Miami, at the courthouse.

While she acknowledges that she’s always been open to the thrill of discoveries like this in her story-telling, Orlean acknowledges that there’s also a different kind of writer, namely, “those who have something they want to say to the world.” In other words, it’s not the world as your oyster (waiting for you to discover its delights or ponder its mysteries), but about some internal fire that drives this different breed of writer to tell the world what’s on her (or his) mind..

One or the other of these propensities tends to announce itself early in writers (Updike’s “childhood sense”), and likely in non-writers too.  For example, I’m currently working with a physical therapist who’s so in love with the next Broadway musical, golf game or Top 10 list of horror movies that I quickly got him to admit that he’s always (“since I was a little kid”) been open to the delights his slice of the world kept offering up to him. Even more importantly, his pursuit of the next delight always seems to drive him to prescribe whatever will make David better.

As a writer, and before that, as a child, I always had that other kind of perspective, wanting to say something to the world before I ever realized that it might be listening. It was odd, because I’m hardly an extravert. But once “whatever it was” was done percolating, it always had to come out someplace, overcoming any inhibitions or stage fright that might stand in its way. 

You’ve probably noticed that many of these posts are driven by that impulse. It’s why when Kyla Scanlon wrote about how a prosperous future no longer seems evident in the broken world that we see and experience every day, I wanted to shout out, “Yes, I agree with you, Kyla!”  Since we’re supposedly so rich, I want my streets to be cleaner $ safer, my neighbors to be less anxious & more confident about the future instead of charting America’s prosperity in the cold comfort of data centers, AI chips & invisible wealth, as I wrote on this page last week (“Our Future Will Only Be Better When We Change It.””) 

It’s why I wrote about Trump here for several weeks until I convinced myself that he’s effectively done, that are wobbly institutions are still likely to prove resilient enough to blunt his most serious damage. I also kept writing about him because I wanted at least some of you to know that you’re not alone in your alarm at seeing his unprecedented misuse of our nation’s highest office, and (I’m sure) as a kind of reassurance that we (in Susan Sontag’s words) “are not accomplices” to the damage he’s causing, even though we are witnesses to it & citizens with stakes in our governance. In all these regards, Trump is lighting fewer internal fires that I need to vent about.

Yet while many of my posts are still driven by the desire to tell the world something (or to trumpet some other writer who’s doing so), I’ve also learned that I can get tired of hearing my mountain-top voice, and at such times, I try to see the world as my oyster too, like I did recently in my journey to a local gas station framed by reflections of its spiritual past  (“Is the Solution a Speed Bump?’), in this summer’s Short Stack posts (here, here and here), and when I escape into the smorgasbords of art, TV & music.  

At such times, I’m both surprised & relieved by this bit of counter-programming. It’s like surfer and art critic Dave Hickey wrote in “The Perfect Wave” (another worthwhile read):

When[ever] something that is not your thing blows you away, that’s one of the best things that can happen. It means you are something other than you thought you were.

It always feels like a revelation. New doors seem to open when I’ve nothing left to say.

This post was adapted from my November 30, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

More House-Cleaning, Less Judgment in Politics

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If we’re serious about finding a unity of purpose on the direction of our country, we should step back from the moral judgments we keep making about our political opponents (“We’re good, they’re bad”)  and start putting our own disheveled houses in order. 

Fessing up to our own failings would make us feel less superior when it comes to everyone else’s failings and more willing to seek common goals. 

This is certainly true where traditional Republicans and Democrats are concerned. For the zealots on both sides on the other hand—a relatively small number of true believers at the MAGA and Progressive extremes—that kind of modest self-awareness may not be possible. 

Instead of the vast middle of American politics being endlessly roiled by the certainties of the extremes, it’s time for house-cleaning, undaunted by the fear that we’re simply enabling our foes by airing out our dirty laundry. (They already know more than we’d like to admit about our hypocrises.) 

Putting our own houses in order is the only way that “the traditionals” to the right and left of Center can set aspirational agendas unburdened by the sins of the past. 

+ + +

In that regard, let’s start today with some political soul-searching by a traditional Republican, Gerard Baker, who is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. In his Monday post—“Trump Accelerates Our Decline into Moral Relativism”—Baker became more critical of traditional Republicans like him than I’ve heard him admit to. The headline makes his bottomline point, which is that MAGA extremism has distorted thinking and cowed bravery in the Republican Center.

Moral relativism and the ratchet effect will ensure that there is always some precedent close enough to persuade people to shrug even when confronted with some evidence of genuine turpitude on their own side.

We’ve been descending this spiral for a long time, but as with just about everything to do with the gargantuan figure of Donald Trump, his behavior has accelerated the descent.

His corrosive effect on norms of ethics, language and, for that matter, conservatism, has been amplified by the eager acquiescence of the Republican Party in the process.

The party that once liked to think of itself as committed to values and principles has become the most cynical exponent of the idea that everything is relative. A cheerleading chorus of so-called conservatives in the media eased the way. Every time they are confronted with evidence of some new infamy by their president, many on the right will choose to avoid the unrewarding path of moral consistency [with bedrock Republican principles] and opt instead for the tactics of least resistance: misdirection, “whataboutism,” or simply reaching for the blinders. All of these relativist tools have been on display in the last week. [my emphasis]

Republican Senator John Thune (the Senate’s Majority Leader) has sadly become an exemplar of these tendencies during Trump 2.0. He not only is, but also looks like a traditional Republican. But when he tries to defend the on-going government shut-down he (squeamishly) sounds and looks like a MAGA puppet. “Will the real John Thune please stand up!” 

The moral relativism is abundant. As an alternative, one could say to him: “Yes, the Democrats are often hypocrites, but Republicans control not only the Presidency but also Congress (and maybe the Courts). It’s not about your “relative” purity or impurity. Just do your job, which is to keep the government up and running.” 

Gerard Baker doesn’t mention Thune or the government shutdown in his op-ed, but he does highlight the dirtiest of dirty laundry in the Republican house today: their own leader’s self-dealing and his corruption of the justice system that should be ferreting it out. The stain was painfully apparent when Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance cryptocurrency exchange founder, this week. (Zhao had pled guilty to money laundering charges in 2023.) As Baker scathingly notes, this pardon came after Binance:

had been involved in a lucrative financial partnership for the president and his family that helped contribute to the $4.5 billion in wealth they have generated this year alone. Morally equivalent precedents: Hunter Biden? The Clinton Foundation? Hardly on the same scale. What we have seen this year is new levels of graft and grift. We seem to be moving rapidly toward a justice system in which the president essentially gets to decide who should be in prison. If you’re a political enemy, we’ll come up with a crime to fit your punishment. If you’re a friend, we will annul your crimes. [my emphasis]

(Helpfully, Baker also links us to a Journal article on “the recipe behind the Trump Family’s crypto riches.”)

Until other traditional Republicans like Baker come clean by signing-on to admissions of failure like this one, their attempts to improve the Republic’s health going forward will always be suspect. 

What about  traditional Democrats and their dirtiest laundry?

It is hard to say whether journalist Jeffery Toobin is a Democrat or not—he’s certainly been a thorn in their side for years, as in “CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin Calls Democrats ‘Weak and ‘Wimps’”—but my read on it is that he’s probably a member of their loyal opposition. 

In that spirit, on Halloween Toobin wrote an op-ed in the Times that billed itself as a discussion about the use of Biden’s autopen to grant clemency in the last days of the administration, but which ended up making timely remarks about Biden’s (and indeed, any president’s) mental capacity to serve in office.

It was in no small part because of “the capacity issue” that I was heartened when Biden said in March, 2020 (while campaigning for the presidency) that he saw himself as a one-term, “bridge figure” who would quikly make way for up-and-comers in his Party. So in the wake of Biden’s disastrous presidential debate in June 2024, I (along with many others) were more than a little interested in knowing when exactly, during his term in office, his faculties had begun their precipitous decline.

For example, in the final 6 months of his presidency, Toobin is rightly “troubled” by the way “the late-stage Biden White House worked.” Was “Mr. Biden [effectively] a ventriloquist’s dummy operated by his staff”?  And on the legality of his clemency decisions: “Did Mr. Biden actually authorize all the pardons that were processed by autopen?”  After reading an investigative report released by Republicans in the House and considering what Biden had said in public about it, Toobin’s conclusion is that the process “was imperfect, at best… with considerable chaos [marking] Mr. Biden’s last days in office.” 

Toobin also believes that traditional Democrats need to be as worried (if not more worried) about what was happening in the West Wing during Biden’s ENTIRE term than the administration’s opponents in Congress. 

As the June debate revealed, Mr. Biden was an 81-year-old man in decline. In later months, his staff sought ways to lighten his workload and formed, according to the committee report, ‘a cocoon around [him], thereby limiting his time spent with outer circle aides and Democratic Party leaders.

Let’s assume for a minute that Progressive Democrats are constitutionally (small “c”) unable to provide as much as a glimpse of their party’s dirty laundry to their foes. But it’s fair to wonder why less ideological Democrats haven’t been more interested in “the cocoon” around Biden, when it was first being spun, and how it effected their own work in places like Congress.

Toobin doesn’t say.  But it would be better for these representatives today (and for their standing with voters tomorrow) if they were more curious about Biden’s “fitness for office” at the very same time that they were implementing what they thought was his agenda (as opposed to some un-elected staffer’s agenda) throughout his tenure in office. 

Toobin spends his remaining ink on the difficulties around assessments of “presidential competency” going forward, in particular the advisors who provide a similar cocoon around President Trump today. 

Trump (like Biden) is an old man who’s already facing speculation about his own mental acuity. And there will be surely be future presidents who will be challenged by physical & mental incapacities while in office that are concealed from the public by protective staff members. Notes Toobin:

[I]f we are concerned that a president can be protected by a staff of sycophants, the risk now is greater than ever. No modern president has been surrounded by a more adoring staff than Donald Trump in his second term. As Mr. Trump, now 79, moves soon into his 80s, who can believe that the people around him will blow the whistle if he starts to slip?

In theory, the 25th Amendment addresses the issue of a president who is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.’ But its cumbersome procedures, requiring the concurrence of the vice president and a majority of the cabinet to sideline a president, do not inspire great confidence. The amendment trusts that a president’s loyalists will put their country’s interests above their own and their patron’s; history, not just in the Biden era, suggests that it might not be the best bet.

Toobin ends on a note of resignation, that we’re all mostly “hoping for the best” on this highly consequential matter. But like traditional Democrats should be delving into its stain on Biden’s presidency (and not just letting the probe unfold as a partisan witch-hunt), tradiitional Republicans need to be (let’s call it) “attentive” to the health of their own guy or they may find themselves pilloried by voters for remaining willfully ignorant about his own incapacity.

My bottom line: traditional Democrats and Republicans alike need to be far more invested in washing their own dirty laundry than either is today. Moreover, America’s future leaders are likely to be the ones who faced their party’s liabilities squarely instead of those who did little more than spray air freshener in their direction. When it comes to the issue of a president’s ability to serve, the stakes for America could simply not be higher.

(Today’s post continues an Independent Centrist engagement argument that I’ve been trying to make since at least 2021’s “Healing Makes Listening a Cabinet-Level Priority,” (in the wake of the 2020 election) and through the summer of 2025 in pieces like “The Democrat’s Near Fatal Boys & Men Problem.” Unfortunately from then until now, most traditional members from both of our political parties have been failing us almost completely.) 

Returning briefly to the crypto story.

In the five or six newsletters about political humor that I’ve written this year, South Park’s current season has certainly provided it’s share of satirical material.  Friday’s Halloween show was no exception, with a brilliant take on why none of us should be counting on the MAGA or Progressive or apolitical (“nihilist”) extremes to truly improve things when it comes to our politics. 

The first brilliant thing the South Park creators did on Friday was to acknowledge the avalanche of negativity they’ve been receiving from Trump’s Right-wing supporters (and, indeed, from the administration itself) for attacking the President & his team so relentlessly and mercilessly. Much like Trump himself has tried to co-opt his critics—by, for example, being regularly seen wearing a crown in White House memes—one of the series characters proclaims that he hates how his town of South Park has become so political this season. Laments Stan:

How many weeks has it been not dealing with one stupid thing after another? The truth is, I think a lot of people are just afraid to admit that South Park sucks now. Everyone knows it. South Park sucks now, and it’s because of all this political shit. We’re just getting totally bogged down in it. Remember when we used to do stuff? Just us guys? Ever since all this political crap took over, it’s like, what happened to us? Like Kenny, I haven’t even heard you say anything in like four months.

But instead o proposing a solution like “laying-off on Trump” or “counter-punching his opponents,” the show’s second stroke of brilliance has Stan proposing a MAGA-style solution, namely,  to launch a crypto-meme coin that simply says “South Park Sucks Now” so he can widely profile his distain while profiting mightily when his coins are sold to the simpletons he thinks agree with him.   

What a hilarious “solution” for any wannabe grifter in the Trump era. And what a lesson on the difference between sincere opposition and a stunt “that’s mostly about you.”

Just like the MAGA and Progressive wings of their respective parties often seem to be about nothing more than virtue signaling to one another, South Park has Stan proposing the perfect, self-involved solution to his problem with the show’s politics while effectively co-opting many of the satire’s nay-sayers.

Just brilliant.

This post was adapted from my November 2, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Has America Decided It’s Finally Had Enough?

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In a short exchange with a reader about the incitement-to-violence standard, I got to talking about our jury system. I told him I’d witnessed it in action dozens of times (as a law clerk for a trial judge, as an occasional trial attorney, and finally as a member of 3 or 4 Philadelphia juries). 

The vast majority of times, I watched in fascination as an assemblage of 8 or 12 people got both the “facts” and the “law” almost exactly right by bringing their randomly-chosen perspectives along with their common-sense and community-based morality (what we can tolerate as a group, and what we can’t) to the matter of guilt or innocence. These men and women would disagree, even argue or pout at one another, but after one day or several would reach consensus and a result that invariably felt right under the circumstances.. 

Then I realized:  the vast American public determines what is acceptable and unacceptable in our poliics much like the jury system. 

It’s not always paying attention to our leaders or “the state of our nation” because it’s busy raising families, going to work, shopping, being entertained or just distracted. But when the American public starts to focus on its job of giving or withholding its consent from its representatives—because it simply can’t ignore what’s happening any longer—it can be both quick and true in its judgments. As in: Maybe I can tolerate this, but I won’t tolerate that.

After hearing the sucking sound of consent being withdrawn, the exhale of opposition can often be heard next. When tens or hundreds or millions of Americans raise their voices to say, “Hey, wait a minute,” the political consequences can be swift, harsh & certain, saying in effect: “This is the America that I’m a part of, but where we’re headed is not.”

The causes of shifts like this and when have they happened before are not just for historians to consider.

Was the moment Americans turned against the Vietnam War when we saw (and absorbed the impact of) that photograph of the naked, crying girl with napalm burns in June, 1972, or did the change of heart come somewhat earlier? When did our nation go from being against same-sex marriage to being for it? (Was it one big thing that changed our minds or a build-up of several smaller ones?) Didn’t the American public turn-as-one against Joe Biden on June 28, 2024, the day after his fateful, pre-election debate with Trump? Sometimes we know exactly when the shift occurred. Other times, our acceptance or rejection just seemed to materialize out of the ether. 

I have never watched Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show, but know that his stand-up routines have skewered both Trump and our politics over the years, and how broad & deep “the comedic bond” with the American audience can be—because all of us want to be free to laugh at our leaders when they deserve it. So Trump’s and FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s ham-handed attempt to cancel Kimmel’s comedy a little over a week ago FELT (at least to me) like a turning point. As in, it feels like the American tide is turning against Donald Trump in real time. I could almost hear the whoosh of it.

But then I remembered that I’d had dreams like this before, such as after the Washington Post’s release of that infamous grabbing-women-by-their-privates tape in October 2016; while the J6 insurrection was unfolding at the Capitol in 2021; after Trump’s felony conviction in a New York Court in May of 2024. None had individually (or even as they compounded) changed our collective mind, so why would his attempt to cancel Kimmel be any different?

It’s because a week or so ago, Trump messed with American’s funny bones (and their First Amendment/free speech backstory) at a time where “cancel-culture” may be our worst damnation—due in-no-small-part to Trump himself. But despite the hypocrisy, he used the government’s coercive power to pull Kimmel off-the-air because he couldn’t take this (or maybe any) comic’s point of view. Was censoring political comedy, at long last, Trump’s “bridge too far” in the public’s mind? 

Well a couple of prominent observer/commentators thought the public finally changed its mind too. Moreover, the same shift in the American mood seems to have registered as more than a blip in national polls. Is it all just wishful thinking? Here’s what they’ve been saying over the past week.

Robert Reich worked in Washington for the Ford, Carter and Clinton administrations (in other words, he’s experienced a lot of government over the years.) After leaving public service, he’s been a professor, author and commentator on American politics. Reich is also very smart in my opinion, an intelligence that’s leavened by a marvelous sense of humor. For example, being short of stature (4’ 11”) due to a genetic disorder, he called his most recent book, “Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America.”

Well Reich was at it again this week in a Substack that he sent out on Tuesday called “The Sleeping Giant is Awakening: after a week of authoritarian excess, the nation is turning on Trump.” This is how he begins his post:

Friends,

I can’t tell you exactly how I know, but after 60 years in and around politics I’ve developed a sixth sense, and my sixth sense tells me the tide is now turning on Trump.

This past week did it.

He then proceeds to list an example-a-day for the week of September 15, including Trump’s: suing the Times in a lawsuit that included “page after page of gushing praise for the president;” accusing a national reporter of “hate speech” and threatening him with consequences from Pam Bondi; having the FCC pressure broadcasters to cancel Jimmy Kimmel now, and other comic late show hosts, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, later; threatening to prosecute political rivals (James Comey, Letia James and Adam Schiff) “even though grand juries and federal prosecutors couldn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing;” and saying at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service that he “hates his opponents” and doesn’t “want what’s best for them.”

Reich wrote: “You could almost feel the great sleeping giant of America open an eye and frown, then blink both eyes and sit up and stretch, and then roar, ‘What the hell is going on here?’” 

He went on to note protests and “boycotts” by Kimmel viewers and Disney customers, how Republican Ted Cruz spoke out against the censorship, and Disney’s bowing to the public outcry by returning Kimmel to the air. Reich recalled how the American public turned on Communist-witch-hunter Joe McCarthy’s cruelty in the 1950s, on the “white supremacists” who clobbered civil rights marchers in the 1960s,  and on Richard Nixon’s mendacity during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s.

[The sleeping giant that’s the American public] is starting to roar again now — at the sociopathic occupant of the Oval Office who won’t tolerate criticism, who in one wild week revealed his utter contempt for the freedom of Americans to criticize him, to write or speak negatively about him, even to joke about him.

Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I’ve seen a lot. I know the signs. The sleeping giant always remains asleep until some venality becomes so noxious, some action so disrespectful of the common good, some brutality so noisy, that he has no choice but to awaken.

And when he does, the good sense of the American people causes [the giant] to put an end to whatever it was that awakened him.

Ann Cox Richardson, an American historian with a pod-cast and Substack that’s followed by millions, said on YouTube in a posting called “The Tide Turned this Week” that she feels the same as Reich, while providing additional reasons. For example, she says more Americans have begun to realize:  that it’s not just “the worst of the worst” who are being targeted by ICE but also valued community members; that RFK Jr. is threatening our health with this attacks on science and the medical community; that there may be more to the Epstein files as his victims begin to speak out; that the American farmers who have long supported Trump are being devastated by tariffs and the loss of both documented and undocumented workers; and that the claw-back of federal funds has disproportionately affected rural districts making its largely Republican legislators reluctant to face their voters in town meetings.  

Cox believes that more Republicans as well as business owners are realizing that the best way to retain power or remain profitable is to stop siding with Trump’s MAGA agenda and that further cracks in his coalition will begin to show during the impeding government shut-down. But this is still a fairly small group; is enough of the American public really starting to rebel? 

This is where Nate Silver steps in. Silver has made a name for himself by “averaging” new national polls that (among other things) attempt to assess Trump’s public approval and disapproval. After the Kimmel brouhaha, Silver’s Trump approval averages dipped down fairly sharply, while his disapproval rating ticked up in the same degree.

So have we finally reached that moment where our views of everything-Trump have changed?

Reich argues that authoritarian over-reach has brought Trump to the point of no return.

Richardson piles health, economic and community concerns onto this conclusion.  

Silver’s polling data suggests that some or all of these factors have begun to move the dispproval needle.

From where I sit, I’d argue that more than any other thing it’s Trump’s failed attempt to cancel political comedy (and its free speech implications) that’s finally changed the public’s mind. 

It’s been commonly argued that Social Security is the third rail for the American public, placing in jeopardy anyone who dares to touch it. 

Well I think messing with political comedy is even more consequential in our snarky and cynical age. 

Because Trump can make fun of others but not himself, his long slide into powerlessness his finally begun–and it will only be hastened by the return of South Park–which provided a 20-minute capstone in these fateful days-after.  

As in: “Will Kyle [Broflovski’s Jewish] Mom Strike Gaza and Destroy a Palestinian Hospital?”

As I’ve tried to demonstrate above, the comedy that’s aimed at our politics today is off-limits to government censorship. 

So thank God the South Park guys took all the time they needed—when many feared they’d been cancelled too—to create another, near-perfect episode in what’s become this season’s favorite opera-buffa.  

The episode’s themes included (but were not limited to): 

1.    turning nearly everything in our play-oriented society into a gambling bet; 

2.    throwing “anti-semitism” around in an irresponsible manner to juice the gamblers’ emotions (all while the Jewish holidays are on-going, no less);

3.    Trump’s attempts to abort his “butt-baby” with Satan because (as JD Vance reminds him) having a baby around will be an intrusion on fun times at Mar-A-Lago, MAGA rallies, and sporting events;

4.    how the FCC’s chair (and Kimmel nemesis) Brendan Carr comes to suffer his own form of intestinal vengeance; and last but hardly least:

5.    how the wily J.D. is methodically scheming to keep his place in The Grand MAGA Succession.

It was a lot of comic ground to cover in what was, after all, just a third of an hour. But man-o-man, was I grateful to see it in a week that seemed to have more than the usual cavalcade of horrors from Trump world. 

In this week’s Carr-Vance storyline, here is the innocent-seeming JD entering Carr’s hospital room after Carr is mistakenly stricken with a cat-borne, brain-eating disease called “Toxoplasmosis”—funny in its own right given the way the administration treats health risks—after Carr gets caught up in one of Trump’s failed attempts to induce the abortion of his misbegotten child. 

This is FCC Chairman Carr siting in his own revenge while giving a frozen “Heil” as his little visitor approaches.

And finally this is JD, his expression transformed as he mutters to Carr the now infamous words that were also spoken to Kimmel’s broadcasters Disney, Nextar & Sinclair: 

Mr Carr, why do you keep melding in my plans? I have been trying to convince the boss to get rid of this baby. I am next in line to be president. This baby cannot be born. If you continue to interfere, I will make things very difficult for you. 

We can do this the easy way, or the hard way.

JD probably won’t be bragging about the pro-Choice stance he takes here, unlike like his lame attempt to neutralize his first appearance on South Park a few weeks ago. For that matter, it’s unlikely that Carr, Trump, “special advisor” Don Jr., or Benjamin Netanyahu will be bragging about their well-deserved man-handlings either. 

And last but hardly least: thank you South Park for your powerful & long-overdue shout-out to Jewish mothers everywhere as Kyle’s mom confronts Israel’s leader about his mishigas and the impacts it’s had on her.

More evidence (if we needed it) that things actually are taking a turn for the better.

This post was adapted from my September 28, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Will Our Comics Get the Last Laugh?

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The killing of Charlie Kirk—the MAGA Right’s golden boy & recruitment engine—continues to reverberate on the citizen-side of my brain.

It’s first echo was the sidelining of comic Jimmy Kimmel, but we probably share the worry that the next repercussion will be a death for a death. Kirk wouldn’t have wanted that, but it seems that there are too many disaffected boys waiting in their basements to be “called-into-action” for it to be otherwise.

I tried to react to Kirk’s murder in the ways that I needed to in last week’s We’ve Entered the Arsonist’s Age but I didn’t go far enough in capturing what Kirk embodied or in describing the brakes on political violence that exist today. It feels necessary to do both before more dominoes start to fall. 

So that’s where I’ll begin this morning, before getting to comedy’s ability to mobilize an opposition and inhibit those with Strongman tendencies.

Hanging over all of these themes is a sense of foreboding and menace, like in the photo above by Dane Manary. While part of America may still be at the beach, even more of the President’s warriors have started to engage.

+ + +

As with most consequential politicians, Charlie Kirk’s outreach defied easy judgment. His cheerfully engaging young people in conversation was admirably effective. Still, he dominated nearly every exchange with talking points he’d honed hundreds if not thousands of times before while his interlocutors often sounded like they were defending their views for the very first time. The Charlie Kirk show was often more respectful than cruel in part because those who’d brought him their questions would often make fools of themselves long before he fully engaged them. Nevertheless, his patience, resolve and “willingness to put himself out there time and time again” could be a marvel to behold. 

Less marvelous were Kirk’s “enemy lists” of woke professors (some who had done no more than proclaim their solidarity with Palestinian suffering or complained about concealed weapons laws on campus). They operated as rallying cries to his more ardent followers to harass and intimidate these academics, sometimes causing personal damage that far exceeded the parameters of any fair debate. Moreover, his tarring of whole groups also seemed more injurious than necessary to make his points about, say, immigrants, abortion or Black Lives Matter. 

I also want to say a bit more about “hate speech” in general, and incitement to violence in particular. 

Under the First Amendment, even the most hateful speech—like some of the words that danced on Kirk’s grave last week—are protected, because in and of themselves, they do not constitute violence however badly they make some listeners feel.  Decades of Supreme Court decisions say so, and whatever your view of the Court today, they are likely to stand.

Among other things, that means it’s likely illegal for employers to fire employees who took to their private social media accounts to say hateful things about Charlie Kirk (because Kirk’s supporters discovered where they worked and “doxed them” to their employers). Still, it can be a somewhat hollow victory because fired employees, like those “woke” professors before them, usually suffer their harms long before their First Amendment rights can be vindicated.

In other words, just because you have a right doesn’t mean it protects you in a timely manner. You may need to fight for many expensive years before some tribunal finds that its protection “applies to you”—a time lag and personal burden that menaces our current politics. That’s because: if a big enough minority of Americans and our most powerful leaders wish to exploit these realities, Constitutionally-guraranteed free speech will increasingly be “chilled” by threats causing harms long before the necessary debates can occur.

Moreover, when Kirk invited students to target their “woke” professors or Trump invited his angriest supporters to seek his preferred justice at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it’s been argued that they were illegally inciting their foot-soldiers to violence.  So what would it take for that charge to stick?

Last week, when I quoted Trump’s calling for “all of those” who were “responsible” for Kirk’s murder to be held accountable, he could only be found guilty of incitement if a court could infer “the intent to harm others” from his words, and some unhinged follower actually heeded his call and exacted some violent retribution in response. 

The leading Supreme Court case here is Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 44 (1969), and we all need to become more familiar with its two-part standard for liability given the confusing political noise around it today. For speech to constitute “incitement,” Brandenburg requires it to be (1) directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action and (2) likely to incite or produce such action. That means “inciting speech” loses First Amendment protection when the speaker intends to cause immediate violence and is, under the circumstances, likely to succeed in provoking it.

From where I sit as a lawyer, Trump’s speech to a mob of angry supporters he had called to Washington on January 6th met the legal definition of incitement to violence and should have been, but never was punished. Since he effectively “got away with it once,” he and his least temperate proxies are continuing to poke the tinderbox of Right-wing incitement to every grievance he expresses—because that’s the end of the political spectrum in America that’s bred the most violence in recent memory according to a study by the Cato Institute, a respected libertarian think tank. 

Which brings us to the fate of political comedy these days.

Nothing bites “the man who would be king” like ridicule. Luckily, some of our democratic institutions (like stand-up comedy) are still alive and kicking–at least for now.

Comedian, and Jimmy Kimmel’s fellow talk show host, Stephen Colbert gave what was likely the most effective comic response to Kimmel’s suspension from ABC in a brilliantly modified version of the “Be Our Guest” song and dance number from Disney’s “Beauty & the Beast” a few days ago. Not only did it skewer Trump’s vanity and vindictiveness, it also effectively pilloried Disney (as ABC’s owner) and its boss Bob Iger for allowing Kimmel’s censorship.

In addition, Trump undoubtedly noticed how some British “comedians” heralded his visit to the royals this week by projecting images of him with Jeffrey Epstein onto the walls of Windsor Palace while he was about to be indulged there. 

On the other hand, South Park’s “postponement” of the episode that was expected to run this week seemed more ominous. Even Colbert’s parody failed to bite as deeply into Trump’s image of himself as Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been managing, but the South Park franchise is also owned by a media conglomerate that’s run by the son of Trump buddy Larry Ellison, so some feared interference.

While South Park said they’d “run out of time” to wrap the episode, and it’s been reported that the guys wanted “to find the right tone and approach to addressing current events,” it was hard to escape the specter of more censorship, particularly in light of the show’s most recent storyline about Trump’s amorous relationship with Satan. It should also be noted that South Park parodied Charlie Kirk in an August episode (“Clyde Donovan destroys woke liberal students” etc.), though Kirk himself (almost alone among his post-mortem defenders) admirably said that he found his portrayal in the parody to be both “awesome” & “hilarious.” 

Perhaps the last word this week about comedy’s impact on would-be authoritarians came from one of the guests on this week’s Colbert show,  New Yorker editor David Remnick. Before leading the magazine, Remnick had been a reporter in the Soviet Union in the years when it was transitioning from Gorbachev’s glasnost to Putin’s rise. Tellingly, Remnick reminded us that Putin’s very first act upon becoming Russia’s new leader was to censor one of the country’s leading parodies, and eventually the entire network that had run this troublesome puppet show. Here’s a clip of Remnick’s timely comments. 

Among other things, this parallel between Putin and Trump 2.0 also is a reminder that it’s not just the comedian but also the broadcasting network (or conglomerate with its billionaire investors) that also play a key role in crackdowns on political comedy, especially when it’s hitting its marks most effectively. 

It was the possibility of reprisal by Trump’s Federal Trade Commission (FCC) that cowed Disney/ABC and is local affiliate conglomerates (Nextar and Sinclair) to pull Jimmy Kimmel off the air despite the non-existent First Amendment grounds for doing so. All of these companies have upcoming mergers that need FCC approval, and both Nextar and Sinclair need FCC authorization to buy more than the currently mandated maximum of affiliate television stations so they don’t “unfairly dominate” their particular markets. By kowtowing to Trump’s wishes in July (“Kimmel should be the next to go”), all three corportations hope to curry favor with the FCC and get any “problems” waived.

Moreover, media conglomerates and their billionaire investors will continue to play an outsized role in the censorship of comics in particular as well as in the reporting of “the news” more generally. Because while his ultimate aims may never be realized, the aforementioned Larry Ellison—who already is a major stakeholder (through his son) in CBS/Paramount, the company that recently cancelled Colbert’s contract for another year—is also looking to acquire CNN, HBO and a major stake in TikTok. As an essayist in the Times noted on Thursday: 

If all goes as anticipated, this tech billionaire, already one of the richest men in the world and a founder of Oracle, is poised, at 81, to become one of the most powerful media and entertainment moguls America has ever seen….

Along with his son, David, he could soon end up controlling a powerful social media platform, an iconic Hollywood movie studio and one of the largest content streaming services, as well as two of the country’s largest news organizations. Given Mr. Ellison’s friendship with, and affinity for, Donald Trump, an increasingly emboldened president could be getting an extraordinarily powerful media ally — in other words, the very last thing our country needs right now.

Once again, Ellison’s ambitions may never be realized, but the trend lines are clear. Almost all of our channels of information are controlled by billionaires who seem eager to do Trump’s bidding, either because they share his grievances or are willing to do whatever’s required to secure government backing for their business objectives. This also goes for Elon Musk and Twitter/X, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook/ Instagram, and Jeff Bezos with the Washington Post. Of these, Musk seems most aligned with Trump’s desire to crack down on speech that’s critical of his governance, though all have enormous incentives “to go along to get along” because they (along with their investors) want profits instead of battles over the First Amendment.

So will our American comics have the last laugh?

If we follow the Putin analogy, the only places where you can find Russian comics (or a free press) these days are in places like the Baltic states and the Netherlands. And whether you call them oligarchs or billionaires, both Putin and Trump prefer to surround themselves with men who manage large segments of their respective economies in the ways that they want them to be managed.

For America, that means getting the information (including the comedy) we both want and need may increasingly depend on whether folks like the Ellisons believe in a free press and appreciate the liberating qualities of political humor. 

This post was adapted from my September 21, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Using AI to Help Produce Independent, Creative & Resilient Adults in the Classroom

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I learned something that made me smile this week. 

An innovator at the leading edge of American education and technology (or “ed-tech”) named Steve Hargadon picked up on a thesis I’d advanced some time ago in “The Amish Test & Tame New Technologies Before Adopting Them & We Can Learn How to Safeguard What’s Important to Us Too” and applied it to the use of AI in our classrooms today.

For both better and worse, we’ve let marketers like Google (in search), Facebook (in social media), and Apple (in smart phones) decide how we integrate their products into our lives—usually by dropping them on top of us and letting each new user “figure it out.”

But instead of being left with the hidden costs to our privacy, attention and mental health, we could decide how to maximize their benefits and limit their likely harms before we get hooked on these products, the types of assessments that groups like the Amish always undertake —as another innovator in this space (Wired co-founder Kevin Kelly) noted several years ago.

To further the discussion about our use of technology generally and ed-tech in particular, I’ll briefly review the conclusions in my Test & Tame post and summarize a more recent one (“Will AI Make Us Think Less or Think Better”), before considering Hargadon’s spot-on proposals in “Intentional Education with AI: The Amish Test and Generative Teaching.”

The traditional Pennsylvania Amish work their farms and small businesses at a surprisingly short distance from Philadelphia. When I venture out of town for an outing it’s often to Lancaster County, where the car I’m in is quickly cheek-to-jowl with a horse and buggy, and families hang their freshly washed clothes on lines extending from back doors instead of cramming them into drying machines. It’s hard to miss their strikingly different take on the “modern conveniences” that benefit as well as burden the rest of us. What Kelly and others pointed out was that the Amish manage their use of marvels like cars or dryers as a community, instead of as individuals.

I described the difference this way:

As consumers, we feel entitled to make decisions about tech adoption on our own, not wishing to be told by anybody that ‘we can buy this but can’t buy that,’ let alone by authorities in our communities who are supposedly keeping ‘what’s good for us’ in mind. Not only do we reject a gatekeeper between us and our ‘Buy’ buttons, there is also no Consumer Reports that assesses the potential harms of [new] technologies to our autonomy as decision-makers, our privacy as individuals, or our democratic way of life — no resource that warns us ‘to hold off’ until we can weigh the long-term risks against the short-term rewards. As a result, we defend our unfettered freedom until we start discovering just how terrible our freedom can be.

By contrast, the Amish hold elaborate “courtship rituals” with a new technology before deciding to embrace some or all of its features—for example sharing use of the internet in a device that all can access when its needed INSTEAD OF owning your personal access via a smart phone you keep in your pocket. They reach a consensus like this from extensive testing of smart phone use & social media access within their community, appreciating over time its risks in terms of “paying attention” generally, or “self-esteem among the young” more particularly, before a gatekeeper (like a bishop) decides what, if any, accommodation with these innovations seems “good” for all.

The community’s most important values are key to arriving at this “testing & taming” consensus. The Amish openly question whether the next innovation will strengthen family and community bonds or cause users to abandon them. They wonder about things as “small & local” as whether a new technology will enable them to continue to have every meal of the day with their families, which is important to them. And they ask whether a phone or social media platform will increase or decrease the quality of family time together, perhaps their highest priority. The Amish make tech use conform to their values, or they take a pass on its use altogether. As a result,  

the Amish are never going to wake up one day and discover that a generation of their teenagers has become addicted to video games; that smartphones have reduced everyone’s attention span to the next externally-generated prompt; or that surveillance capitalism has ‘suddenly’ reduced their ability to make decisions for themselves as citizens, shoppers, parents or young people.

When I considered Artificial Intelligence’s impacts on learning last month, I didn’t filter the pros & cons through any community’s moral lens, as in: what would most Americans say is good for their child to learn and how does AI advance or frustrate those priorities? Instead, I merely juxtaposed one of the primary concerns about AI-driven chatbots in the classroom with one of their most promising up-sides. On the one hand, when an AI tool like ChatGPT effectively replaces a kid’s thinking with its own, that kid’s ability to process information and think critically quickly begins to atrophy. On the other hand, when resource-rich AI tutors are tailored to students’ particular learning styles, we’re discovering that these students “learned more than twice as much as when they engaged with the same content during [a] lecture…with personalized pacing being a key driver of success.”

We’re also realizing that giving students greater control over their learning experience through “personalized on-demand design” has:

allowed them to ask as many questions as they wished and address their personal points of confusion in a short period of time. Self-pacing meant that students could spend more time on concepts they found challenging and move quickly through material they understood, leading to more efficient learning….

Early experience with Ai-tutors has also changed the teacher’s role in the classroom. While individualized tutoring by chat-bots will liberate teachers to spend more time motivating students and being supportive when frustrations arise, 

our educators will also need to supervise, tweak and even design new tutorials. Like the algorithms that adapt while absorbing new data, they will need to continuously modify their interventions to meet the need of their students and maximize the educational benefits.

Admittedly, whether America’s teachers can evolve into supervisors and coaches of AI-driven learning in their classrooms—to in some ways, become “even smarter than [these] machines”— is a question “that will only be answered over time.”

Meanwhile, Steve Hargadon asks an even more fundamental question in his recent essay. Like the Amish, he wonders:

What is our most important priority for American students today, and how can these new, AI capabilities help us to produce the adutls that we want and that an evolving American community demands?

In what I call his “foggy window paintings,” photographer Jochen Muhlenbrink
finds the clarity through the condensation (here and above). I borrowed his inspiration
in a photo that I took of our back door one night a few years back (below).

Hargadon begins by acknowledging a lack of consensus in the American educational community, which startled me initially but which I (sadly) came to realize is all-too-true.

Unlike most Amish communities, American education is “a community of educators, students and stake-holders” in only the loosest sense. It’s also an old community, set in its ways, particularly when it comes to public education (or “the educating” that our tax dollars pay for). Writes Hargadon:

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: traditional schooling, despite promises of liberating young minds, has always excelled more at training compliance than fostering independent thinking. While we often claim otherwise, it’s largely designed to create standardized workers, not creative thinkers.

Unless we acknowledge this reality, we’ll miss what’s really at stake with AI adoption. Unexamined AI use in an unexamined education system will amplify these existing flaws, producing students who are even less self-directed and capable. The temptation for quick AI-generated answers, rather than wrestling with complex problems, threatens the very traits we want in our future adults: curiosity, agency, and resilience. (emphasis added)

If we examine the American education system and consider it as a kind of community, it quickly becomes apparent that it’s a much more diverse and divided in terms of its priorities than the Amish.

Moreover, because non-Amish Americans often seem to love their individual freedoms (including choosing “what’s good” for their children), more than the commitments they share (or what’s best for all), the American educational community has often seemed reluctant, if not resistant, to accepting the guidance or governance of a gate-keeper in their classrooms.

So while some of us prefer tech-tools that get students to the right answers (or at least the answers we’ll test for later), others prefer fostering a vigorous thinking process wherever it might lead. 

Hargadon, along with me and the AI-tutor developers I wrote about in July clearly prefer what he calls “generative teaching,” or building the curious and resilient free-agents that we want our future adults to be. So let’s assume that we can gather the necessary consensus around this approach—if not for the flourishing of our children generally, but because an increasingly automated job market demands curiosity, resilience and agency for the jobs that will remain. Then “the Amish test” can be put into practice when evaluating AI-tools in the classroom.

Instead of asking: Will this make teaching easier [for the teachers]?
Ask: Will this help students become more creative, self-directed, and capable of independent thought?

Instead of asking: Does this improve test scores?
Ask: Does this foster the character traits and thinking skills our students will need as adults?

With their priorities clear, parents and students (along with American education’s many other stakeholders) would now have a “test” or “standard” with which to judge AI-driven technologies. Do they further what we value most, or divert us from a goal that we finally share?

To this dynamic, Hargadon adds a critical insight. While I mentioned the evolving role of today’s teachers in the use of these tools, he proposes “teaching the framework” to students as well. 

Help students apply their own Amish Test to AI tools. This metacognitive skill—thinking about how they think and learn—may be more valuable than any specific technology…

[By doing so,] students learn to direct technology rather than be directed by it. They develop the discernment to ask: ‘How can I use this tool to become a better thinker, not just get faster answers?

When this aptitude finally becomes engrained in our nation’s classrooms, it may (at last) enable Americans to decide what is most important to us as a country—the commitments that bind us to one another, and not just the freedoms that we share—so we can finally start testing & taming our next transformational technology on how it might unify the American people instead of divide us.

For the past 4 months, I’ve been reporting on the state of American democracy’s checks & balances because nothing should be more important to our work as citizens than the continuing resilience of our democratic institutions. And while I assumed there might be some “wind-down” in executive orders and other actions by the Trump White House in the last few weeks of August, the onslaught in areas big & small continued to challenge our ability to respond to each of them in any kind of thoughtful way.

Other than mentioning this week’s bombing of an unidentified vessel in the the Gulf of Mexico; threat of troops to Chicago, Baltimore and New Orleans; turmoil at the Centers for Disease Control; immigration raid on a massive EV plant in Georgia; more urging that Gaza should be turned into the next Riviera; the president’s design of a new White House ballroom; and Vladimir Putin’s repudiation of America’s most recent deadline on Ukraine, Trump’s leadership today faces 2 crossroads that may be even more worthy of your consideration.

At the Department of Labor in Washington D.C. this week

1.    What we’re seeing & hearing is either a fantasy or a preview.

In a subscriber newsletter from the New York Times this week, columnist Jamelle Bouie writes:

The administration-produced imagery in Washington is… a projection of sorts — a representation of what the president wants reality to be, drawn from its idea of what authoritarianism looks like. The banners and the troops — not to mention the strangely sycophantic cabinet meetings and news conferences — are a secondhand reproduction of the strongman aesthetic of other strongman states. It is as if the administration is building a simulacrum of authoritarianism, albeit one meant to bring the real thing into being. No, the United States is not a totalitarian state led by a sovereign Donald Trump — a continental Trump Organization backed by the world’s largest nuclear arsenal — but his favored imagery reflects his desire to live in this fantasy.

The spectacle that falsifies reality is nevertheless a real product of that reality, while lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it,’ the French social theorist Guy Debord wrote in his 1967 treatise ‘The Society of the Spectacle,’ a work that feels especially relevant in an age in which mass politics is as much a contest to construct meaning as it is to decide the distribution of material goods.

2.    Trump seems to be dealing with everything but “pocketbook issues”—or (in James Carville’s famous words during the 1992 presidential election), “It’s the economy, stupid.”

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that after trending up in June and July, consumer sentiment dropped nearly 6% in August according to the University of Michigan’s “closely watched” economic sentiment survey. “More U.S. consumers now say they’re dialing down spending than when inflation spiked in 2022,” the article says. “Over 70% of people surveyed from May to July plan to tighten their budgets for items with large price increases in the year ahead….”

In a rejoinder, columnist Karl Rove mentioned a new WSJ/National Opinion Research Center poll that shows “voters are sour about their circumstances and pessimistic about the future.” As we head into the fall and towards the mid-terms next year, Rove opines: “It’ll take a lot more than happy talk” to counter these impressions. “People must see positive results when they shop, fuel up their cars, deposit paychecks and glance at their retirement accounts.”

As of this week, there is no sign that any plan for economic stability or growth is on the horizon, forecasting even more contentious, unsettling & expensive times ahead.

This post was adapted from my September 7, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

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