David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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Short Stack of Interesting (dog-days edition)

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It’s a testament to the discombobulation of too many August days that I outlined this newsletter on Friday, deleted all the underlying materials, and then forget to save these marching orders so I could pick up where I left off on Saturday—that is, yesterday.

So much for a turn-key newsletter.

But after rummaging around in my laptop’s trash can, I recovered the best bits, dusted them off & present them below.

Short Stack of Interesting is an occasional series that features stories, points of view & images that caught my attention & lingered there long enough that I began to suspect that you might find them interesting too.

1.    Waterfront Living in Holland

The image up top & those immediately below are of some of the homes that hundreds of Dutch families have built on strips of land that were left from centuries of peat mining. For many of us, living on or close to the water is something of a dream, particularly at this time of year. To my mind, these homes embody that dream more fully than most.

In the Loosdrecht Lakes region of the Netherlands, peat extraction for use as fuel began in the Middle Ages and expanded significantly from the 16th Century onwards. Thin embankments were left between the excavated trenches which filled with water over time. Today these proximities have been transformed into one of the Netherlands’ premier destinations for water sports (think sailing, kayaking and paddle-boarding) as well as waterfront living. Turning a centuries-old industrial landscape into a thriving community highlights the Dutch ability to adapt their “low (below sea-level) country” and to its ever-inundating waters in an enviable way.

2.    Nature Finds a Way

For some reason, my social media feeds have been filled with clips of giant tortoises being given back-scratches by zookeepers and pet (?) owners. I probably started watching them because I never once suspected that these incredible creatures could feel something like a scratch through their shells, but apparently they can, enjoying the sensation tremendously.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by another giant tortoise story, this one involving 2 from a species on the critically endangered list, improbably named “Mommy” and “Abrazzo,” who recently gave birth to sixteen (!!!) hatchlings at the Philadelphia Zoo despite the fact that both parents are estimated to be in the neighborhood of 100 years old, and Mommy is a first- time mom. The full story is told on the Zoo’s website.

These days, where even zoos have become controversial places for (say) keeping animals like elephants who need larger habitats in order to thrive, we sometimes forget that these institutions have also evolved, becoming incubators for creatures that face extinction in the wild. My hometown zoo has always been one of my favorite local destinations & this story was a reminder that I need to get over there to spend some quality time with one of its newest families. 

3.    Former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy Talks About an Essential Book

As last year ended and this one began, the Wall Street Journal  invited an array of public and non-public figures to discuss the books they’d read in the previous year. I zoomed in on Kennedy’s comments because he played a unique role in the Supreme Court’s rulings over thirty years, from 1988 to 2018. During that era, Kennedy was the crucial “swing vote” in a vast majority of the Court’s 5-4 rulings on cases involving gay rights, abortion and the death penalty (where he sided with the so-called “liberal” bloc of justices), but even more frequently where he enabled the “conservative” bloc, as in Citizens United vs.the Federal Election Commission, where Kennedy wrote for the Court that prohibiting independent expenditures by corporations & unions violated the First Amendment’s protection of free speech in political contexts. Notwithstanding the outsized impact that Citizens United has had on the role that money plays in American politics, Kennedy’s voice was always a thoughtful & measured one, making his “outside” reading of more than a little interest to me. 

In his end of the year comments, Kennedy mentioned a single book,  Victor Davis Hanson’s “The End of Everything,” which he described as a “stunning account of four ancient wars that destroyed entire civilizations.” It chronicles how Thebes (in Ancient Greece), Carthage (during the rise of Rome), Constantinople (in 1453) and the Aztec empire (facing the Spanish conquistadors) weren’t undone by military power alone but also by “their gradual relinquishing of the civic virtues and adherence to the rule of law that had allowed them to flourish in the first place.” In other words, their civilizations had been undermined from within before any of them were felled by foreign invaders. 

In this light, Kennedy sees 21st Century America as a cautionary tale. 

We must not assume that liberty will perpetuate itself or that institutions will function without the trust and discipline of those they serve. The ancient world teaches us that decline rarely arrives suddenly. It accumulates in small abandonments of responsibility and mutual respect. ‘The End of Everything’ instructs us that the preservation of our democracy requires constant attention to the norms of civility, respect for lawful authority and a shared commitment to the dignity of every individual. We are not destined to follow in the paths of the societies Mr. Hanson writes about, nor are we destined to avoid them; it is our duty to take conscious steps to preserve freedom in our present day and secure it for generations yet to come.

A mid-term election in November or our next presidential election (even if both end well) won’t address the vulnerabilities that are undermining our way of life here today. Kennedy argues that only a wider and deeper revitalization of our basic commitments can reduce the civilizational risks that America faces.

4.    Shopping Plus History in a Striking New Supermarket

Traveling in Europe is a near constant reminder of a deeper human past than can easily be glimpsed closer to home. European’s also have a greater respect for their histories, something I’m always lamenting as Philadelphia tears down yet another historical building. 

So I was delighted by the story of a new supermarket in central Dublin that made multiple archeological discoveries during its initial excavation work. The developers discovered not only an 11th-century structure dating back to Ireland’s Viking era but also the remnants of an 18th-century Georgian theater. Instead of relocating their findings, they made the innovative decision to preserve the ruins in place, installing glass panels throughout the supermarket so shoppers can see their City’s deep historical roots while they move down the aisles.

When I visited Rome almost ten years ago, I spent part of my last day at the upscale Rinacente department store, where the basement level showcases the layers of Roman history that were uncovered while building that store. Unfortunately, the picture I took at the time of the ruins failed to capture the time-travel of moving from the top floor cafe through six floors of Italian fashion & design and down to the ancient streets below as successfully as this extraordinary approach in a Dublin supermarket.

5.    Who Gets My Collections When I’m Gone?

Baseball cards. Rocks. Shells. Paintings. Prints. Five of these. Seven of those. From the first collections that began when you bent down to fetch something that caught your eye at the beach or during a walk in the woods, sometimes the collecting bug never ends—even when you start wondering what will become of all of these accumulated treasures once you’re gone.

The Times did a thoughtful piece on the sad fate of most collections a few years back. It began with the following testimony from someone at an auction house who constantly hears the complaints of the unfortunate “heirs” who now have to dispose of all of these “treasures.”

More times than I can remember, a spouse or child has said to me, ‘If he wasn’t dead, I’d kill him all over again for leaving me with this mess.

So if you respect not only your inheritors but also the time & enjoyment you gained from your collecting, you’ll want to catalog your treasures in your will, as well as indicating what’s to be done with them once you’re gone.

It’s not really about doing it for the sake of the money, but it’s making sure that the responsible stewardship of your collection extends beyond your life.

That stewardship can mean different things for different people. For one guy who’s collected Superman memorabilia, he’ll trade his funeral (“a total waste of money”) for an invitation to his friends to browse his collection and take what they want.

If I were to die tomorrow, I would like to think that all of them would not mind having a Superman action figure of mine to keep to remember me by.

Others of us would simply prefer that our treasures not end up in a garage sale. Once again, it’s a matter of respect for the time & energy that we’ve spent on them. Collectors know the places where they’ve bought their favorite things & the folks who inherit our collections should be told about them too, as well as what items were worth when we purchased them & what they might fetch tomorrow. 

And if your rocks or shells will never be scooped up by a natural history museum, find a boy or girl who has the collector’s glint in their eyes and pass on your treasures for the enjoyment of a kindred spirit. When I was a kid, I got more than one treasure from collectors who’d identified an earlier version of themselves.

There are several ways to give your collections a respectable home when you’re gone—but as with so many other things, you’ll need to do some thinking about how you’ll be providing them with a new home. 

6.    The Friendliness of Objects

I’m going to drill a bit deeper into our relationship with things with an assist from Alan Jacobs & his Homebound Symphony newsletter. Some months ago, Jacobs elaborated upon philosopher Roger Scruton’s observations about traditions that we’ve maintained for centuries that involve repairing valued objects—traditions that are (sadly) fading away in our throw-away-the-old-one-just-buy-a-new-one culture. According to Scruton:

Repair was not so much a habit as an honoured custom. People respected the past of damaged things, restored them as though healing a child and looked on their handiwork with satisfaction. In the act of repair, the object was made anew, to occupy the social position of the broken one….

The custom of repair was not confined to the home. Every town, every village, had its cobbler, its carpenter, its wheelwright and its smith. In each community people supported repairers, who in tum supported things….

The truth is that repair, like every serious social activity, has its ethos, and when that ethos is lost, no amount of slap-dash labour can make up for it. The person who repairs must love the broken object, and must love also the process of repair and all that pertains to it.

(In a similar spirit, a post of mine from six years ago called “August’s Repair Shop,”  elaborated on how Japan embraces traditions of repairing treasured articles of clothing, reliable storage vessels & favorite cups or bowls through sashiko, staple repair & kintsugi—so there must be something about “restoration” and this time of year for me.)

Anyway, Jacobs goes on to make an interesting leap from repairing broken things out of the love for a “friend” to repairing much larger things (also out of friendship), like our education systems or our democracies.

I am greatly taken by the way Scruton frames the work of repair here, especially the idea that the impulse to repair arises from and is sustained by love — and that the particular form of love at work here is friendship. By repairing the things of this world we exhibit friendship towards them — and they become friends to us in return. 

People need things, and things need people.

The critical moment of their mutual support is the moment of breakdown…. We get angry at broken things, and want to throw them out — and this impulse often governs us even when the broken thing is not a car or a drain but democracy or education…

But what if we were to think not that our [democracy or our] education has betrayed us but rather that its need is greater than ours? What if we were to think that towards even something so vast and complex we have the obligations of friendship? 

And, if we meet those obligations, perhaps we could even enjoy the benefits of friendship.

(I wrote another related post more recently, “Our Work Includes Repairing the Commons of Public Life,” with “the commons” being spaces we hold in common—like parks or sidewalks—collectively sharing them in hopefully unselfish ways while benefitting from their use.)

Thinking about valued objects as well as traditions and even “our ways of life” as friends that we’re obliged to maintain & repair so that we can benefit from their use going forward may just be the beginning of the solution to some of our most existential problems today.

7.    The Great Green Wall of the Sahara

I’ll end today on an aspirational note with another story about the obligations & benefits of friendship–this time regarding people who are struggling to live a half a world away.

We hear a great deal about environmental calamities these days but (it sometimes seems) much less about human beings taking environmental responsibility for the places they call home.

I collect tribal art from African countries that are impacted by the Sahara so I follow developments in these countries, including recent reports of the more than 60,000 refugees from this region overwhelming the Spanish enclave of Ceuta last month, Russian mercenaries weakening the government of Mali, and violence from radical Islamic rebels that plagued eastern Nigeria earlier this year. But despite this region’s challenges (and those in the eastern Sahel, like the ongoing war in Sudan), what remains of the global community is also supporting an ambitious project to halt the march of the Sahara desert and reclaim arable land that’s being lost.

The U.N.-sponsored Green Great Wall initiative aims at restoring 100 million hectares of already degraded land, improving food security for residents, creating green jobs, and helping communities adapt to climate change.  In other words, it is rebuilding local ecosystems, with millions of hectares—a single hectare being just under 2 1/2 acres—already restored.

Pie in the sky?

While funding bottlenecks, high seedling mortality due to drought, and political instability have stalled the initiative at 20 to 30% completion since its inception in 2007, the initiative continues to advance in many areas, testifying to the resourcefulness of its managers at a time when the availability of farmable land may be the single most important factor in stabilizing local populations & averting an even graver immigration crisis than countries in the northern hemisphere have experienced thus far.  

The necessary response isn’t higher border walls and mass deportations that are turning wealthier countries into police states, but supporting projects like this one that enable local communities to sustain themselves so that those who live there aren’t desperate to leave, and reasonable border security can be restored by destination countries. 

We hear too much about the immigrant crack-downs & not nearly enough about the often heroic efforts that are being made today to address mass migration’s root causes. The Green Great Wall is one of them, and August may be the best time of year to contemplate the work of our friendlier angels instead of the blame that’s being asigned by our fallen ones.

This post was adapted from my August 16, 2026 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.

We Can’t Turn Our Backs on Coming Together

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This weekend, when America celebrates its 250th year, it seems harder (than maybe ever in that momentous arc) to join with our fellows, to encounter strangers, to press the flesh, to come together in person as a diverse yet divided people.

There are reasons of course. 

If the World Cup visitors to America have taught us anything, it’s that we’re an unbelievably rich country, with super-sized comforts in shopping, eating & living compared to our European, African & Latin American guests. 

True, they have not made a beeline for our pockets of poverty, so the impressions they’ve been touting have been about our spaciousness, convenience & abundance. As hosts for a global stadium party, our good fortune has also found us to be far more kind & welcoming than the foreign news had reported, indeed, almost the farthest thing from hostile to strangers, violent in our interactions, or embarrassing in our narrow-mindedness.

But the spaciousness, convenience, abundance & comfort of our American lives also portend a darker side that our guests were never warned about & likely missed as they explored our star-spangled delights. In spite of all our warm welcomes, too many of us are increasingly turning our backs on one-another & withdrawing into ourselves. 

Let’s begin with the weather. 

In my lifetime, I’ve never experienced a stretch of 100+ degree days where the humidity pushed the threshold of discomfort to 110 or higher. So instead of mixing with July 4th revelers this weekend (and there are still many in this “Birthplace of Democracy”), I’m cocooned in air-conditioning instead of sweating my way to the celebration of two-and-a-half-centuries with Philadelphians I already know & the tens of thousands I could be meeting. 

When I got to this City as a student, I was surprised to learn that folks living in the suburbs never visited Philadelphia, never came in on New Years Day to march besides the Mummers, or be wowed on the 4th by explosions of fireworks over Boat House Row. Today, even more “stay away,” satisfying any urge to “join in” by watching a news clip on TV or a home-made video someone who actually went posts on Facebook. If we participate at all, it’s increasingly from behind our screens. 

Meanwhile, the counter-narrative of the World Cup is fans traveling here from all over the world to be together with other fans and the fans of rival teams, because there is nothing quite like experiencing a much-anticipated event with a rambunctious horde of new friends and crowd-seekers. The quest for summertime connection may also be driven by a very different response to “climate control” almost everywhere else in the world. The wide-spread lack of air-conditioning drives non-Americans from their over-heated domiciles onto the streets, making encountering their fellow inhabitants less of a choice and more a fact of daily life. 

(The picture above captures the human immersiveness of a World Cup game from the stands at France’s first match with Senegal in South Philadelphia. As for the openness & fascination of visitors like these, my local paper featured a funny story this week about some French fans encountering the wonders of Philly that fewer of us natives actually get out to experience “live & in person”)

It was the interactions of fans, teams & rivals that seemed so exhilarating & elemental in Liverpool’s 2005 Champions League game against AC Milan in Istanbul that I couldn’t say enough about in my May 24 post, before comparing the potency of that fan-team mind-meld with the collective conviction of protestors when they take to the streets about a cause that almost everybody out there feels passionate about: “‘Taking it to the streets’ creates a solidarity among protesters that is no less powerful than the one established between the Liverpool squad & its fans.”   

Moreover, at the same time that first-person, embodied encounters are being celebrated by some, social animals everywhere are being confronted with new ways that LIVE experience is being priced-out-of-range for all but the few who can afford to follow their teams fortunes in a widely dispersed string of World Cup matches, or to make it inside the Garden on June 10th when the Knicks finally won the NBA finals (before some of the delirious fans pictured below). Going forward, “location ticket pricing” (or “how much” a particular market can bear) will keep fans with lighter wallets in front of their screens at home, a medium which can only approximate “the once in a lifetime experience” of being part of a throbbing crowd of fellow-travelers assembled for an all-consuming purpose.

Meanwhile, after a year which saw violent confrontations in cities like Minneapolis (involving ICE) and on college campuses (involving Gaza), there’s the additional risk that more Americans who disagree with their political foes are becoming too afraid to put their bodies behind their convictions, saving their Bronx cheers for closeted exchanges on Facebook or behind the curtains of a ballot box. But the right to peaceably assemble is enshrined in our Constitution’s Bill of Rights because something vital about America’s democracy is lost when the passions of its citizens are kept behind closed doors or limited to key-stroke-driven rants. 

What becomes of the America we toast this weekend—indeed, of democracies everywhere—when fewer & fewer citizens engage with one another with their voices, spit, sweat & actual bodies, preferring the comfortable distance of their air-conditioned phones to those kinds of visceral & life-giving engagements?

A wave of fans after the Knicks recent win in New York City.

In one of her cautionary posts about America’s milestone birthday, WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan listed 3 things that we’ll need “to get to our 300th”—the first two being “the grit and guts” of our nation’s pioneers & “a deeply rooted faith in God”—but she spent the lion’s share of her essay on her third observation, “what I think of as embodiment, the presence of [Americans] with other human beings.”

Noonan goes on to say a lot that’s worth repeating about it.

We were made to be alive together, to help each other, inform each other, cheer each other on. And to resist the temptation to detachment….[W]e need each other to survive, to flourish.

About the Knicks march to victory in NYC, she says a startling but true thing that clearly comes from her own, direct experience of that outpouring:

the whole city was alive and felt not like a virtual city but a real one…[T]he most wonderful thing was to see so many young people witnessing a city many had never seen, one bound by shared life, not just shared interests….They weren’t trying to record the experience, they were having it.

It seemed “a first,” of course, because of the rise of smart phones and the doldrums of the recession, both of which were topped off by the pandemic’s isolation. And while it’s not a foregone conclusion, artificial intelligence seems likely to make us turn even deeper into ourselves, communing with the AI-driven bots & agents that will make our lives even more comfortable, convenient, and, in-some-ways, even more blessed than they were before.

What is to be feared is a slow-motion migrating of human need away from other humans and toward AI, which has deeper hooks than other screen technologies. Television was passive, social media created the illusion of connection and delivered performance, but AI talks to you, remembers, is endlessly available, patient and undemanding….

AI will come to imitate consciousness to the point it thinks it has it—and you will too. It will think it has a soul and ‘develop’ a soul and fool people with its depth. AI systems will in time be fully trained on the entire record of human history, consciousness, feeling and art and literature and faiths. It will process its own states in a way that resembles reflection. It will very much seem to have an inner life. It will do as it is trained and, in the end, it will generate something that walks and talks like a soul.

Because Noonan’s right about this, of course, she argues that “[t]he next 50 years will require a committed will toward reality and not illusion.” 

The “us” she has in mind includes you & me, but even more so our children’s and our grand-children’s ability to maintain their “will toward reality,” when, in some tangible ways, the ubiquity of their screens have been offering-them-up far less of “the real world.”  So instead of their becoming anxious girls (failing to achieve the perfect lives, skin, bodies  & clothes of their influencers), or insecure boys (who are trying “to max out their masculinity” in the face of taunts from the manosphere). we should all be asking ourselves whether their “real life” role-models are giving them “the grit & determination” they’ll need to keep themselves grounded.

The final point that Noonan made was easily as worrisome.

Because she sat at the elbow of a president in her formative years, Noonan has experienced the push & pull of the Body Politic in our restive, hard-to-please democracy in ways that most of us have not. (One of her first jobs was being a speech writer for Reagan, crafting many of that vaunted communicator’s most memorable lines.)  So I suspect that Noonan knows more than most about the likely impact on the health of our democracy should Americans withdraw in even greater numbers from the immediacy of fractious public life.

In terms of political continuance, the democratic process ultimately depends on a kind of shared witnessing. It requires bodies, minds and souls that are present, can see each other, read each other, join together—

(and to continue her thought), engage with one another as fully as they are in the stands when their World Cup or championship basket ball team is out there, representing them, in another kind of high-stakes face-off.

The New Haven Green, May 1. 1970.

When I think back, there were two early occasions when I witnessed democracy in action like this, and both were startling in their vitality & impact.

Towing the line almost too enthusiastically in high school, I only skipped classes one time, as my junior year drew to a close, when I traveled with friends in a suddenly available convertible to attend a protest rally that was happening on New Haven’s “Green” (or central, grass-covered square) a few miles away.

In May 1970, the Black Panther Party was protesting the on-going trial of Bobby Seale, Erika Huggins & others in a courthouse facing that Green. I gained a wealth of impressions that day, but none more lasting than of the conversations that were animatedly on-going among the Panthers weaving their way through their supporters, opponents or simply-curious New Englanders who had turned out for the day. The exchanges were happening everywhere. 

I still remember thinking: in what other country on the face of this earth could a band of high schoolers venture out to over-hear the snippets of a dozen conversations with members of a group like the Black Panther Party?  In the wake of the Sixties, there were many sides to the American story that was playing out, and this was one of the places where they were given voice.

My second experience was more vicarious—I was outside the U,S, this time—but nearly as impactful.

During the “summer of peace” that followed the 1993 Oslo Accords, I was out for a night of eating & sight-seeing somewhere in Jerusalem with my family when we happened upon a protest between two or more Israeli political factions. Being unable to either read or understand Hebrew, I couldn’t say then and can’t say now what they were disagreeing about, or what their signs & banners said, but their confrontation was as emotionally intense & engaged as any encounter I had ever seen. 

Spit. Sweat. Megaphones. Physicality to the point of chaos. All compressed in a too small tinderbox where several ancient streets came together.  How much was an exchange of views and how much simply venting?—it was impossible to tell. I can still see the yeowling, contorted faces, and remember thinking back that day to what I’d always heard about Israel on the Nightly News back home: “We protect Israel because Israel is the only democracy in its part of the world.” This, I realized, was a big part of what we were protecting.

For the second time in my life, I was understanding that the right to peaceably assemble is part of the life-blood of all true democracies, and I’ve had many more reminders since.

We may need one another most when we disagree, but we need one another all the time. One of the most consequential challenges for our country is for us to keep affirming, with our bodies, the strength of those mutual bonds. 

This post was adapted from my July 5, 2026 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.

Why Reveal Our Ugliest Truths?

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Investigative journalist Seymour (“Sy”) Hersh is a complicated man. 

88 years old today, his career has been a testament to his courage, tenacity and outrage, believing America could only get better if the dark recesses that our government is always hell-bent on covering-up could be exposed to the light of his story-telling.

His half-century of revelations have extended from the massacre of over 500 villagers, including babies and pregnant women, in My Lai during the Vietnam War in 1968 (in order to contribute “body counts” that our military leaders at the time felt they needed for their press briefings), to the first person accounts and shattering cellphone images of Iraqis being tortured by American interrogators and their dogs at the secret Abu Ghraib prison in 2004.

Along the way, Hersh also revealed the illegal bombing of neutral Cambodia during the Vietnam War; how the Committee to Re-elect the President paid “hush money” to those on trial for the Watergate break-in; how the CIA, in violation of its charter, “conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States”; and that same CIA’s illicit and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to breed their own Manchurian Candidate through the use of LSD.

He also got things wrong over the years. For example, he believed Syria’s Bashar al-Assad’s denials about using chemical weapons against his own people in 2013, saying (with more than a little defiance) in a recent interview:

I saw him two, or three, or four times, and I didn’t think he was capable of doing what he did, period. Is it an example of getting too close to power? Of course. What else is it? I never thought he was Mother Theresa, but I thought he was ok. If I have made the claim in prior interviews that I was perfect, I would now withdraw it.

And even more recently, in 2023, Hersh relied on a single source, who turned out to be unreliable, for his charge that the CIA had collaborated with Norway to blow up the North Stream pipeline that was providing Russian gas to Germany (“So what? So what? Legitimate criticism. Absolutely.”) 

But, the cranky, defensive, indomitable, paranoid and often funny Hersh is still at it today, with a Substack that of course he calls “It’s Worse Than You Think.”

What I wanted to know is: Does Pulizer-Prize winning, muck-raking journalism like his really matter any more? And perhaps even more importantly: What drives someone to do it in the first place?

For example, we seem so much more resigned in our cynicism about our government today. In 1968, a so-called Silent Majority of Americans seemed to believe “the best” about our country, while only a fringe of young people, long-hairs and counter-culture reporters like Hersh were intent on decrying “the dark side.”  These days, after 50+ years of exposés, our hearts barely flutter as the next outrage becomes normalized almost as soon as it is flagged. 

The current administration also challenges this kind of “truth-telling” in a couple of novel ways.

It barrages the public with so many outrages that one’s focus on one of them is quickly eclipsed by its successor. It’s an attention-span issue surely, but also a bottomless pit. Even if another Hersh were able to connect-all-the-dots and establish culpability for one outrage, whoever’s tuned-in may feel hopeless & resigned instead of righteous & emboldened by the time he/she gets to the punchline. 

Moreover, while all governments want to hide their dirty laundry, the current one almost succeeds in making that impulse into a kind of virtue. For example, many Americans seem convinced when our president publicly proclaims that it is somewhere between unpatriotic to traitorous to acknowledge our history of discrimination, our economic reliance on slavery until the Civil War, our dispossession of native Americans, and the like because “everybody” wants to be uplifted “by the best in our past.” Effectively making new disclosures about bad things disfavored as a matter of public policy is fairly unprecedented in American history, except during wartime.

The further application of this “patriotic outlook” has been to erect higher barriers of secrecy and to impose harsher punishments for unauthorized disclosures by government insiders during Trump 2.0. In some ways this is just the public enshrinement of a phenomenon that’s been a truth throughout the entire Hersh era, namely, that the only ones who usually end-up being held accountable in the course of an exposé are the confidential sources and whistle-blowers.  Still, the public firings of inspectors general in nearly all governmental bodies & restricting the access for journalists in, say, the Pentagon, make the risks assumed for the sake of claiming an overwhelmed public’s awareness seem even more daunting these days.

So if that’s the case, what motivates Hersh and other investigative journalists to crawl around in our government’s most fetid basements to uncover “what’s really been going on” for the sake of a healthy democracy?

In Sy Hersh’s case, I sought the answer in a couple of recent profiles and in one long, hindsight look into his career. 

A half a year ago, two other investigative journalists (Laura Poitras & Mark Obenhaus) released an engrossing & provocative documentary called “Cover Up” about Hersh’s remarkable career. Among other things, it was short-listed for this year’s Oscars. Here’s a link to its trailer on Netflix. 

Poitras may be known to you as the award-winning journalist and filmmaker behind “Citizenfour” (about Edward Snowden’s exposure of the government’s mass surveillance) as well as “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” (about Nan Goldin’s activism during the AID’s epidemic and her fight to expose the Sackler family’s complicity in the opioid crisis) which she co-directed with Obenhaus. In addition, I caught Poitras’s On the Media interview this week, and Obenhaus’s interview in the Times in February, both about Sy Hersh and his groundbreaking work.

Meanwhile, another attempt to sum-up Hersh’s investigative accomplishments and occasional failures was provided in 2018 by Matthew Ricketson in an Inside Story essay. 

From these viewpoints and some leaping-to-my-own-conclusions, I’ll try to resolve what makes someone like Hersh do what he does, and why such work matters today as much—if not more—than ever.

This is the young Sy Hersh after he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book “MyLai 4: A Report on the Massacre and its Aftermath.

“For-the-sake-of-democracy” arguments are the ones repeated most often to extoll the virtues of investigative journalism in this country. Of course, such arguments require enough citizens who are: paying attention to that reporting, able to reach a judgment about what they’ve learned, and willing to do something about it if it violates their norms, including voting against it or otherwise registering their dissent. 

Even though by some counts there may be fewer such engaged citizens today, it seems fair to conclude that whatever else was accomplished by last weekend’s No Kings rallies, at least the 8 million Americans who took to the streets are probably ringing those engagement bells today. 

Hersh, of course, has always stood squarely with those who dare “to speak truth to power,” in that sadly over-used phrase. For her part, Laura Poitras doesn’t see government secrecy, abuses of power, and vindictiveness towards sources as much different today than they have always been. Nor are investigative journalists less fearless today. Instead, she describes one perennial problem that separates the more institutional media from what she views as the far more impactful muckrakers like Hersh, along with a worrisome shift in who controls the mass media itself today as opposed to in the 1960s.

The shortcoming in her view is that too many of today’s journalists fail to describe what their reporting uncovers in a clear and honest way, leaving the far-too-common impression that they are merely government mouthpieces. For instance, if it’s torture, don’t call it “enhanced interrogation techniques” as if there were some kind of science involved. She also decries the coverage of Gaza when reporters try to make the situation palatable to everyone.

What we’re seeing in Gaza, how can we look at a population that’s being starved and civilians being bombed for two years and not call it a genocide? I just think we have to use the words that we know to describe what is happening. The erosion of trust in the media is because the public often feels lied to. They feel lied to by their government, and they feel that the press is also part of the lying.

She’s also more worried about corporate developments affecting today’s journalism than any shortage of investigative reporters today.

Currently, I’m very concerned about the capitulation of large media organizations to government pressure. Both the settlement around 60 Minutes, and Paramount and ABC not fighting for the First Amendment, I think, is the biggest threat we’re seeing. That’s coming from institutions, not from journalists doing their jobs.

But Sy Hersh never fit comfortably within corporate media, famously leaving the New York Times after his own coverage of preferential loans being received by an American business conglomerate during the 1980’s bumped up against the reality of similar loans being accepted by members of Times’ management. As a result, for the entirety of his career, Hersh has regularly gone outside & around the System for his “truths” instead of through it. 

For example, rejecting the pre-packaged sound bites his colleagues were receiving in the Pentagon briefing room during Vietnam, Hersh would listen for the idle remark in casual conversations with insiders far outside of it, finding the scent of the My Lai massacre when he heard one source say: “Well, it’s murder incorporated over there,” and then wondering like a bloodhound what was behind that tossed-off comment.

But his cultivation of sources and careful listening were only the start of it. One reviewer of the “Cover-Up” documentary commented on both “the obsessiveness” and “the painstakingness” (or doggedness & discipline to do the necessary digging) that makes an investigative journalist like Hersh “in the behavioral sense.”  At the same time, another reviewer was surprised by how reluctant Hersh has always been to put himself into his stories

Restless, kinetic, energized by the word no, he’s quick to recite the facts and loath to put himself in the story. ‘In case anyone cares, this is less and less fun,’ he says [around the mid-point of “Cover-Up”] in what appears to be two sit-down interviews at his home office, surrounded by mountains of faded yellow legal pads.

Perhaps it’s the reluctance to become any kind of celebrity in his own right that most distinguishes him from the other “most famous” investigative journalist of his age—Bob Woodward. After all it was Woodward & his pal Bernstein who not only broke the first Watergate story but who were also portrayed in “All the President’s Men” by no less than Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Ricketson’s Inside Story profile is particularly insightful about what distinguishes the two reporters. 

[I]n Donald Trump’s America, there is a strong argument that what is needed is more Hershes and fewer Woodwards….

[A] comparison of their reporting] shows Hersh hewing more closely to the promise of public interest journalism. ‘Bob has become the diarist of sitting administrations,’ says Bill Kovach, a former editor at the New York Times, ‘and Sy has continued to be the muckraker. Sy continues his outrage.’

Or, as Mark Danner, himself a respected American investigative journalist, puts it:  where Woodward relies for his disclosures on officials at the highest level of government, Hersh’s sources come from lower levels of the government and intelligence bureaucracy. ‘Where Woodward provides the deeper version of what is, essentially, the official story, Hersh uncovers a version of events that the government does not want public — which is to say, a version that contradicts the official story of what went on.’

In other words, Hersh was never an insider, playing an outside-the-system role that his targets, like Henry Kissinger and Richard Perle (himself a powerful business figure connected to the first Bush administration), ‘feared and intensely disliked,’ while Woodward’s more affable demeanor and institutional touch produced more best-selling books and fueled more frequent appearances on talk-shows. For his part, Perle once summed up their differences even more succinctly, arguing that “Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist.”

So while one always needs to proceed with caution when using autobiographical details to explain career motivations, I found it particularly revealing that Sy Hersh never learned about his father Isadore’s searing legacy until long after he had died, and then went on to render a surprisingly harsh judgment about that silence in his 2018 memoir.   

In 1941, the entire Jewish population of his father’s birthplace, the village of Seduva in Lithuania, was executed by a German commando unit aided by Lithuanian collaborators. His father had never discussed the atrocity with him in a childhood that was filled with fatherly interactions. Of this omission, Hersh’s judgment is both brutal & telling: “In his own way, Isadore Hersh was a Holocaust survivor as well as a Holocaust denier.”

It’s another way of saying “The truth can set you free” I suppose, and there are few pursuits beyond safety & sustenance that are more powerful than that. 

These days we hear ad nauseam that Americans are more concerned about the cost-of-living than any of the crimes & other outrages of our current government. 

Moreover, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Trump vs. U.S. to grant the president immunity for all of his “official acts” puts the onus on identifying, exposing and prosecuting all of his “unofficial” ones.  Moreover, many have argued that Trump’s opponents would be better off “holding their powder” while trying instead to identify fresh leaders with compelling proposals to address affordability and other pressing issues like clean energy & AI’s growing impact on the American workforce. 

But should investigative journalists like Hersh similarly “hold their powder,” and what kind of exposé would make a genuine difference for the health of America’s democracy today?

To these questions, I can only answer that Hersh’s coverage of the My Lai massacre was critical in turning the American public against the War in Vietnam, while his coverage of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison similarly helped to turn pubic horror into public opposition to our War in Iraq. 

One man’s investigative journalism.

Think about how Hersh’s truth-telling—or a similar dose of truth from someone like him—might help to set us all free today.

This post was adapted from my April 5, 2026 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.

Here Comes the Sun

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The quest for greener, more responsible energy sources that crested with the international treaty signed in 2015 (the so-called Paris Climate Accords) continues in force today despite the current administration’s rejection of key findings on the harms of carbon-based fuels and its gutting of policies that the government has used to regulate them. 

It’s difficult to impossible to stop innovation that’s both economically & environmentally beneficial once it’s gained traction, and the vast, 200-square mile solar energy project that’s moving forward in an agricultural stretch of California’s Mojave Desert is but the latest demonstration of this momentum. 

Yes, the Western world is increasingly preoccupied with the costs of military build-ups (like in Europe) and strained supply chains (given the global reaction to tariffs & other trade practices). But the West’s demand for cheaper energy, it’s lingering commitment to cleaner energy & the enormous advances that China has made over the past decade in monetizing solar power have produced a change-for-the-better that simply can’t be stopped. 

It’s also a story that speaks to this time of winter.

–    because these weeks in late February have long reminded me of the awesome power that the sun always brings to drive the cold away. We’ve been battered here in Philadelphia by a succession of snow & ice storms that have created a continuous blanket of white over grounds that have seldom been dusted, let alone covered, in recent years. So now, in particular, I’m yearning for the warming powers of the sun.

–    because brighter & more light also drives away the despondency that entrenches far too easily during our darkest months, and

–    because the 24/7 sideshow of our political leaders tends to conceal (but not disrupt) the currents of progress that quietly defy their sticks & stones. 

So a story about a project that includes 200-square miles of solar panels that are helping to irrigate farms & power cities from the San Joaquin Valley fits quite comfortably within the needs of this late-winter moment.

The photograph up top was taken by Erlend Haarberg. This picture of a girl is care of Derrick Neill.

The project that has launched on fallow agricultural land “on the dry side” of the Valley deserves a far better name than the Valley Clean Infrastructure Plan (VCIP) because it produces a near virtuous circle of benefits. The VCIP does this by:

–     providing new energy income to cover farmers’ losses from their fallow land while enabling them to continue producing crops like pistachios & tomatoes with the reduced amounts of water that the water authority will make available for the lands they’ll continue to farm;

–    continuing to produce valued seasonal crops domestically for domestic markets; 

–     giving an economic boost to the towns and cities that dot the Valley by sharing the VCIP’s economic benefits—including funding for schools generally & for job training in the solar industry in particular—through “community benefits packages”;

–    re-using farmlands that had already modified their desert ecosystems in a way that’s less likely to produce further environmental harm and which may be tailored to produce at least some restorative benefits in the future; all while also 

–    providing a workable model for thousands of other farms in the American West that have abandoned (or will soon be abandoning) formerly usable farmland due to declining water supplies, but that still want to afford their continued production of crops on land they’ll be able to irigate. 

Here is a link to VCIP’s website trumpeting several of its wide-ranging benefits. 

According to one recent story, not only will VCIP install solar panels for miles in every direction, it will throw off enough income to justify the installation of new, multi-billion dollar power lines to carry the 20,000 megawatts of electricity they’ll produce “on every sunny day at noon” (along with the rest of every day) to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Silicon Valley. In addition, massive batteries will store the unused power that’s generated there until it’s needed most.

These days, VCIP is just one of many American projects that are drawing increasing amounts of usable energy from the sun.

In 2025, 7% of our domestic energy supplies came from solar power and usage is expected to increase by nearly 20% this year, when it will account for 51% of all newly-installed & utility-scaled power capacity. Moreover, solar power facilities are projected to produce approximately 30% of all U.S. electricity generation by 2030.

If that’s not encouraging enough, an even more optimistic future for the solar power industry is forecast by our most notorious entrepreneur (Elon Musk), largely because he’s been frustrated in recent months by constraints in the current power grid as he contemplates building new AI-data centers with their enormous energy demands.  His frustrations have led him to ruminate about something I’d never heard about before, namely the Kardashev Scale. 

First proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, the Kardashev Scale is a way to measure a civilization’s level of technological advancement based on the total amount of energy it can can manage to harness. The Scale categorized civilizations into three primary types: Type I (planetary), Type II (stellar) and Type III (galactic). Needless to say, Earth-bound humanity has yet to advance to even a Type I civilization, but for Musk—who actively imagines Type II & III futures along with everything else that he does—it’s only natural for him to also wonder “what kind of energy supply” can get both him and those who will consume his associated products to that civilizational milestone?

Well last September, Musk posted the following on X:

Once you understand the Kardashev scale, it becomes utterly obvious that essentially all energy generation will [one day] be solar. A relatively small corner of Texas or New Mexico can easily serve all U.S. electricity.

He goes on to tell us that he’s done the math here, before announcing how the solar collectors on his own space-based satellites will further help to provide all the power that humanity will need for millennia:

One square mile on the [earth’s] surface receives ~2.5 Gigawatts of solar energy. That’s Gigawatts with a ‘G.’ It’s ~30% higher in space. The Starlink global satellite network is entirely solar/battery powered. Factoring in solar panel efficiency (25%), packing density (80%), and usable daylight hours (~6), a reasonable rule of thumb is 3 GWh of energy per square mile per day. Easy math, but almost no one does these basic calculations.

Among other things, that easy math makes Musk confident that he can build a solar energy company out of the foundations that he’s already laid in SpaceX and in Tesla’s solar division, which currently provides rooftop solar panels to consumers along with energy storage solutions. 

Who am I to say whether Elon Musk (in full-on visionary mode) is right or wrong when he looks towards the sun and sees it as the only source we’ll need to power the future of our civilization. 

But what I can say is that solar energy projects like VCIP and the proliferation of its kind of model throughout the increasingly-dry farmlands of the American West might very well mark the next big step in our solar-powered future—whatever distain Washington currently has about an energy source that’s cheaper & cleaner than any of the alternatives.

For me at least, that’s bringing rays of sunshine into the first week of March.

This post was adapted from my March 1, 2026 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.

Storytelling Our Way to a Nobler Time

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Listening to myself tell you about something that happened in 5th Grade makes me feel like it was a hundred years ago, almost lost in the mists of time.

Either the weather was bad or there was some other reason that we couldn’t go outside for recess so our teacher—Sister Dennis I think her name was—needing some way to redirect our 10- or 11-year-old restlessness, asked if we’d like to hear her read us a story.

To call our muffled response a “Yes” that day would have been generous, but that’s what she chose to hear, having no better idea about “what to do with the lot of us” under the circumstances.

The book she’d selected was “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” by C.S. Lewis. and this is how it begins:

ONCE there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.

That was really all it took to settle us down & put us on our way to finding out more about this refuge from the Blitz, the furtive games of hide & seek that took place there, and how one such game found Lucy (the youngest of the 4) hiding in a wardrobe that became a portal to a another world as she pushed her way inside and started feeling snow & ever-green branches instead of simply coats and sweaters. 

Us 5th Graders ended up having the whole book read to us during that season of grade school because every time we couldn’t go outside (and even some times when we could) we called out for it in something like a chorus, not being able to wait any longer to hear what happened next as those children met the White Witch, a fearsome Lion and a taking faun named Mr. Tumnus.

I mention all this because a new book came out recently about C.S. Lewis, his friend and Oxford University colleague J.R.R. Tolkien, and how both came to pen sagas about marvelous worlds that were more hopeful & noble & loyal than the worlds that had collided around them during World War II. This book is called “The War for Middle Earth,” and it begins with the fantasy world that Lewis called Narnia, a place “with endless winter and no spring,” and with an equally menacing one that Tolkien conjured out of hobbits, dwarves, humans & elves and their struggles to defeat the malevolent forces that had gathered around the Lord Of the Rings. 

In “The War for Middle Earth,”author Joseph Locate’s main point is that both Lewis & Tolkien wanted to bring a broken world stories that were powerful enough to re-animate human virtues like wisdom & friendship, courage & self-sacrifice we seemed at risk of losing in our modern battles of Good versus Evil.  

Both Lewis and Tolkien had fought in the Great War (1914-1918) and the experience had (in the words of one reviewer) “endowed them with a tragic sensibility and a perception of true heroism” instead of the “twin drugs of ideology and nihilism” that too many of their fellows had turned to in order to manage the pain of that barbaric conflict. Concerned that the second great war also saw too little virtue and “faith in human dignity,” Lewis came to write his Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56) and Tolkien his Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-55). As this reviewer continued:

Much of Mr. Loconte’s history concerns Lewis’s and Tolkien’s efforts as scholars. Their positions in Oxford’s English department gave them authority to promote classic literature as a solution to modern discontent. Tolkien, a scholar of Old English, studied the ‘theory of courage’ found in poems such as the ancient epic ‘Beowulf,’ redeeming what he called the ‘noble northern spirit’ from the fascists who would pervert it. Lewis, meanwhile, sought to recover the ideas of love that animated medieval and Renaissance literature. Both authors admired the way that the medievals combined pagan virtues with Christian theology to sustain a culture that was simultaneously vital and humane.

Lewis & Tolkien believed that the West’s literary tradition provided the moral grounding that can enable individuals “in the face of death” to forsake their own safety in the struggle to save others from subjugation. In Loconte’s view, both hoped their imaginative stories would help to counter “many in the West” who had come to doubt and even resent our civilization’s ideals in their cynicism and retreat from what would have once been seen as necessary commitments. Arsenals like fellowship and a wider respect for human dignity would be necessary to counter new despots as they sought to spread their particular brands of tyranny. 

In other words: What is still worth fighting for after all the darkness and horror they had seen?

What virtues will humanity need for its next battles?

“Evil has reigned for100 years.” What will we need to replace it?

Legions of orcs are one face of Evil in the battle for Middle Earth.

A couple of hundred posts ago, I wrote here about an exhibit at Oxford’s Bodieian Library of watercolors that Tolkien had painted before writing either “The Hobbit” or “The Lord of the Rings” so he could envision the world that his heroes would be fighting for. In that same newsletter, I quoted from a local philosophy professor who lamented the near-impossibility of imagining such an ideal world today—our “utopia of desire”—and what it would feel like to be returning there after the additional shocks the human race has experienced in the 80 years since Lewis & Tolkien had offered us their ways back home.

He despairingly told us:

The utopias of desire make little sense in a world overrun by cheap entertainment, unbridled consumerism and narcissistic behaviors The utopias of technology are less impressive that ever now that—after Hiroshima and Chernobyl—we are fully aware of the destructive potential of technology. Even the internet, perhaps the most recent candidate for technological optimism, turns out to have a number of potentially disastrous consequences, among them a widespread disregard for truth and objectivity, as well as an immense increase in the capacity for surveillance. The utopias of justice seem largely to have been eviscerated by 20th-century totalitarianism. After the Gulag Archipelago, the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields and the Cultural Revolution, these utopias seem both philosophically and politically dead.

That catalog of smashed ideals was compiled almost 8 years ago, before a global pandemic, growing political divisions, media’s assault on our attention spans, and the rise of artificial intelligence had defeated even more of our hopes. 

So it’s fair to ask: how much more do we need collective stories—ones that affirm the best in humanity, show us how to have courage & conviction—in our current battles against nihilism & tyranny?

Such a story might begin with our visualizing what we cherish most about our lives. For Lewis & Tolkien, it was the communal life of the countryside and the heroism that everyday people could muster in challenging times. For both, it was also courageous action emboldened by faith. 

In their respective writings, their challenge was to combine these elements into more compelling narratives than the fascists or communists had been telling. To that end, Lewis & Tolkien took what was best in the Western literary tradition and wove it into characters & plot lines that effectively “critiqued and opposed the point-blank threat of what was worst in our tradition,” as another reviewer has noted.  These sagas “made qualities like courage and fortitude deeply attractive to an otherwise skeptical generation.”

Said Lewis himself: “When we have finished [these narratives], we return to our own life not relaxed, but fortified.” 

The early-teen protagonists in the streaming saga “Stranger Things,” arrayed against the forces of Evil that treaten their hometown.

By now you’ve probably gathered that I wish every unexceptional inhabitant of this troubled planet could have the benefit of new stories & sagas that could bolster the fortitude and courage they’ll need in their current struggles against cynicism, despair and resignation.

How long has it been since a story you’ve read or watched actually left you emboldened or (as C.S.Lewis put it:) “fortified” instead of merely entertained?

Late last fall, I joined the daughter of close friends who was visiting from graduate school, we got to talking about stories we’d recently enjoyed, and she strongly recommended that I watch Season 3 of “Stranger Things,” an 80’s-inspired, sci-fi/horror-saga with large doses of comic relief about a close-knit group of small-town kids who play games like Dungeons & Dragons far from the in-crowd of their middle school before mustering their talents to confront the ultimate Evil.

The recommendation came with certain demands, like watching the first 2 seasons of the show to get to know the characters and their fight against the horrors of the mirror world that exists beneath them as well as a federal government that aims to harness its potent powers. Well I took her advice, made it through the Season,1, marveled at the uptick of Season 2, and was (as promised) amply rewarded by the remarkable confrontations of Season 3.

The story profiles young heroes in impossible situations while their adolescent hormones intrude & shows their self-sacrifice and courage in genuinely terrifying circumstances, all while celebrating (in technicolor) the aspects of their town (the mall & community pool, annual fair & middle-school dance) that they love the most and rally to protect.  

The Duffer Brothers behind “Stranger Things” are not C.S.Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but what they built in this multi-dimensional & deeply human saga about a more “contemporary” battle between Good & Evil is noteworthy, and their success as storytellers in the storytelling marketplace even more so. 

The entire 5 season franchise has gotten more than 1.2 billion views. It has become a global cultural phenomenon for younger generations that have lived much of their lives during the Great Recession, a global pandemic, through the downsides of cellphones and social media & amidst their ever growing fears about the future. If the show’s fans were looking for heroes who embodied loyalty & bravery against impossible odds they would have found them in Season 3—several of them in fact. 

So if “Stranger Things” demonstrates anything, it is the ravenous hunger that young viewers have for stories that might help them cope with the daunting array of challenges they’re facing on a daily basis. 

And while the show will likely be less fortifying for anyone over 30, I found Season 3 to be a sometimes unnerving, sometimes hilarious & often heart-rending thrill ride through some of my best memories of the 1980’s, all delivered with the soundtrack, hair, clothes, cars & destinations that made it a slice of America that actually may be worth fighting & dying for.    

“Stranger Things” is not quite the successor to the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, but it demonstrates our burning desire for a story that can help us prevail in what is far too often a horrifying & dismaying world, 

This post was adapted from my February 1, 2026 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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