Why Reveal Our Ugliest Truths?

April 7, 2026 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

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

March 4, 2026 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

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

February 3, 2026 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

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.

What To Write About?

December 2, 2025 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

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

November 16, 2025 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

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.