The image of the engulfing wave (above) was recently installed at the Vatican in Rome.

The “happening artist” known as JR makes temporary installations with embedded commentary that he stages with a great deal of fanfare throughout the world. For example, in June he transformed the oldest bridge in Paris into a monumental inflatable cave which he called La Caverne du Pont Neuf. 

This week, it was a gigantic black&white wave, splashed across the 16th century facade of the Vatican’s Apostolic Library. It caught the water in “the instant before it seems ready to crash into the architecture,” according to one on-looker, no doubt drawing its inspiration from Noah & the biblical flood. 

As the artist explained: 

The library at the Vatican came to see me because, for them, water represents their biggest fear. It’s the fact that one day water comes and takes away all the memory … all the traces of a civilization they’ve been preserving.

When such a calamity happens he continued, What do you choose to save?

The question is a timely one. 

At a moment when apocalyptic fears abound, I’d argue that once you have a courageous mindset, the choices about what to save—and what to let go of—become almost automatic. That’s because acting on your principles always clarifies your priorities, making it easier to follow-through on those commitments over time. On the other hand, repeatedly avoiding what you know to be right mires even the best of us in a swamp of cowardice.

Last Tuesday, while JR was busy chatting-up his new project in Rome, journalist Jacob Weisberg published an important & timely book called “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.” It’s a dark twin to John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage” (1956), which the then-senator intended as a response the Red-Scare witch-hunts of the early 50’s & the malevolent rise of his unscrupulous contemporary, Roy Cohn.

Coincidentally or not, a new Roy Cohn biography also came out this September called “American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump,” written by Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird & his longtime collaborator Susan Goldmark. 

Both books are examinations of frightening & cowardly times that have played out their ugly details about 75 years apart. As glimpsed from the Vatican Library, it’s easy to imagine a similarly sinful world, as described by the authors of Genesis, just before Noah loaded his arc & God cleansed the mess he was leaving behind with a great flood.

From a civic perspective, what should be destroyed & what saved today?

A cleansed & refreshed world begins with a man of courage like Noah. As for the stains that are washed away, they’re Cohn & Trump of course, but what about their collaborators & enablers? 

Weisberg’s “Proiles” are not another witch-hunt or holier-than-thou hit job; the author is far more rigorous & nuanced than that. He also brings a whiff of hope to the proceedings, as he explains in a lengthy interview about his book that appeared in Slate last week:

[T]he cowardice has been a contagion, especially in Trump’s second term. But courage can be contagious, too. And when you see on the international stage, and when other world leaders see [Canadian prime minister] Mark Carney standing up [to Trump], and being admired for [his courage, in spite of the costs to him and to Canada]… you think, maybe we’re [all] just gonna have to do this ourselves.

As the next generation of courageous leaders choose what to save from this stained & tattered world, Weisberg argues that the rest of us should consider how several of our most prominent citizens have been enabling our decline over the past 2 years–despite their knowing better.

It’s understanding how the old world happened, so that we can honestly & collaboratively step with our own courage into a new one.

In “Profiles in Cowardice,” Jacob Weisberg examines with skill and more-than-a-little compassion eight prominent though “cowardly” Americans. They are: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts; Amazon founder & Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos; former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell; the most-recent past Republican in the White House, George W. Bush; former chairman of the powerhouse Wall Street law firm Paul, Weiss, Brad Karp; president of Dartmouth College Sian Bellock; influential media personality Megyn Kelly; and private equity titan Steven Schwarzman. 

All “knew better” & could have stood up to Trump’s bullying Weisberg argues, but for their own “supposedly good reasons,” each failed to do so in what he calls “the great capitulation of 2025.” With the exception of Karp (who no longer leads his firm, and is the only one who accepted Weisberg’s request for an interview), all persist to this day in failing to act with the civic courage that Weisberg believes is required. 

For decades, Weisberg has been sharpening his research, writing & analytical skills at a range of national publications. For a decade beginning in 2008, he was editor in chief of Slate magazine & more recently has helmed Pushkin Press. My personal favorite among his biographical details is Weisberg’s refusal as a Yale undergraduate to accept an invitation to join Skull & Bones (its most career-enhancing “secret society”) because it refused to extend similar invites to the women in his class.

The review of “Profiles in Cowardice” in the New York Times notes (and I’m in full agreement) that Weisberg truly:

investigates the specific situational and psychological forces at play in the moral downfall of each of his subjects, taking care, it must be said, to acknowledge that it isn’t straightforward to resist lawless state power….

[But] n the final analysis, he suggests, the rights and wrongs were pretty clear.

Weisberg told Slate he consulted five factors that constitute “a kind of taxonomy of civic cowardice,” and the extent to which each factor played into these leaders’ choices for themselves personally & for the institutions they represent. For example, he considers each subjects’ “fear of violence” from populist mobs or otherwise if they stood up to Trump. He also examined “pressures from their peers,” “fear of ostracism,” “the financial consequences,” and “long-term impacts for the institutions they lead.” As Weisberg also said at the time, “what I try to do… is put myself as much as possible in the position and the mindset of the person making these decisions….” 

In several instances, his subjects did what was expedient in the moment, strangely oblivious to either their long-term personal interests or those of the institutions they served (including a newspaper, law firm, university, political party and the highest office the land). I’ll talk here a bit about the dynamic behind Chief Justice John Robert’s abdication of civic responsibility, leaving Weisberg’s book to explain how he considers his other subjects’ actions (or failures to act) in light of the pressures & fears both they & their institutions confronted from a bullying Trump.

As a lawyer myself & someone who appreciates the gifts that fueled John Robert’s remarkable trajectory, I was particularly appalled by the Chief Justice’s steering of the Trump v. United States decision in July of 2024—particularly after Trump’s first four years in office and when it already appeared possible (given Biden’s disastrous debate performance the previous month) that Trump could very well gain a second term. As you may recall, Robert’s majority opinion in that case makes it nearly impossible to prosecute a president for corruption or other criminal activity either while in office or after they leave the White House.

Nevertheless, seemingly oblivious to Trump’s past & future conduct, Roberts pursued his own objectives regarding executive power & authority instead, says Weisberg in his interview on NPR:

without much regard for the reality of who’s exercising that authority right now and how they’re exercising it…

[On the other hand] I think it’s wrong to see Roberts as a shill for Trump. I don’t think that’s what’s going on, and I don’t think it’s that he won’t draw any lines. I think it’s that [Roberts] is holding back when it comes to restraining the executive in ways that this executive in particular, needs to be restrained. (emphases mine).

That’s because of Roberts’ longstanding intellectual commitment to the theory of “unitary executive power,” namely, that no president’s ability to act should be constrained by either Congress or the Courts unless (as with tariffs) that power is expressly limited by law or the Constitution. But at the same time, it’s an ideological commitment that flies in the face of current realities, causing both me & millions of other Americans to throw up our hands in disbelief about his leadership of the Court. 

Here is Weisberg’s interlocutor during the Slate interview, speaking of John Roberts:

He’s not Dumb. And he’s not unaware of what is being burnt to the ground on his watch, but he just has this one play [about the separation of powers] and he’s just gonna play it out to the end….

[IIt goes to this larger point you [Jacob Weisberg] and I are both struggling with, which is the John Roberts that I think I will maintain forever has the highest EQ [or emotional intelligence] on the court, like he knows what’s going on and knows how he is perceived in the world. He can’t possibly be sitting idly by while Donald Trump threatens to steal an election. 

But he seems to be be sanguine about it in ways that I don’t understand. And also as you suggest in the book and said just now, seems to be completely sanguine about actual threats against actual judges, about a weaponized Justice Department that walks into court and lies systemically. And those things don’t jibe with the John Roberts I thought I understood. And it’s hard to understand. 

You quote Noah Feldman for saying [Roberts] is playing this massive game of chicken where he’s just trying to not, not willingly enter into a constitutional crisis with the President of the United States. But every single time he hands over a truckload of powers to [Trump], it’s an entirely self fulfilling permission structure [for this particular president to try and] grab [even] more.

The ability to finally implement a favored legal theory doesn’t give a leader who knows what’s been happening to this country & its legal system a pass from acting with courage to confront those threats. 

John Roberts knows better, and Weisberg is right to label it a grave moral lapse for the Chief Justice to fail to muster his colleagues in an effort to confront Trump’s unprecedented power grabs more directly & more effectively.

Weisberg’s judgments had to sting his subjects, but it’s not only about their past actions or failures to act. He wants each of them as well as others currently in American leadership roles, and (indeed) every citizen of this country, to reach down and find their own civic courage at a time like this.

For example, in his Slate interview, Weisberg worries about what our current military leaders will do (or decline to do) if they’re given an unlawful presidential order during the mid-terms.

In Trump’s first administration, General Mark Milley (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Mark Esper (his Secretary of Defense), as well as deep support from below them in the chain of command, helped both courageous men to fend off the president’s worst inclinations before they could materialize. But as we all know, in Trump 2.0, checks like these on his impulses are largely gone. With Hegseth & his retiring of seasoned military leaders at an unprecedented rate, Weisberg told Slate that “all eyes” are on Joint Chiefs Chair Dan Caine, because:

there’s a decent chance now that he’s going to get tested around the midterms [by a reactive Trump if it appears that Republicans will lose.]…But what will Dan Caine do in extremis?  It could determine the whole fate of American democracy….

Then Weisberg continued:

I [wrote] this book in part to try to use… shame as a pressure point… [because] these people care about their reputations. They care about how they look, they care about how their children and grandchildren [will] feel about them. They care, at least some of them, about how history is going to view them.

But Weisberg also believes that a sense of civic responsibility must fuel the participation of every American in safeguarding our freedoms because the costs of cowardice are far too high. In this, he also invites our admiration for the citizens of Minneapolis earlier this year, when they “raised their heads above the parapet” to challenge injustices around immigration enforcement in that City.

I’m also reminded of the justly-famous movie-line from Robert Bolt’s “Man for All Seasons,” where Thomas Beckett challenges what he views as his king’s immoral actions. When asked why he’s taken such a risk given their past friendship and the sheer ease of “just going along,” Beckett says: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for enough good men to do nothing.” 

Jacob Weisberg’s excellent “Profiles in Cowardice” is another reminder to leader & citizen alike that courage is always necessary when you know that you’re being pressured to yield to unacceptable demands.

This post was adapted from my September 20, 2026 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them on my websites’ landing page in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right of each post.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friends,

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

This past week did it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+ + +

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So will our American comics have the last laugh?

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

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

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