Many of our earliest flags and symbols were arboreal for good reason; like a tree, our democracy has sheltered us from the elements and spread wide to embrace all denizens, but some today fail to understand the common imperative of trees and democracy, seeing the...
We've been told repeatedly in recent years that we're living in an increasingly Orwellian Brave New World, which might be true if Orwell and Huxley had been dropping acid as they wrote. Fiction is becoming stranger than truth--and being perceived as true in the eyes...
All across the country, it's commencement season again, and leaders are fanning across the country to give advice. When it comes to careers, the future may never have been so compelling...
As the conflict in Ukraine continues to evolve, it increasingly 'spits bars' from our own history and experience. Cumulatively, its inflections and outcomes may represent turning points in democracy's struggle against authoritarianism, both domestically and around the world...
With Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, an entire era reached forward from the past to prove Faulkner right and push us all backwards and off-balance. Do we still have the collective resolve to move this nation and the world forward?...
Optimism has always been integral in our rise to the first rank, if not the pinnacle, of nations. Now would be the worst time in at least eighty years, if not our entire history, to lose it. ...
As we reach the end of another tumultuous year, it's clearly time for taking stock in advance of even more critical times ahead. Nothing better indicates the urgency of doing so than this recent poll result: 71% of Republicans believe our democracy is under major threat....
It's said that in life, we go through three stages: dependence, independence, and interdependence. As a nation, like mid-lifers in crisis, we've been stuck in the second stage for more than 250 years...
Never in our history have we seemed so lost, so unsure of who we are. Instinctively, like children, we seek to go back to our beginnings. But origins nearly always prove more complex than we expected...
There are six degrees of separation from the past, not in sequence, but overlapping, like waves: embrace it, reject it, avoid it, ignore it, learn from it, build on it...
