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A personal story about a WWII bomber pilot—and what his sacrifice teaches us about civic responsibility, truth, and defending democracy today.

What “Becoming the Blizzard” means—and how ordinary citizens can organize, push back on disinformation, and strengthen American democracy.

“The first reality—and perhaps the most worrying—is that we are using tools that are fundamentally beyond human comprehension. We have a name for this: the interpretability problem. Nobody—including the scientists and philosophers at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic—can precisely explain why a massive neural network chooses the specific combination of weighted parameters that results in an AI’s response to a prompt.[1]” AI is the thing that finally pushed all thoughts of the E

Do Democrats really hate America? I analyze the claim that we do.

After a trip to Target, I was so exhausted I fell asleep on the floor in the livingroom I want to take this time to commemorate the passing of Gloria Steinem. Not because she was my role model exactly. In some ways, and at some times in my life, she was my nemesis, but she was a looming presence for much of it. In some ways, she loomed larger over how I managed my life than the mother who raised me, so her passing forced me to take stock on my life and career to-date. I canno

Maybe I should stop to answer the question why I felt like I could or should write a book about the current administration. I am not a politician, an academic, a reporter, a current or former staff member, or even a relative of the president. I am just a citizen, like you, like all our neighbors, our co-workers. No less, but no more. I have the advantage of having been raised by a WWII veteran whose PTSD prompted me to learn about that war to gain insight into the man I saw,

By US gov - US gov, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2130620 Living in Montana in the 60’s came with a certain resignation. There was a gallows humor everyone had about the Cold War. The joke was that we didn’t need to worry about a nuclear war with the Soviet Union because it would be over for us in a flash. The state was sparsely populated with people, but had a lot of rattlesnakes, antelope, and missile silos. We accepted the fact that the Rus

I don’t look back on my 20s with a lot of fondness. I wish I did. I hope most of you do. I mean, on the surface it’s a great time to be alive: there’s no arm flab yet, no wrinkles around our eyes, no grey in the hair. The things I spend hours on now to just “maintain,” like arm strength and overall stability (trying to watch me do some of the strength exercises meant to help with that is hilarious – the Leaning Tower of Pisa has nothing on me!), but that was all taken for gra

I’m going to swerve off course a little this week because I’ve been pondering my experience in New York recently when I went into the city to see Rush. It has me thinking about a large worry that I’ve had, which is how we heal as a nation after such a divisive period that admittedly started before the Trump presidency, but has been ratcheted to a new level in recent years. And, while it has been spurred on by a leader who insults just about anyone who crosses him, many of us

Chuck Schumer met with MS NOW, as reported by Ali Vitali this past week, as he came out of meetings where Democrats had been workshopping “doomsday” midterm election scenarios, ranging from misinformation to physical interference at the polls. That’s admittedly chilling. Vitali’s report spoke to the worry that Democrats have that there is a balance to strike: to plan for worst-case scenarios but not scare people away from voting. I share that fear, but the very fact that the

The President wants you to believe that elections that he and his party lose are rigged. His own evidence doesn't prove that.

I couldn’t do it. After literally two decades of being a loyal fan of anything Westeros, I could not get through the first episode of the new season of House of the Dragon (the last season of the OG Game of Thrones being somewhat of an exception). I haven’t even tried past that. Was it the violence I’d lost my taste for? It’s true, I don’t much care for animals dying, even mythical dragons, but I ruled that out when I had Alien: Romulus on in the background a couple of night

@agodissart went on Threads on the 4th of July and posted, “DemoRATS stay home! No watching fireworks or eating a hot dog off the grill. These activities are for patriots only!” When I see those sorts of provocative posts, I often assume they were bot generated “rage-bait,” and I looked at this user profile, and I can’t really tell if that is the case here or not, but whatever it is or isn’t, it’s echoing something I’ve heard many times before, dating all the way back to when

What a strange time to be celebrating America’s 250th birthday. Many of us aren’t in the mood for a party. The American promise seems further away than ever right now. While it may seem bizarre for the country to be so obsessed with the disaster at the Reflecting Pool considering everything else going on in the world, I get it: it just encapsulates the state of the country right now. Yet did our 200th birthday come at a better time? I was a teenager living in a small town, so

I took my grands to the pool on Saturday. It was a pretty lowkey experience in all: the pool wasn’t too crowded, the weather was mild and everyone was enjoying themselves. It didn’t occur to me until afterwards how freeing it felt not knowing anything about anyone’s political affiliation who was there. For a while, that topic was totally off the table. No one came in wearing a MAGA red cap, or the opposite for that matter. No one had anything provocative on a t-shirt. We all

Why try to write a book that revolves largely around the current administration while it’s still in power—especially given the chaos around it? I won’t lie: it was a challenge. But I felt a sense of urgency, and a fear that waiting might sell our chance to take back American democracy short. You may be thinking the current president is now in his 80s, so we just need to wait it out and this will all be over. I fear it’s not that simple. The party that brought him to power and