Conclusion: The Words That Made Us and Still Must.  In December of 1776, the Revolution was not moving toward triumph. It was close to collapse. Washington’s army was exhausted. Enlistments were running out. Men who had already given much were being asked to give more. Then Thomas Paine’s words were read aloud… …  “These are the times that try men’s...

Part 2: Common Sense Are we still capable of that kind of clarity when it matters most? There was a moment in the birth of the country when uncertainty did not simply fade; it was confronted. Not with noise or outrage, but with moral clarity. A moment when a divided people were forced to face a harder question: not what...

For the most part, my high school history classes consisted of names, dates, documents, and battles. What I’ve learned since then — through historians like Doris Kearns-Goodwin, David McCullough, Ken Burns, and others — is that history comes alive when we discover the human stories behind the events. One of those stories belongs to John Hart of New Jersey, a...

Lately, I’ve been reading more history, mostly to educate myself. But the other night, I opened Lord Acton’s Lectures on the French Revolution and didn’t get far before I sat up in bed. I was reading about France two centuries ago, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the comparisons to Washington today. To be honest, most of what I remember...

As our nation nears its 250th anniversary, an uneasy emotional connection to the past has returned—one rooted in fear, and the question of who gets to define the “real” America. Reading The Murrow Boys, by Stanley Cloud and Lynne Olson—which traces Edward R. Murrow’s journalistic coverage from World War II through the Red Scare of the 1950s—it’s hard not to...

The current American political order is starting to feel like a collision between the films Seven Days in May and All the King’s Men. One warns us about powerful institutions turning against constitutional democracy. The other shows how a populist leader can take grievance, resentment, and loyalty and turn them into a system of rule. I recently watched both films...

We are building machines that may soon judge, persuade, police, diagnose, hire, fire, and even help governments decide whom to trust. Yet we still have no truly independent way to inspect the machines themselves. AI is not just another technology. It is becoming a decision-making layer between human beings and power. That raises enormous ethical questions: Who is responsible when...

I’ve been listening to and watching Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia for more than a year now: his speeches, his questions in Senate hearings, his oversight work. And I keep coming back to one clear thought: Jon Ossoff should not only be re-elected to the Senate. He should consider running for President. Why? Because he does something that has...

Last August, I wrote that I was “stepping back from the chaos” of Donald Trump. I meant to write about his presidency only when his actions were significant. That was the naïve part. This is not Republican versus Democrat. This is democracy versus authoritarianism: 2025–2026 — Turned pressure on universities into national policy.After targeting individual universities with investigations and funding...

During a contentious staff meeting at 60 Minutes, Scott Pelley spoke out sharply, criticizing the judgment and decision-making of CBS News editor in chief Bari Weiss and newly appointed executive producer Nick Bilton — the meeting I wrote about yesterday in “The Clock Is Still Ticking… ” After that meeting, in a letter addressed to Pelley, obtained by NBC News,...