Walter Isaacson’s latest book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, has arrived at a pivotal moment for the country: the 250th anniversary of the American experiment. I found it especially meaningful at a time when we need to return to the words that first set America on the path toward democracy. This should be more than a season of fireworks and...

Recently, I found myself returning to a question I’ve asked in different forms for years: what does it actually take to hold a country together when its people don’t agree? We like to believe the Constitution emerged from unity, shared purpose and a kind of moral alignment that made agreement certain. It didn’t. As Max Farrand makes clear in The...

As distilled from an email update from Michael Waldman, President and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court struck down what remains of the Voting Rights Act. Soon, it will rule on the president’s birthright citizenship executive order, one that, as Waldman writes, “could upend what it means to be an American.” That is not...

Britain’s King Charles III spoke to a chamber that, for a moment, set aside party labels—Democrat and Republican—and listened not as factions, but as participants in a relationship that has endured for more than two centuries. What stood out in Charles’s address was not grandeur, but restraint. Not proclamation, but purpose. And beneath it all, a quiet ethical framework worth...

How does a country move from argument to action? The shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is not an isolated event. It is part of a pattern, a deepening reflex in this country to divide the world into friend and enemy. We have been moving, steadily and dangerously, toward seeing one another not as fellow citizens, but as sides...

What will define us at 250 years—not our disagreements, but what we are willing to believe about one another, and about the truth itself? As we approach the 250th anniversary of our democratic republic, I find myself returning to a familiar concern, now sharpened by the widening divide in our country. Disagreement has always been part of the American story....

Since my dinner with Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison, I’ve been reading more about James Madison, who’s often called the father of the Constitution. What struck me is this: despite the distance of time, he isn’t speaking about us. He’s speaking to us. Madison did not fear a foreign army nearly as much as he feared us. That is not an...

In the winter of 1863, as the Civil War dragged into its third year, prices in the North rose sharply. Coffee, flour, and coal steadily became more expensive. Newspapers carried the numbers. Housewives felt them at the market. Even then, Americans did not see the same hardship in the same way. And that divide, between what is experienced and what...

SPECIAL REPORT  I recently received an email message from a nationwide grassroots political network. The message reads as follows: “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is spending millions on warehouses they plan to repurpose as ICE detention ‘mega-centers’ to hold as many as 10,000 human beings per warehouse. “Draft layouts show ‘pods’ in which individuals are to be held, each...

In 1927, Sinclair Lewis gave America a character it did not want to recognize in the mirror: Elmer Gantry. Gantry is loud, magnetic, insatiable — a sinner with a capital “S.” He does not discover faith; he discovers its usefulness. He learns that fear, properly stirred, can fill a sanctuary. Redemption, properly marketed, can build an empire. Gantry bellows and...