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...

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...

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...

What kind of leadership… what kind of citizenship, will it take to restore and live the values we claim to believe? It begins with service. Leadership without service is merely power. Public office was never meant to be a stage for self-glorification. It was meant to be a trust.  A president’s first question shouldn’t be, “How do I win?” but,...

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...