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August 3 - August 6, 2019
History was back, and in hindsight it’s obvious that we had actually never been living outside its rhythm.
bipartisanship and appeal to independents was not the same thing as ideological centrism. I wrote that Sanders’s “real impact has been as a reaction to the cynical climate which threatens the effectiveness of the democratic system.”
felt that telling the time by reading it off a building, instead of a watch, affirmed that I was now in a bustling place of consequence, as downtown South Bend had perhaps once been.
This was the political education we really needed—the realization that success in politics was not necessarily about impressing people with your pedigree or intellect.
the treatment that is instinctual to a politician who knows that you will be best to work with if you have first been made to feel good about yourself.
I had wanted to explore it deeply ever since reading Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” in Mr. Wylie’s sixth-grade English class at Stanley Clark School. At twelve years old, it felt like sudden enlightenment when we learned that this poem wasn’t just about two roads in a forest but about the choices we make in life.
And doing History and Literature together meant that I could also study pretty much anything that had a past—ideas, politics, foreign countries, and global affairs.
The American Jeremiad described a distinctly American form of rhetoric that goes back to Puritan sermons and persists in our culture even now: a way of castigating society for failing to live up to its sacred covenant, while reinforcing the
the idea that we had lived to see the End of History collapsed with the two towers.
that day it seemed as if we all had to check on each other for injury, as if anyone we cared about might have been harmed that morning just by being in the same world where this had happened.
It was immediately clear that the project of my generation had just been reassigned in some way.
The top priority of the terrorist—even more important than killing you—is to make himself your top priority.
terrorists and wind up publicizing their causes. We all want to avoid being harmed—but if the cost of doing so is making the terrorist the thing you care about most, to the exclusion of the other things that matter in your society, then you have handed him exactly the kind of victory that makes terrorism such a frequent and successful tactic.
We might have been asked to weigh what risks we are willing to tolerate, personally, in order to remain certain that this is a free country.
Rawls became famous for creating a new definition of justice, which boils down to this: a society is fair if it looks like something we would design before knowing how we would come into the world. He imagined a fictional “original position,” the position we would be in if we were told we were about to be born, but were not told about the circumstances we would be born into—how tall or short we would be, or of what race or nationality, or what resources or personal qualities we would have. This vision of justice is often compared to being asked how you would want a cake to be divided if you
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Indeed, even the most orthodox economic theories showed that market failures were all but guaranteed to occur in situations, like health care and education delivery, where a seller has power over a buyer, or a buyer is seeking a service that can’t easily be assigned a dollar value, or the seller and the buyer have different levels of information about the product.
Occasionally, I had worked that hard on a campaign or on my studies, but it felt strange to put in those kinds of hours not for a cause but for a client. I wanted to do a good job for my team, my firm, and my client—but this wasn’t life-or-death stuff. And so it may have been inevitable that one afternoon, as I set Bertha to sleep mode to go out to the hallway for a cup of coffee, I realized with overwhelming clarity the reason this could not be a career for very long: I didn’t care.
For purpose-driven people, this is the conundrum of client-service work: to perform at your best, you must learn how to care about something because you are hired to do so.
But for others, work can only be meaningful if its fundamental purpose is in things that would matter even if no one would pay you to care about them.
In general, American case law does not allow you to go to court and sue to make yourself worse off.
To me, the whole episode was about what happens when a public official becomes obsessed with ideology and forgets that the chessboard on which he is playing out his strategy is, to a great many people, their own life story. Good policy, like good literature, takes personal lived experience as its starting point.
coffee and professional necessity can make me just lucid enough
there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.
Mayors in South Bend and Mishawaka have tried to abate the goose situation over the years, but none has solved it yet. Efforts to scare them off have been ineffective; the occasional move to cull them met fierce opposition from animal rights activists, even a “vigil to honor slain geese” organized on Facebook in response to a particularly aggressive effort in Mishawaka once. With all respect for those who care for animals, the response to that situation displayed a loss of perspective worthy of TV satire, or beyond it: even the writers of Parks and Recreation would probably have stopped short
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Trucker hats are worn without irony here; the hipsters are welcome but not in charge.
a rule that I believe should be understood implicitly: anyone not wearing pants should not have to talk about work.
Like economic development, our understanding of violence prevention remains primitive, partly because so many overlapping causes are at play. It almost resembles the state of medicine in the nineteenth century: finally advanced enough to do more good than harm, but only barely and not always.
Being vulnerable, in this sense, isn’t about displaying your emotional life. It has to do with attaching your reputation to a project when there is a risk of it failing publicly.
First, know the difference between reporting an issue and resolving it.
responsiveness and efficiency are not the same thing; in fact, they can sometimes pull against each other.
follow the data where it leads, and recognize that it could show you the answers to questions you never even asked.
Elected officials earn our keep by settling moral questions, ones where there is no way to make someone better off without making someone else worse off.
The question of suffering brings me to one last concern around the use of data-driven techniques to bring about better government: the importance of exceptions, otherwise known as mercy.
There is great power in human pattern recognition, which actually resembles big data analytics in its most important characteristic: the ability to know things without knowing exactly how we know them.
no matter how sophisticated the programs, they will never fully learn our sense of mercy—the rule not to be applied, the efficiency not to be captured. Capable of something resembling intuition but nothing quite like morality, the computers and their programs can only imperfectly replicate the human function we call judgment.
I didn’t care whose fault it was; I just wanted it to change.
It was my first major experience in this kind of bipartisan cooperation. The most important thing I learned was that it has little to do with stretching or changing your beliefs. The governor and I did not persuade one another to become more centrist on any particular issue; rather, we found the areas where we had common goals and stuck to them.
Over time I’ve observed that we are more generous, supportive, and pleasant toward people we actually know than toward those we understand only as categories or groups. Humans can of course be cruel in person, too, but as a general rule we seem less likely to hate from up close.
AN ADVENTURE IS ONLY an inconvenience rightly considered,” said my friend and colleague Scott Ford, quoting G. K. Chesterton as he raised a glass of scotch.
You resolve to build a life that is somehow worthy of emerging on the better side of luck’s absurd equations, because you know that by definition your luck is something you don’t deserve.
SOMEDAY, POLITICIANS WON’T HAVE TO come out as gay any more than one “comes out” as straight. Someone like me would just show up at a social function with a date who was of the same sex, and everyone would figure it out and shrug.
Gays have the benefit of being a minority whose membership is not necessarily obvious when you meet one (or love one). Common decency can kick in before there is time for prejudice to intervene.
the worst historical injustices visited upon black citizens of our country came at the hands of local law enforcement. Like an original sin, this basic fact burdens every police officer, no matter how good, and every neighborhood of color, no matter how safe,
“Life is short, and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us; so be quick to love, make haste to be kind, and go in peace to follow the good road of blessing.”
we might all be growing into harder and perhaps worse people, as a consequence of political leadership that failed to call us to our highest values.
For those who remember if not mourn an epoch of lost greatness, it may be impossible to accept that there is no return. But for those of us who were raised only among its shards, and who grew up questioning if it was ever as great as advertised, embracing the permanence of change is the only thing that can liberate us to move forward.
Nothing is more human than to resist loss, which is why cynical politicians can get pretty far by offering up the fantasy that a loss can be reversed rather than overcome the hard way. This is the deepest lie of our recent national politics, the core falsehood encoded in “Make America Great Again.”
For us, paradoxically, the only way to relive anything like our hometown’s former greatness is to stop trying to retrieve it from our vanished past.
The founders of car manufacturing here would scarcely recognize this industry as their own—but it echoes their originality and audacity, showing that the less we concentrate on emulating our forebears, the more we begin to resemble them at their best.
WE DON’T ACTUALLY WANT TO GO BACK. We just think we do, sometimes, when we feel more alert to losses than to gains.