It’s for that very reason that I have decided to start a Friday newsletter designed to help make sense of the week gone by. I’ll flag stories that you might have missed. It will also be home for a familiar feature: my Distinguished Person of the Week. And I will go beyond my usual diet of politics and policy to share books I am reading, films I have seen, travels I am taking and more. The full newsletter will be available only with a Washington Post subscription. Subscribe now to make sure you get the first edition in its entirety.
As some of you know, I didn’t start my professional life as a journalist. I practiced labor law for 20 years. So, if my columns sometimes read like a brief — position, evidence, argument, conclusion — that’s my legal training poking through. Not being a lifelong journalist, I’ve had the great benefit to learn from many fine colleagues at The Post and elsewhere. But it’s also allowed me to utilize my academic love of history and legal training. (I’ll share more of why I left the law for journalism in the first newsletter.)
It has been a professional journey, but also an ideological one greatly affected by monumental changes in our politics and in the world at large. As I’ve witnessed everything from the Cold War to the war on terrorism to the war on democracy, my perspective on the world has shifted and my thinking hopefully deepened about the challenges we face as Americans.
In the newsletter, I’ll have the chance to share some of that with you. I’ve always believed in the rule of law, judicial restraint, public virtue, objective reality, free markets — including free trade and robust legal immigration — and U.S. leadership in the world. (The GOP doesn’t anymore, which explains a lot about my partisan shift.) As the political parties’ views on these matters changed dramatically, my political orientation also evolved. The GOP of Teddy Roosevelt, Sandra Day O’Connor and John McCain is long gone. In its place is a nationalistic, authoritarian cult that traffics in White grievance, Christian nationalism, conspiratorialism, know-nothingism, hostility to effective government, isolationism and violence. That alarms, angers and, yes, frightens me.
So how do we cope with these challenges? I try to screen out the media gibberish and focus on the bigger picture. What matters most to me now is preservation of American values, pluralistic democracy, scientific reality and simple decency. Those principles help ground me and provide a way of understanding the avalanche of news we encounter each week.
And my search for meaning and for hope in a confusing world doesn’t stop when I log off my computer for the day. (You’ll soon learn that I’m a compulsive reader, an avid traveler, a dog nut, an English soccer fan, a theater buff, a movie enthusiast and a museum regular.) The same principles and interests that drive my writing also shape my reading, cultural and even travel choices, where I look for inspiration, illumination and the best in the human experience. I’m excited to share all of that, delivered straight to your inbox each week.
I’d like to think of the newsletter as a place to search for context, for understanding and for faith in the tenacity of the human spirit, a place to recognize where we’ve come from and where we can find reassurance. And I would also like it to provide some needed relief from a world too often gone mad. Because we aren’t powerless. We are writing future chapters of the American story.
I hope you’ll join me in my new adventure. You’ll have the opportunity to weigh in, and I’ll welcome your ideas and suggestions each week. Please sign up here.
