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Stories
Every piece is written to pass the swap test: swap the party labels, and it should still read as fair.
The strongest fair case for firm immigration enforcement, the strongest fair case for humanitarian obligation, and where honest neighbors still differ.
Before arguing for our own view, we practice stating the strongest fair version of a fellow citizen's view. This piece gives two competing positions on immigration equal space, equal specificity, and equal charity.
No statute compels a losing side to concede. What compels it is a chain of choices, made by ordinary people, that has held for more than two centuries.
The Constitution never says a defeated candidate must step aside. The peaceful transfer of power survives because each generation decides to keep it — and the winner's half of the bargain matters as much as the loser's.
Nobody sets the pothole budget in Washington. The votes that shape your actual week are the ones with the lowest turnout.
The office most likely to affect your commute, your water bill, and your child's classroom size is decided in an election most people skip. That mismatch is worth taking seriously.
A composite account of a suburban library dispute over collection policy, and the cross-party working group that turned a shouting match into a written policy.
Two camps, matching T-shirts, and a two-minute microphone. What finally worked was a parking-lot conversation, a chair nobody had chosen, and a policy that took each side's real concern seriously.
A composite account of a rural county commission that solved a failing water system by treating disagreement as information rather than as a threat.
Two tax-hawk commissioners, one commissioner elected to fix the water, a state deadline, and a working group that met at the fire hall instead of the courthouse. Nobody changed their politics. Everybody ended up with the same spreadsheet.
The strongest fair case for robust gun rights, the strongest fair case for stronger public-safety measures, and the ground both sides share.
Gun rights and gun safety are usually argued past each other. This Two Truths piece states each case at its strongest and names what each side could honestly concede.
The strongest fair case for local control of public education, the strongest fair case for a strong federal role, and the questions that remain.
Local boards or a national floor? This Two Truths piece gives each position the same length, the same detail, and the same benefit of the doubt before naming what both could concede.
A calm summary of what social scientists have found about affective polarization, and about how badly each side misjudges the other.
Partisans dislike each other more than they used to, and much of that dislike rests on beliefs about the other side that are measurably false. Here is what the research supports, what it does not, and what remains open.
It is easy to demand honesty from leaders and media. The commitment is harder, and more important, when it turns around and asks something of us.
Five practices for ordinary readers who want to hold themselves to the same standard they hold politicians and the press: notice the feeling, separate the claim from the messenger, disclose uncertainty, correct in public, and ask what would change your mind.
The people who show up to the hearing are not the public. Neither are the people who fund the campaign. Finding the common good means looking for who isn't in the room.
Organized interests are legitimate, and so is expertise. But neither is the same as the common good. This essay offers habits of attention for anyone who sits on a board, in a council, or at a hearing.
Disagreement built the republic. Contempt is what could unbuild it — and it is available in equal measure to every side.
Anger says you are wrong. Contempt says you are beneath argument. This essay traces what contempt does to the machinery of self-government and why the cure is not niceness but arguing hard with people rather than at them.
The strongest fair case for empowering law enforcement to control crime, the strongest fair case for structural reform and accountability, and where honest neighbors still differ.
Public safety and public trust are treated as opposites in most debates about policing. This Two Truths piece gives each position equal space, equal specificity, and equal charity.
The strongest fair case for maximizing open expression online, the strongest fair case for responsible content moderation, and where honest people still differ.
Should platforms host almost anything short of illegality, or actively moderate harmful content? This Two Truths piece gives each position equal space and equal charity.
Admitting you were wrong costs status. It is also one of the few habits that makes democratic argument possible at all.
Changing your mind quietly, in private, costs nothing. Changing it in public, in front of people who remember what you used to say, is a specific and undervalued civic skill.
Losing well is not passivity. It is one of the harder skills self-government asks of its citizens, and it has to be practiced somewhere other than the highest-stakes election of the decade.
A ballot measure fails, a favored candidate loses a primary, a proposal gets voted down at the town meeting. What happens next says more about a citizen's civic character than any vote they ever cast.
A composite account of two neighboring volunteer fire departments, a forty-year rivalry, and the truck breakdown that forced a merger neither side wanted to ask for first.
Riverton and Aldern had competed for the same volunteers, the same fundraising dollars, and the same bragging rights for decades. A mutual-aid call gone wrong made the case for merging that neither chief could make alone.
A composite account of a school board redistricting fight that a professional consultant could not resolve, and the volunteer working group that finally did.
A new elementary school meant redrawing attendance boundaries. Every option seemed to break up somebody's neighborhood. A working group of parents from every affected school found the map the consultant never could.
A calm summary of what researchers have found as local newsrooms have closed, from split-ticket voting to how well residents can name their own representatives.
As local newspapers have closed by the hundreds, researchers have tracked what disappears along with them: knowledge of local government, split-ticket voting, and contested local races. Here is what the evidence supports.
A calm summary of decades of survey research on Americans' confidence in government, media, and other major institutions, and what social scientists believe is driving the decline.
Confidence in nearly every major American institution has fallen over the past half-century, across survey after survey. Here is what researchers are confident of, what remains contested, and what does not fit the simple story.
A composite account of a city council split over where to site a homeless shelter, and the unlikely tour that changed the terms of the argument.
Every proposed site had a neighborhood ready to fight it. A council member who opposed the shelter and an outreach worker who ran one spent a week together, and the council's next vote looked nothing like its first.