Resist much, obey little, wrote Walt Whitman in "To the States," a three-line poem he placed near the start of his life-long collection of poems, Leaves of Grass. Why? Because, Whitman said, once liberty has been stolen or crushed, no nation ever wins it back. True? I don't know, but it must be true that…

There are values and there are values.  In a coffee shop, if someone mentioned a value I agreed with, I would nod to them across the table, showing my approval. In a voting booth, if I saw a referendum on something I value, I would vote in favor. On a busy day, when a referendum…

“The truth,” writes Dave Winer, is that “you have to help other people if you want to survive.” “We are incredibly codependent. Our fates are determined by what all of us do.” “Somehow,” he continues, we Americans “got pretty far without having to face this. The myth is we all live on the prairie fighting…

Staying true to TB-L’s vision, extending and refining it, naming it precisely, and protecting it, is of immense importance in this perilous time.

In Eastern Europe under the thumb of the Soviet Union, people couldn't publish newspapers or magazines without government approval, which was not forthcoming for anything critical of the ruling regime. People interested in protesting against the regime faced prison time, loss of jobs, assignment to street sweeping and building cleaning crews, among other things. Their…

E. B. White wrote a remarkable essay about visiting the winter rehearsal headquarters of a big circus. He sees something quietly remarkable there, and sets out to preserve the memory of it in his sentences, saying: “As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of…

When certain politicians say something is common sense, they mean that it makes sense to them, and should to you, without being examined or discussed. Which means they don't intend to show why it might make sense. So in calling something common sense, what that sort of politician means is that people who agree with…

What does a social media post — in this case a brief YouTube talk — look like when it goes far beyond the "It's bad! They're so bad!" approach of many op-eds and social media postings? In an earlier posting, I suggested that they offer p_attern recognition, instructive historical cases, and techniques for action_. Beyond…

After a strong, detailed analysis of how "Trump's Big Bad Bill Will Kill Americans," authors Jeremy Barofsky and Pamela Herd offer this brief action paragraph: If the bill’s impact is clearly disseminated and its supporters pay a political price at each implementation step, there is real hope that the worst effects to the nation’s health may not come to…

In this crisis, there are only two kinds of social media posts, two kinds of op-eds in the world. The first kind says that something is horrible. No shortage right now, for example, of op-eds and posts saying that it's horrible that top-down political pressure may have caused the cancellation of the late night political…