How do you talk to a friend or family member planning to do something you don’t just disagree with, but think is morally wrong? I try to answer that question in the latest Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good podcast, with a letter to a friend who’s planning to vote for Donald Trump.
You can listen on Apple Podcasts or any podcast app, at YouTube, or here.
[Read more…] about On the Podcast: A Letter to a Friend Voting for TrumpI recently spoke at a TedX conference on Peace in the beautiful village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia. Pugwash and peace have a historic connection: the Nobel Prize-winning Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs were founded in 1957 by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the nuclear physicist Joseph Rotblat.
On the stage at Peace Hall, I talked about why it seems impossible to find common ground these days: often, there is no common ground, because there isn’t even a common worldview. If it feels as if people live in different realities, it’s because they do. Hence my title, “The War of the Worldviews.”
[Read more…] about “The War of the Worldviews” at TedX PugwashI was so glad to see President Biden speak clearly and forcefully last night about the true scale of the threat facing our democracy. The history is clear: Biden was right to link Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin with both the Confederacy and the Axis powers of World War 2, and he was right to stand squarely with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
[Read more…] about Why Biden was right to link MAGA, the Confederacy & the Axis in his SOTU addressAs we risk obliviously repeating catastrophic mistakes others have already made, some thoughts about memory and freedom, from people who know the precious value of both…
Most of us in the U.S. have been spared the necessity of knowing history, and instead have been able to live as if the world was created at our birth. But people in Central and Eastern Europe have already been trammeled by the history that has just now caught up with us. They’ve been trying to warn us for decades.
[Read more…] about Will we survive “the desert of organized forgetting?”On recent episodes of Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good (available on all apps and now on YouTube):
How to win elections so we still *have* elections, featuring two guests with experience at all levels of politics going back to the Carter Administration, Les Francis and Lora Lee Martin.
Two conversations with Chicago radio host Joan Esposito. In one, Joan interviews me about the rising popularity of tyranny in the US and around the world. In the other, I ask Joan about her experiences building a popular progressive talk show from scratch.
Education and tech expert Katie Davis on What We Really Know About Kids and Tech.
Meta, Obama, and DOJ veteran Kevin Lewis on Artificial Intelligence.
And A Hollow Man Vacates the Chair, a conversation about the fall of Kevin McCarthy and what it means, with Kevin Lewis and Zach Friend. Zach has worked with the White House Council of Economic Advisors, the Senate, the House, on presidential campaigns, and as a local elected official. This one’s on YouTube as well: