“Stories live where things go wrong.”
I still remember writing this down in the Notes app on my phone, a hopeful mantra for and from myself, on the day I graduated from high school. I was in the car with my parents on the way home from dinner when my dad was prompted to retell one of his famous stories, which I had been hearing since I was a toddler, about him and his idiot college friends.
In a recent history course of mine, my professor told the class that, when reading any historian’s work, their narrative says just as much about the time they were living in as the period they were writing about. For example, Roman historian Livy, who lived from 59 B.C. to 17 A.D. and wrote about the centuries before, had certain biases that mutated his transcription of past events. Livy even says himself that he writes with the specific purpose of teaching certain moral lessons.
Oftentimes when Americans think about a person exemplifying patriotism, they conjure images of a courageous soldier defending American values and protecting her country against enemies, foreign and domestic. If you take that same framework of someone acting with courage even when at direct personal cost, it is evident that Christine Blasey Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University, demonstrates this courage and determination.
A little over a month ago, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., introduced the Accountable Capitalism Act to Congress. The introduction of the bill made tidal waves in the media after she described its purpose in an eye-opening Op-Ed published by the Wall Street Journal.
I try to write my column with the utmost composure and professionalism, but today I just can’t do that. It’s late September, we’re approaching week four of college football season, the trees are bound to start shedding their leaves any moment now. If you can’t guess it already, I want a pumpkin spice latte! What’s the point of fall if you can’t have a PSL?
To summarize the above rant: Starbucks, bring vegan pumpkin spice lattes to the United States. Please. I’m begging you.
On Sept. 14, incumbent Andrew Cuomo defeated progressive challenger and Emmy award-winning actress Cynthia Nixon in the New York gubernatorial Democratic primary election, garnering nearly two-thirds of the total vote. This was by no means a shocking result.
When I retired from Washington politics a year ago, I thought I had finally separated myself from click-driven “gotcha” journalism that is making public service a challenge. Unfortunately, I now find myself and my alma mater struggling uphill against an all-too-familiar media obsession.
Stop talking about special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation. To close a few loopholes of this request, I’d also add Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos and any of the other bit players in Trump’s orbit to that list. It’s rarely more substantial than media spectacle and offers only an illusory sense of resistance to those dissatisfied with the current government.
