Today I’m bringing you a conversation with the writer Susan Cheever. Let’s kick things off with a passage from her new book:

I know that my writing talent is mostly just hard work—decades of writing, first as a journalist…and then as a novelist and then as everything else. Millions of pages and then thousands of pages of revision. If only writing skill had been more contagious, something I could have caught when my father coughed and sneezed at the dinner table.

As her former writing student, I can tell you that this is quintessential Susan. I read it, and I can hear her saying it. For her, writing is all about hard work. And few writers I know have worked as hard as she has.

She’s the author of seventeen books, among them a biography of Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous; a biography of the poet e.e. Cummings; several memoirs about addiction; and a history of drinking in the United States. She’s produced an impressive body of work. And, of course, she’s written about her famous father, the writer John Cheever—first in 1984 with the publication of Home Before Dark, and now in her latest book, When All the Men Wore Hats.

John Cheever, at one time, may have been the most famous writer in the country. His stories remain widely anthologized today. You’ve probably heard of “The Swimmer.”

In Home Before Dark, Susan revealed that her father had led a secret life as a gay man. In 1984 America, this was not an easy revelation for some fans of John Cheever to bear. But had some of these detractors read the book, they would have understood that it was a labor of love—respectful and deeply empathetic. John Updike called it “indispensable” and “beautiful.” I happen to agree with Updike.

Now, forty-two years later, in When All the Men Wore Hats, Susan offers what she calls “a sequel of sorts,” in which she explores her father’s short stories and the connections between art and life. I wanted to know what led her back to this subject, all these years later. Some other topics we discuss included:

• The experience of grace through writing

• The question of who owns the story

• What it was like growing up as the child of a famous person

• John Updike

• An update on her health and her next writing project

And much more. Here’s one more passage from her book, in which she’s describing why her father was a good writing teacher: “With us, and with his students, he was a great teacher because he had the one thing that makes a great teacher, a furious belief in the power and importance of what he was doing as a writer.”

I think these words also apply to Susan herself. And I think this conversation will be of value to anyone out there who shares that furious belief in the importance of reading and writing. Enjoy.

Backstage at the Huron Room of the SoHo Playhouse, before each performance of his one-man show Lost in Del Valle—a seventy-minute production in which he plays twenty different characters—Ned Van Zandt performed the same ritual, a way to steel himself for the exacting, exhausting work ahead. It was an idea suggested to him by his director Amir Arison, and he observed it religiously.

He would get quiet, slow his breathing, and, in his mind, offer that night’s performance to someone from his life, living or dead—his best friend and mentor William M. Hoffman, his buddy Alejandro Escovedo, his cousin Townes, his “long dead daddy.” Thus he would sanctify the night’s work and take the stage with a sense of vocation.

The first time I saw Lost in Del Valle, on April 15 of this year, I didn’t know anything about the backstage ritual. I hadn’t even seen Ned act before. I was there because he’s my friend and because, at long last, his show was happening. This thing I’d heard about for years between bites of diner cheeseburgers—this thing Ned often doubted would ever find an audience—had found a venue and a stage. Of course I was going to attend, at least once. By the time the show’s initial run was up, I had attended three more times.

The show did something to me. I brought friends because I wanted them to see it, too. (One approached Ned after a performance to tell him, “It doesn’t get better than that.”) Seeing Ned do his show, the show he’d spent years writing and rewriting, I felt that I was witnessing a man doing exactly what he was put on this earth to do. I also felt that my heart was being opened up to an understanding of grace, as well as the relationship between experience and innocence. I felt that Ned had learned something essential and was trying to pass it on to us.

*

When the lights go down, right before Ned takes the stage, you hear, as voiceover, a public service announcement from Amir Arison. This show, he warns, is not for the faint of heart. It’s got violence and racism; it’s got addiction and graphic sexual scenes and a lot of profanity. And, lest we forget, he reminds us that the story we are about to witness actually happened.

Well, what happened to Ned? When you’ve known him a while, you piece some things together. His life hasn’t been boring.

A child of a prominent Texas family, he was an acting prodigy whose potential was widely recognized, including by the local papers, from the time he was ten years old. He made his way to Hollywood in pursuit of the glory for which he seemed destined. He lived with his girlfriend, a Bulgarian supermodel. He slept with lots of beautiful men and women. (More men than women.) He partied with Iggy Pop, Chaka Khan, and Steely Dan. He moved to New York, renting a room in the Chelsea Hotel, where he shot heroin with Sid Vicious hours before the murder of Nancy Spungen.

Things went downhill: drugs and booze, heartbreak, bottoming out. Despite achieving some acting success, he mostly characterizes his career as a series of near misses, a “could’ve been a contender” saga.

He was almost Luke Skywalker. He was almost the sad boy in Ordinary People. He was almost John Boy’s best friend on The Waltons. Almost, almost, almost. Hooked on heroin, he found himself back in Texas—not as the golden boy returned home but as a drug dealer, supplying boxes of Sudafed to his friends who ran a meth lab. In 2006, at age 50, he got busted and wound up in the Travis County Correctional Complex, also known as Del Valle. Inside, he lived in constant physical danger. In exchange for protection, he gave acting lessons to one Donnie Haynie, the Junior Grand Dragon of the Aryan Brotherhood.

By the time I met Ned in 2017, this was all long behind him. He was running a halfway house, and he was acting again. But the past wasn’t past. It happened; it marked him. What was he supposed to do about it?

This, to me, is one of the questions that animates Lost in Del Valle—what to do with the experience we have. There’s no use wishing for a different life, a different past. Given this, we’re left to figure out how to live with our wounds and our losses, how to transform them into something other than fuel for further self-destruction. Maybe, if we’re lucky, or we get a little grace, we have a chance to turn the whole mess of our experience, the good and the bad, into something helpful for somebody else. Something worthy, something beautiful, even if the raw materials can seem “ugly.” Something that affords meaning to our lives.

In this sense, Lost in Del Valle answers the question it implicitly poses. What was Ned supposed to do with his experience? The answer: Lost in Del Valle.

*

After Arison’s PSA, the lights come up and there’s Ned, seated, talking about an overdose that nearly killed him. The first words we hear: “I remember falling.” He’s not sure if he fell on his cat or if the animal simply intuited that he was about to die. Either way, the beloved pet’s screams startled Ned’s roommate, who broke down the bathroom door and administered Narcan. Says Ned, “That cat saved my life.”

Over the course of the next seventy minutes, we get to know the other characters, with shifts in scene and mood signaled by the guitar accompaniment of Mike Moore. (I sat inches away from Moore for two of my viewings, and man, the guy is good.)

There’s Gary, the meth dealer, and his girlfriend Belinda, whose sweetness is hard to bear. Once Ned gets to Del Valle, we meet Jesus, the Mexican-American “tracer”—literally a guy who uses magazines to trace pornographic pictures for his fellow inmates. Then there’s Jimmie (“I’m OCD diagnosed ADD borderline personality bedwetter”), who recognizes Ned from TV, nags him about sharing commissary, and never fails to invite him to Bible study. And then there’s Donnie, he of the Aryan Brotherhood, who tells Ned, “I’ve been watching you through the fence since I was born and now I got you where I want you.” One thing all the folks based in 2006 have in common: They love the show Lost. The rest of the characters—Sid Vicious, Nancy Spungen, and Chaka Khan among them—we meet in flashbacks.

The first time I saw the play, it took me a minute to adjust to its rhythm and logic, to get used to Ned’s switching from character to character. But I was quickly able to forget that’s what was even happening, so effortless were his transitions, so skillful his depictions. The changes are rapid and seamless; he inhabits characters talking to each other, and the effect isn’t the least bit disorienting. Some of the cues are even nonverbal—you can tell which character he’s inhabiting by how he tilts his head or adjusts his posture.

While some of the action is indeed over the top, the characters are recognizably human, not the least bit cartoonish. At different points, your heart breaks for them all. You even kind of, for just a second, hope Donnie realizes his dream of becoming an actor.

In the respectful rendering of each character, you glimpse something of Ned’s moral wisdom. The show is about his own life, but he resists making himself the sole—or even the main—focus. He is a part of a wider network of mutuality; he is implicated in a past; he is bound to others. And if, by the play’s end, the Ned character has been saved, then so too have these others, through him: the people, however objectionable, who have helped make him who he is. We are never saved in isolation, only in relation.

*

Lost in Del Valle is serious about deep questions of life, death, and purpose. It is also, it must be said, hilarious. The jokes come early, expertly crafted and timed, exposing the extent of Ned’s fallenness and the absurdity of our shared condition. Here’s Ned complaining about the dining options in Del Valle:

Ned: The food here is really inadequate.

Jimmie: Inadequate. That’s a big word. I like that word! I think I’ll call you “Inadequate.” Hey, Inadequate.

At one of my viewings, the audience laughter started within the first minute. At another, I heard a few sheepish, reluctant chuckles from the back row—as if maybe laughing at Ned’s sorrows was impolite or transgressive—before the laughter became less inhibited and more widespread.

My advice: Just let it happen.

*

After one of the performances I attended, Ned and Amir Arison held a question-and-answer session with the audience. They shared something about the writing of the play that surprised me—namely, that the hardest character to write was the character of Ned himself.

The other characters came easy. Their motivations, their schemes—all immediately explicable. But what was going on with this Ned guy? How had he ended up here? Where did he hope to end up?

At times, this Ned character does seem to be simply swept along by life’s currents, hardly making choices. Thinking about the show later, I remembered a line from a Franz Wright poem, in which the poet is imagining the thoughts of his recently deceased friend: “Strange how little say I had in all I said.” The idea being, of course, that our lives consist of a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with our choosing. Will we wake up to this fact before it’s too late?

The Ned of the play, much like the real Ned, does wake up. He gets some help. A door opens, and he steps through. In his decade-plus of working on this play—performing it for small groups, painstakingly revising each time—Ned Van Zandt kept going deeper into his story, into his experience, until he found his way to the truth. And he didn’t do it alone. Of Arison, Ned says, “He’s masterful. He got me to be me.” It was a process of remembering who he is, of lighting up that part of himself that was there from the beginning, back before addiction had its way with him.

It was, indeed, a process of rediscovering innocence on the other side of experience. Of finding his way home. Once asked when he feels the happiest, he said, “When I’m doing my show.”

There’s a scene early in Lost in Del Valle when Jesus (“the tracer”) asks Ned what it’s like to be an actor. Ned answers with a question of his own. “Remember when you were five years old and watched Peter Pan on TV for the first time, and you wanted to fly?”

Jesus says, “No.” But Ned remembers. That’s what the backstage ritual is all about: remembering that it’s a miracle that he still gets to do this and giving thanks to those who, knowingly or not, helped make it possible. Ned remembers.

Why did I attend four times? Because I love seeing my friend fly.

And when the time comes, I’ll go see it again.

Lost in Del Valle will return for an Off-Broadway run this fall. Tickets are now on sale.

I’ve decided to share an essay I first published a few years ago, titled “Souls Passing Through.” The site where it first appeared has been down for a while, and some of you have asked for it. I figured it should live here on The Long Walk Home.

Subscribe now

The first time my dad told me about Honker Dowd, we were riding together in the car, headed somewhere I can’t remember—probably wearing matching Notre Dame hats. Dad and I were always headed somewhere, whether it was the half-hour trek to my fancy private middle school every morning, or else running various errands across western Massachusetts.

As the story goes, my dad met Honker Dowd on the way to elementary school at age seven. They were both students at St. Jerome’s in Holyoke, Massachusetts—one of several Catholic schools in the town, the one where the Irish kids went. My young dad emerged from the apartment block where he lived with his five siblings and spotted an especially dapper young boy, dressed in immaculate suit and tie, making his way down the street, in my dad’s direction.

“Hello!” the boy said. “I’m Henry P. Dowd. What’s your name?”

Thus began one of the most important friendships of my father’s life. I can still remember how my dad sounded when, there in the car, he imitated his friend’s boyhood greeting: “I’m Henry P. Dowd!” His eyes shone, his voice brimming with love. I was just a kid then, but I’ve been thinking about Honker Dowd ever since.

*

I never thought to ask my dad where the nickname “Honker” came from. But that’s still the name he’s known by. He died on August 1, 1981, at the age of forty-five, eleven years before I was born. But you had to hear my dad talk about his friends, especially his closest friends, the ones from childhood. They were the whole world. Their stories were the stories of the universe, echoing through eternity.

The more time passes, the more these stories recede. My dad’s been gone for over a decade now. Almost every day, I think of something I want to ask him. I want to walk up the stairs of my childhood home and find him in bed, clicker in hand, a John Wayne movie on the TV. I want to sit on the bed’s edge and ask him about his old gang, the guys who played ball on Avery Field and the girls who watched.

And I want to hear again about Honker: how he was both the toughest and the kindest man who ever walked the earth, possessed of an otherworldly ability to put my temperamental father at ease; how he never had a drink in his life, having taken a Catholic pledge in childhood; how he had to bury three of his children before they grew; how his lifelong dream was to visit Ireland, from whence his ancestors had come.

Honker was descended from some of the millions of Irish who fled a famine and started new lives in the United States. In Holyoke, even today, Ireland is a big deal. Every St. Patrick’s Day, thousands of friends and family come to town, and we listen to Irish folk ballads with tears in our eyes. Perhaps Honker wanted to see Ireland so badly because he wanted to see for himself where all this—and his own story—began. Perhaps he felt drawn back to the source of things, hoping to recover the beauty of the past and to know he was at home in the world. Or perhaps even he couldn’t explain this longing in his heart. “We must fly to our beloved homeland,” wrote St. Augustine. “There is the Father, there our all.”

*

In middle age, my dad co-owned a Holyoke establishment called The Locker Room, where Honker tended bar part-time. My mom remembers Honker, too, from before she knew my dad all that well. She’d just returned from studying abroad in Ireland, and she’d sit at the bar with Honker as he flipped through the latest copy of Ireland magazine. On any given night, that’s where you’d see Honker, and that’s what he’d be doing. And there would be Irish music in the air, too, sometimes live—local heroes, Butch and Maeve, performed there frequently—and sometimes on tapes of Paddy Reilly or The Chieftains.

Honker’s favorite song was “Shall My Soul Pass Through Old Ireland.”

For Honker’s birthday one year, my dad got some friends together to throw him a surprise party. They had a plan: At the end of the party, my dad would present Honker with two plane tickets to Ireland, one for Honker and one for his mother.

The party was held on what attendees still remember as a blistering summer night, and The Locker Room was packed. Honker’s mother and wife and sisters were all there. Honker carried his little girl around, beaming.

When the big moment arrived, Butch and Maeve stopped playing, and my dad stepped onto the stage. He took the microphone in his hand and called on Honker to come get his birthday present. The year was 1981, a time of violence and hunger strikes in Ireland. Honker took the tickets in his hand and looked out at all the friends who’d gathered to witness this exact moment. Then he collapsed at my father’s feet, where he died.

A headline in the Holyoke Transcript Telegram that week read: “Henry P. Dowd; 45; stricken at party.” The family requested that donations be made to the Northern Irish Aid. At his funeral, Honker’s friends, many of whom had been at the birthday party, wore buttons that read, in caps: HIS SOUL PASSED THROUGH IRELAND. The letters were all green, except for the H, P, and the D, which were orange: HPD, for Henry Patrick Dowd. At the end, someone sang his song, about a soul passing through old Ireland.

*

Sometimes I feel that there’s a sorrow at the heart of things that can never be relieved. We can try to ignore it. We can divert ourselves from it. But it’s still always there, this lurking awareness that our lives will remain unfinished symphonies, our hopes for ourselves left unrealized. What was Ireland for Honker? When he read his magazines and let himself imagine how Ireland’s green fields might look in real life, did he feel his heart expand? Did he feel that once he’d made it there his whole life would cohere, all his striving and suffering made meaningful? Perhaps he felt sorrow, pondering it all.

I recently went up to the attic of my childhood home to look for that HPD button, which my mom assured me was up there somewhere. I brought my phone and Bluetooth speaker with me so I could listen to Honker’s song for the first time. It turns out the song is about an Irish rebel dying in a British prison, and he’s asking a priest if his soul will be permitted to return to Ireland upon his death. “Tell me this, ere I die/Shall my soul pass through Ireland?” In a wardrobe, tucked among funeral cards and yearbooks, I found the button.

Standing there holding it, the song playing on repeat, I thought about my dad and the years he saw that Honker never got to see. As far as I know, my dad harbored no lifelong dreams of visiting Ireland—because, in my dad’s mind, why would anyone want to be anywhere but Holyoke?—but he visited Ireland nonetheless, with my mom and me. He got to see it. And he got to see much more than that: his oldest daughter’s wedding, the birth of grandchildren, presidential elections that left him in varying states of rage and elation. He saw other friends die, too. One by one they started dropping. And then he got sick, diagnosed with an incurable lung disease that suffocated him.

As my dad’s health deteriorated, his friends decided that it was his turn for a big party—one to recognize his years of friendship and service to his hometown, and particularly, to the local Boys and Girls Club. As the day of his party approached, hundreds of people bought tickets, a fact that touched my dad deeply. The night before the party, he was in the hospital, in Boston, with plans of returning the next morning. He was working on a speech. I was back home in Holyoke, eighteen years old, and I was working on my own speech: what I hoped would be a soaring tribute to my old man. Around midnight, I awoke to the touch of my uncle’s hand in my hair. He handed me a phone, and in my half-asleep state I heard my mom’s voice say, “Bill, we lost the battle.” So my old man missed his party.

*

Once in a while, I think of the Bob Dylan line—“I am hanging in the balance/Of a perfect finished plan”—and know it’s true. Other times, I’m less sure. I do know that the day after my dad died, I was admitted to Williams College. I do know that had I not gone to Williams, there’s a lot I would’ve missed.

For one, I wouldn’t have met Henry Patrick Megley (known as “Pat”), who lived across the hall from me during freshman year, and whom I lived with in each succeeding year of college. (How my dad would’ve loved that I, too, had a beloved Henry P. in my life.) I was at Pat’s wedding this past summer, and it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever witnessed. Picture a collection of your favorite people all outdoors, surrounded by Vermont hills, shimmying to “Dancing in the Dark” as the sun goes down. Had I not gone to Williams, I would’ve missed that. I shudder at the thought.

Do such moments of beauty make up for everything that we lose? Can they? Better, I think, not to offer such defenses. I hope, rather, that such moments are a glimpse of the eternal—a glimpse of a reality in which Honker sees Ireland, and my dad enjoys his party, and your best friend never dies, and you never hurt your wife that way, and your dog is still in the yard, and every tear is wiped away, and all is made new. Such a reality would be one that death and evil could not enter. On good days, I know that that’s the source of my hope, the wisdom of resurrection etched across my heart. Like the hymn says, “I don’t want to get adjusted to this world.”

A nun I know, upon hearing some of my complaints about all the sadness on this side of eternity, once said, “I agree that there’s a lot of shit in this life. But I believe in a God who can turn shit into flowers.”

The way Honker’s life has reverberated through time to land here with me, on my heart, shaking me out of my miserable routines and my unwillingness to notice the beauty around me—perhaps that’s a flower. The way my dad’s love for him revealed to me the beauty of lifelong, devoted friendship? Perhaps that’s one, too. The fact that I can sit here and write these words and know that it’s a gift that I get to do so? The ability to look back on my life and see how all of it, good and bad, somehow fits? Flowers, flowers. Still, a sense of fairness prevents me from making too much of this. I don’t know.

But I do know that on the last day of my father’s life, he was in the hospital, and he was getting ready for his party. He was seventy-one years old, and he was working on a speech. I wasn’t there. But my mom tells me that he looked across the room, toward the door, and said, “Honker’s here.”

I was happy, too, but only to a degree. I’m a Massachusetts guy. A Boston sports guy. A Celtics fan. From my couch where I sit writing this intro, I can see photographs of Bill Russell and Ted Williams.

All this is to say, I take sports fandom seriously, and I think there would be something deeply wrong with delighting too much in the triumph of a New York team. Would my father ever forgive me? But I am also capable of appreciating truth and goodness and beauty when I see it. I was grateful to be alive to witness and to understand that sports are about a lot more than points on the board.

And I was grateful to know one Knicks fan, in particular. Tim is a Knicks season-ticket holder, a writer, and a dear friend of mine. We’re close. We talk about life and work and God. But he’s made it very clear that I will never be his guest at a Knicks game. “I’m not bringing a damn Celtics fan,” he once said.

So, after the Knicks won, I told Tim he should write something, and he asked if he could publish it here. I’m honored to have Tim’s piece appear as the first guest post on The Long Walk Home.

One note: At Tim’s request, the piece doesn’t include his last name, which feels fitting somehow. The story is his, but he’s but a small part of this joyous fanbase. So, here, for your reading pleasure, is an essay by a damn Knicks fan.

“Will we have this night?”

It was an annual tradition to text my cousin Phil, a fellow, long-suffering Knicks diehard, during the Larry O’Brien Trophy presentation.

Each year, the response would come back almost as fast as the question was asked.

“No.”

It’s easy to see why. In our more than four decades on the planet, neither Phil nor I had ever seen the Knicks win a championship. We were bruised and battered. We had learned the heartbreak of allowing ourselves to hope.

Then, in 2024, as the Boston Celtics were celebrating their eighteenth NBA title and I fired off my obligatory “will we” text, Phil sent back a shocker: “Yes.”

Belief was growing.

Fast forward to Saturday, June 13, 2026. I wasn’t in New York. Or San Antonio for Game 5 of the NBA Finals. I was in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.

Beautiful. Picturesque. And not a place to watch basketball.

This was supposed to be Taylor Swift’s wedding. I’m not kidding. Page Six reported that Taylor and Travis rented out the iconic Ocean House for a June 13 wedding.

But the rumor was false. Instead, the venue was host to my friend Peter and his magnificent bride Christina.

“I’m surprised you’re here,” one guest said to me during the cocktail hour.

I believe in showing up. I wanted to support Peter. I needed to win a championship. Both goals were within my reach.

After a beautiful ceremony, great speeches and a delicious dinner of surf and turf, the party got underway.

The band was like a merger of Diana Ross, The Four Tops, and Earth, Wind & Fire. A playlist from the heavens…if it were any other night.

It was 8 p.m., and I was getting antsy. I walked toward the ocean, then toward the Ocean House.

I made my way into the bar to check out the TV situation. Grim. One television. Small. A relic. And it was showing a soccer game between Brazil and Morocco. Good God.

I needed a drink. But I quit ten years ago. My addiction to the Knicks, though, remained fully intact.

I walked back out to the dance floor. I did a couple of laps. It was 8:30. I got the stream on my phone working just in time to hear the Spurs play SpongeBob music while introducing the Knicks. We won every game in that damn building, by the way.

Then the ball tipped off. I started walking and watching. My reading glasses were on. I looked ridiculous.

At one point, Peter and Christina caught me in full watch mode. “You’re good,” Peter said with a smile. He had given me permission to multitask.

The Knicks scored 37 points in the first half, and I probably saw 12 of them.

During one commercial break, I hit the dance floor and busted a few moves to “Disco Inferno” with complete strangers.

The lead singer belted out: “I couldn’t get enough. ‘Til I had to self-destruct.” The words hit me.

Was I self-destructing? Were the Knicks? Oh boy. Burn baby burn.

It was time to go. At 9:30, I scheduled an Uber to return me to my hotel in Mystic, Connecticut. The second quarter was wrapping up. I didn’t watch in the car. Instead, I prayed.

When I pulled up, the Spurs were up, 42-37. Not bad!

I walked into the lobby and purchased a bag of chewy Chips Ahoy. A coping snack if we lost. A celebration meal if we won.

The second half started. I was drinking a lemon Spindrift from the wedding gift bag. I stood in between two queen beds. The TV wasn’t perfect, but it was an IMAX compared to what they had at the Ocean House.

Jalen Brunson started to take over. It was clear he would not be denied. The championship I had been dreaming of since 1990 was getting closer and closer.

And here I was. Alone. In Room 206 of the Mystic Marriott. There was something cathartic about it.

I had been to twenty Knicks games this year. I had cheered with the masses. But now I was stripped down to the basics. Sparkling water and a dream.

When OG Anunoby hit his free throw to put the Knicks up four, I knew we had done it. I started jumping up and down. I pointed to the sky. And when Mike Breen said, “Go ahead and cry,” the dam opened up.

I was the only person in that room, but I was not alone. My parents called. I spoke to my cousin Phil. There were hundreds of texts. A FaceTime. I ran out into the hotel parking lot and started screaming. One woman responded, “That’s right, baby.”

I am 44. I had watched the Knicks for 36 consecutive seasons. I bore witness to 21 playoffs.

The good times were good. But always ended with a loss. In Houston and Chicago, Indiana, Miami and Madison Square Garden.

The bad times were beyond bad. Those seasons usually ended sometime in January. There were players who couldn’t play. Coaches who couldn’t coach. Draft picks that felt like they were pulled out of a hat. Contracts that should be criminal.

The heartbreak was real. The finger roll. Charles Smith. Michael Jordan. Hakeem’s block. Tyrese Haliburton. The day after was always the worst.

That’s what makes this moment all the sweeter. It can never be taken away.

In a recent interview, Mike Breen brought up these words from the sportswriter Roger Angell:

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring—caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives.

I care. I really, really care.

Not just about who wins and loses. But about the people who make the journey possible. Family. Friends. Fans. The people who understand that sports are so much more than a game.

Last summer, as part of a leadership development program, I asked one of those people to reflect on my “unique strengths and talents.” The goal was to see my “best self” through the eyes of others.

My cousin Danny listed a number of sports memories. He finished with this. “Timmy has what very few people in my life have. Passion. His passion for things and life is immense and contagious.”

Caring can get you burned. But living with passion is its own reward. And once in a while, if you’re lucky, the ball bounces your way and you get the ultimate prize: joy.

The New York Knicks are NBA Champions.

June 13, 2026 is Peter and Christina’s forever date.

And now, it is mine, too.

I met Davin Malasarn in 2018 when we were both enrolled in the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program. I was there at his graduation reading, when he shared an excerpt from a novel-in-progress about a Thai-American boy named Ben who develops a mysterious health condition.

Today, that novel, The Outer Country, exists as an object in the world—one you can buy at most bookstores and that the writer Justin Torres described as “a book of demons and a book of uncommon grace; an instant classic in the queer canon.” It’s a hell of a thing to witness.

The book tells the story of a family. Far from their home in Phet Buri, Kamron and Siripon, along with Siripon’s sister Manda, are raising the American-born Ben in Los Angeles. Manda becomes something of a second mother to Ben—and, at a critical moment, makes a decision that alters the course of his life.

When Ben is still just a small child, Manda sees him dancing with a blanket tied around his waist, leading her to conclude, consistent with her religious beliefs and prejudices, that the boy must be possessed by the spirit of a dead girl. She conspires with Kamron to arrange a Buddhist exorcism to rid Ben of the spirit—and to forever keep it a secret from Siripon. One afternoon while Siripon is at work, a Buddhist monk comes to perform the ceremony. For the decade that follows, Ben suffers from anxiety-induced illness, even as he can’t quite remember what happened to him.

In a recent essay published in People magazine, Davin explains that what happens to Ben in the novel happened to him in real life: “The monk told me to lie down. He draped gauzy material over me. Then he performed a ceremony that involved chanting, sprinkling of Buddhist holy water and a paper doll that was later burned. We were in the dining room of my house, and my aunt and dad sat beside me, approving.” Davin, like Ben, wasn’t quite sure what had happened or why. But a “sense of terror” stayed with him for some time.

Much of the coverage of this novel has focused on precisely this: the fact that the exorcism—the attempted conversion therapy—really happened. But it would be wrong to think of this novel as some kind of therapeutic exercise. What becomes clear in our conversation is that, for Davin, the desire to write is the thing, which he honors with a fierce commitment to his craft. In other words, he’s worked his ass off. That he drew from his own experience to create this shining and heartbreaking novel? Well, that’s just what the great writers figure out how to do. Davin is, indeed, a great writer, and he’s just getting started.

One last thing: For those of us who try to write, it’s a blessing to have friends in the trenches with us—friends who remind us that the effort to sit in the chair and try to create something is worthwhile, all the contrary evidence in the world notwithstanding. Davin, you’re such a friend to me and to many. It’s your time, bro.

Some topics we cover:

• The Outer Country as an exercise in understanding difficult people

• Davin’s feelings about having a novel in the world

• The relationship between art and life

• Davin’s literary influences

• John Updike and the Rabbit novels

• Ernest Hemingway

• What writing reveals and obscures

• MFA programs

• Writing in community

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

The following essay first appeared in the online literary journal Cutleaf in 2021. I’ll be forever grateful to the team over there—Walter Robinson, especially—for giving it a home. I wrote it while working with Susan Cheever as an MFA student at Bennington College, after trying to write it for nearly a decade. I’m sharing it today in honor of my dad, who died sixteen years ago today.

“Baseball is a game of the long season…”

– John Updike’s essay about Ted Williams’ last game

Even as his life was ending, my dad nonetheless envisioned a future. He’d lie in bed, oxygen tubes up his nose, and I’d sit on his bed’s edge, and we’d talk about the things we hoped to do. One day, in April of 2010, he told me about an idea that seemed especially important to him.

“Let’s go back to Fenway Park,” he said. “Let’s go to a game. It’ll be just a boys’ trip. You, me, some of your pals. I hope your mother would be okay with that. I’m sure I could talk her into it.”

We imagined the trip and talked through the logistics. Our seats would be way closer than anything we actually could’ve afforded, a few rows back on the first base line. It’d be me and my dad, and then definitely Kyle, my dad’s favorite of my friends. We’d have our Red Sox caps on, the brims shielding our eyes from the sun. We’d point toward the left field wall they call the Green Monster. We’d talk about how Ted Williams used to play over there and paraphrase that John Updike essay. It’d be a perfect day for a game, partly cloudy, seventy-five degrees, a light breeze.

A month later, my mom and I left my dad’s body in the bed where he died, in Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and drove straight to Fenway Park. It was early, no later than five in the morning, and light was falling upon the world around us.

There’s no logic in the early moments of grief. Nothing makes sense. Where has the beloved gone? He can’t have gone far. He was here a second ago. If he’s no longer in that bed, maybe we’ll find him elsewhere. He’s probably on his way to Fenway, just like he’d planned. Is there a game today?

My mom parked in front of the statue of Ted Williams, my dad’s hero. I looked at the outer wall of the ballpark and saw the big plaques of the retired numbers of retired players. Ted’s number, the number nine, stood apart.

“Go stand under the statue,” my mom said.

She took some pictures of me on her phone. I stood under the statue, and under the number nine, pointing up at it. I see those pictures now and I can’t believe how young I looked: my eighteenth birthday just two weeks behind me, not a hair on my face, my baggy clothes hanging off my lanky frame. The sky grew brighter, more cars appeared on the road. I started shaking.

“Dad, Dad, Dad,” I said. “What the fuck, Dad?”

*

My mom and I didn’t return to Fenway Park until one year later, on the anniversary of my father’s death.

When I think back on that year, my memories divide roughly into milestones of grief: the first birthday, the first Christmas, the first Notre Dame football game. I found myself doing things that made me feel closer to him. The return to Fenway was to be the finale. And, to make it more special, we worked our connections to get a tour of the ballpark. We awoke early on the morning of May 5, 2011, climbed into my mother’s car, and began our trek back to this hallowed site.

Throughout his life, my dad made many trips to Fenway, but none was more important than his pilgrimage of September 28, 1960: Ted Williams’ last game. Twenty-two years old then and having just ended his own baseball career—he played second base for an Orioles’ minor league squad—a young Bobby Glidden was one of the 10,000 or so spectators in attendance. Another was a twenty-eight-year-old John Updike.

Updike wrote about the game in his essay, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” That essay has long been part of my life. From the time I was able, my dad would have me read it to him. I was always amazed at how the words moved him. Looking back, that’s probably when I understood that I wanted to write: I wanted to move my dad in a similar way, with words of my own.

On the way to the ballpark, I was lost in thought, wondering what this day, this anniversary, meant. A year had passed. Was I better for it? Had I learned anything about life? About the human spirit? I wasn’t sure. I was mostly exhausted. I stayed drunk as often as I could.

After we parked and started walking, my mom removed a small glass jar from her coat pocket.

“I brought your father,” she said. She handed me the jar, and I put it in the back pocket of my cargo shorts.

“Didn’t they say you couldn’t do this?” I asked.

“Just in case,” she replied.

We arrived at Fenway’s Gate D at 11 a.m., as we had been instructed to do. Our tour guide, a tall blonde woman, Ann, wearing a red Red Sox jacket, welcomed us.

“Come right this way, follow me,” she said. “Oh, and just a reminder: We don’t allow the spreading of ashes on the field. The demand would be too great.” I was relieved to hear this; the matter was settled.

The first stop on the tour was the left field warning track. I tried to take it all in: Here, right here, is where Ted Williams played his position. I thought of Updike’s description of Fenway: “a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities.” In the distance I saw a groundskeeper tending to the infield dirt. I could tell my mom wanted to find a way to drop the ashes right where we stood.

“Let me take your picture,” Ann said.

My mom and I posed in front of the thirty-seven-foot left field wall, affectionately known as the Green Monster, smiling in our blue Red Sox sweatshirts.

Ann took us through a “secret door” from left field into the inner structures of the ballpark. She walked us up some stairs to the top of the Monster, where seats had recently been installed. In Ted’s day, there was only a net to block home run balls from landing amidst the Boston traffic below. My mom stood silently thinking. I could make out the lone red seat in right field, which is where Ann took us next.

A few other fans were there, too, also on tours. A young boy wearing an official Red Sox cap with a comically large brim talked to an older man, probably his grandpa.

“Why’s that seat red?” the boy said.

“That’s where Ted Williams hit the ball,” the grandfather replied.

The boy sat in the seat and the grandpa sat beside him, and the two sat looking out at the field. I looked at home plate and imagined what it must have been like for my dad to witness Ted’s final at-bat.

It was the bottom of the eighth when Williams stepped into the batter’s box for the last time. Updike: “The air was soggy; the season was exhausted.”

As Williams approached the plate, the Fenway crowd rose to their feet. The air was dense with expectation. “Have you ever heard applause in a ballpark?” wrote Updike. “Just applause—no calling, no whistling, just an ocean of handclaps, minute after minute, burst after burst, crowding and running together like the pushes of surf at the edge of the sand.”

Three pitches—that’s all it took. The first went wide, the second one Williams missed, and the third etched itself in history. “It was in the books while it was in the sky,” wrote Updike—a home run, maybe the most famous home run ever hit in this ballpark. Witnessing it, my young father bawled. His favorite part of the Updike essay, the part he always wanted to hear me read, was about Ted’s reaction to what he’d just done. “He ran as he always ran out home runs—hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap.” My dad remembered the roar of the crowd exactly as Updike described it: “a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved.” Ted stood his stubborn ground, refusing to salute his fans.

“But immortality is nontransferable,” Updike wrote. “The papers said that other players, and even umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and he did not now. Gods do not answer letters.” That line, right there, about gods and letters. My dad loved to quote it. Whenever I read it to him, his eyes would shine, and he’d be there again, back in that damp afternoon, back among the weeping faithful, a grateful witness to a miracle.

My mom and I found our seats along the first-base line and sat watching the players warm up. She bought us some beers, and we sipped them. I watched Dustin Pedroia stretching. I felt something akin to resignation. We’re here, I thought. We’ve done it. We’ve made the trip. My mom and I talked, but the conversation was stilted. What was there to say?

As it happened, the choir from Eaglebrook, my fancy middle school, was there to sing the national anthem. “Your father would love this,” my mom said. She was right: He’d been so happy that I got to go to a fancy school like that. On my first day of sixth grade, he looked at me in my school dress code—a button-down and khakis—and said, “My son goes to a private school.” I thought about that as the kids sang. The game was soon underway, and the Red Sox were soon trailing by a lot. By the seventh inning, a light rain began, and the Red Sox had fallen behind 11-0.

“Let’s go,” my mom said, but didn’t specify to where, and I followed her to the stairway leading to the Monster Seats. The rain had just stopped. “Let me have the ashes,” she said. “I’m getting your father on the field.” She put the jar in her pocket and ascended the stairs.

It could have been the beer, and it could have been the way the sun was hitting the wet grass, but the world seemed aglow. I felt calm, but confused: Did she intend to dump the jar’s contents onto the field in the middle of the game, with cameras rolling? That seemed ill advised. I distracted myself by taking out my phone and playing with it. I clicked on my voicemails, put the phone to my ear, played one my dad left me right before he died, on the night before I was competing in a track meet.

“Hey Bill, it’s me, Pops,” I heard his voice say. “If you’re asleep, good, I’m glad you are. And good luck in your meet tomorrow. You know I’ll be there in spirit, pulling for you. Okay? Bye.”

“I’m here, dad,” I said. “Just like we planned.” I went up the stairs to retrieve my mom.

“Mom, please don’t jump,” I said.

“Just don’t try to control my actions when the game ends,” she said, looking irritated. At the game’s conclusion, we made our way down the stairs. I was no longer calm. I had no clue what this woman was capable of, and I wanted no part in her scheme. To me she resembled a child throwing a tantrum, defiant at not having gotten her way. She leaned against a wall, glanced back and forth, and gestured toward the door Ann had shown us earlier. “You have to watch me in case I slip out,” she said.

“Slip out of what?”

“Just be quiet and wait!”

“The door’s probably locked now, anyway,” I told her. The words had hardly left my mouth when a slick-haired man in a Sox jacket strode past us and through that very door. My mom looked at me, then back at the door. Then she bolted, and I followed, saying, “Just go, just go!” We soon found ourselves in a big garage-like structure among groundskeepers and other Red Sox staff.

“Act like we’re supposed to be here,” my mom said. From where we stood, we could see the opening that led straight onto left field. I couldn’t believe I’d become complicit in my mother’s crime; it didn’t seem fair. We walked toward the field, affecting an air of calm indifference, as if to say, We’re here all the time. Don’t worry about us.

At any moment, it seemed, we would be noticed and stopped. But we weren’t. We made it all the way to the edge of the concrete floor beneath us, a step away from left field. The air was soggy; the first year without my father was over. My mom held the jar in her hand, unscrewed the lid, and poured some of her husband’s ashes into her hand. She looked at me, and said, “You’re going to do this with me.” She poured the rest of my father’s remains into my right hand, and together, we stepped onto the field.

She went left, toward the wall, and I went right, toward the infield. The grass around us glistened with the moisture of recent rain. I saw the ashes flying from my mother’s hand to the ground below. I followed suit, opening my hand, and a light wind blew some of my father into the air. I decided to be more deliberate, turning my hand over and letting the ashes fall onto the outfield grass. The experience couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but it felt longer, much longer, and by the time I saw the slick-haired, sunglasses-wearing Sox employee waving us down, the task had already been accomplished. My mom and I looked at each other and lifted our arms, as if in victory.

“Who are you with?” the man said.

I wanted to say, “My dad,” but instead I muttered something about the tour we’d been on and how we wanted to take another look. The man shook his head and walked away.

*

“Every true story has an anticlimax,” Updike wrote toward the end of his Williams essay. “The men on the field refused to disappear, as would have seemed decent, in the smoke of Williams’ miracle.” The game had to continue. Life had to go on.

My mom and I stood in an aisle of seats in left field, along the third-base line, to look at our newly formed gravesite. The exhilaration of a moment before had mostly subsided, and I was starting to think about the long drive home, and I was feeling hungry. My mom looked at me, and I saw that she was crying. She hugged me and shook.

Sometimes I think about the trip my dad had envisioned for us and wonder what would’ve happened. It would have been a nice enough time, I’m sure. But no joy on this side of eternity is ever fully consummated; even our brightest moments are colored by sorrow. So that trip would have been marred by my recognition of its being the last time I’d see my dad enjoy a game at Fenway, and remembering it, I would probably have wished I’d been able to enjoy it more. As my mom and I hugged, and then stood looking at the field, I was overwhelmed by the awareness of what was missing: Him. The feeling was, Okay, Dad. We did it. You can come back now. But immortality is nontransferable. Gods do not answer letters.

— Pope Leo XIV

It’s worth remembering Christianity’s founding story.

In the first century Galilee, there lived a Jewish man who was a great storyteller, healer, and prophet, a man whose ministry called for placing the poor, the indebted, the imprisoned, and the otherwise marginalized at the center of our moral concern. He spoke with great ferocity not only about those actively oppressing the poor, but about those who met that suffering with indifference. And he invited his followers—and by extension, everyone else—to relate to God as a child would relate to a loving, infinitely trustworthy father.

For his efforts, this man was ultimately condemned, tortured, and executed by the combined civil and religious authorities of his day. Then, on Easter Sunday, the world’s verdict was reversed: the stone was rolled away, the tomb was found empty, and the crucified agitator was revealed to be one with God Himself. He appeared in bodily form to his friends and disciples, offering them words of peace, healing, and forgiveness.

It’s a hell of a story—a scandal, as Saint Paul wrote. It only fails to shock today because of two thousand years of familiarity. But sometimes it still does cause me to tremble, just a bit. It reminds me that I should never be sure I’m in full possession of the truth; there’s definitely something I’m missing, and the person I’m ignoring might in fact be the key to my renewal. And it also assures me that even though I’m going to keep on fucking up, God remains faithful to what God has made; he can be trusted.

Thus are we freed from the incessant need to prove our worthiness; thus are we freed from the logic of power and violence that reigns in this world.

I should add that I, like most anyone who takes faith seriously, am constantly sliding between belief and unbelief, consolation and desolation, darkness and light. Still, I trust. I keep moving. But enough about me.

Anyone reading this knows the basics of the story. For the past several weeks, Pope Leo has been outspoken in his condemnation of the United States’ war against Iran, even going so far as to say Jesus “does not listen to prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” (This position puts him at odds with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who credits God with guiding the path of American bombs.) And his denunciation of the war isn’t the first time Leo has criticized Trump policies—he followed in the steps of his predecessor in condemning mass deportation and the inhumane treatment of migrants in detention centers.

On Sunday night, the president flipped, posting a lengthy offering on his Truth Social account. He called the pope “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” and took credit for Leo’s having been elected to the papacy. “If I wasn’t in the White House,” the president wrote, “Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”

The president, as is his wont, reads Leo’s intervention in the discourse mainly in terms of himself. And he responds in the only language he grasps intuitively: power and dominance. Failing to grasp the fundamental role of the pope—which is to preach the Gospel, not to engage in punditry—he pursues victory in a game the pope has no interest in playing.

In a moving and insightful tribute to Pope Francis published last year, Rowan Williams offers a helpful clarification on this front:

All the same, the point is that a Pope is meant to be a public figure, a “leader” who is absolved from having to make himself acceptable to an electorate and from defending the security and material prosperity of a limited segment of humanity. He is meant to approach matters from a point of view that is not just “transactional,” as we have learnt to say lately. He is meant to see human lives in other terms than what wins votes.

He is there to propose to us that the value of who and what we are — and the ultimate rightness or wrongness of what we do — will be settled by something other than our own convenience or even the intensity of our commitment. He is there to be an absolutist.

The role of the pope, therefore, is to operate with a different moral horizon. It’s to invite the whole human family into a pattern of life that is deeper and richer than we may have thought possible. It’s to gesture toward a world made new.

So, let’s imagine. Let’s imagine that God hears the cries of the oppressed. Let’s imagine that he is revealed not in halls of power or by wielders of force, but at the margins, among those often kept out of sight and mind. Let’s hear the first words spoken by the risen Christ, “Peace be with you,” as though they are being spoken to us here and now—as, perhaps, they are. Let’s imagine that the same force that lit the stars bestows a special blessing upon peacemakers. Let’s imagine that God loves each and every one of us, without exception, with an infinite and everlasting love.

If this sounds only like so much nonsense—if we believe the world is otherwise, nothing more than a battlefield governed by iron laws of raw power—then Leo’s words are folly. But what if we risk believing there’s more going on here? What if we dare to see the truth revealed in a broken human body?

So we return again to the founding story. It’s the story Leo inhabits: God revealed in weakness, in brokenness, in the people the Empire has forgotten to care about—God victorious over our limited, fearful selves. After all, a world governed only by the violent impulses of the strong and powerful would hardly be worth saving.

And if we believed that God is trustworthy, what would happen then?

Soundtrack for today’s piece: “These Are The Words,” Patti Smith’s tribute to Pope Francis.

Back in February, I attended a talk at New York Encounter, an annual cultural event in the heart of NYC. The talk was about the Catholic view on immigration law in the United States, and it featured Mario Russell, the executive director of the Center for Migration Studies, who happens to be a very kind and brilliant man.

In the talk, Mario described how the failures of the American immigration system had led to a “moral convulsion” across the country—and he offered thoughts on how people of faith generally and Catholics in particular are called to service and moral witness in this moment. I was pretty blown away by his insights, and I wanted to hear more. So, that’s the conversation I bring you today.

Some of the topics Mario and I cover include:

• His journey into this work

• The current state of the immigration debate in the U.S.

• Fact versus narrative on immigration

• Deportation as a proxy for the debate about immigration as a whole

• Immigration and the Catholic imagination

• Americans’ contradictory views on immigration

• Hope in this Lenten season

There are many ways to think about immigration policy in this country. As a matter of border management. As an economic question. As a national security concern.

But for Mario and the organization he leads, it all comes back to the human person—how we think about our obligations to our fellow human beings. On that point, I’d like to offer, as a way of framing the conversation you’re about to hear, a passage from an old favorite of mine, Thomas Merton. Merton describes an epiphany he had while on a trip outside the monastery where he lived.

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers… I have the immense joy of being a man, a member of the race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.

I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

The Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) is a think tank and an educational institute devoted to the study of international migration, to the promotion of understanding between immigrants and receiving communities, and to public policies that safeguard the dignity and rights of migrants, refugees, and newcomers.

Hi, all. I appreciate everyone’s patience while I’ve worked on more pieces and podcast interviews. Stay tuned.

For today, I’m paying tribute to a friend. Yesterday I attended a celebration of the life of Jeff Connor, who died last year. It was a beautiful service, worthy of the man. It featured remarks from Jeff’s amazing wife and kids, as well as two of his lifelong friends. I was honored to be asked to be another one of the speakers. My remarks, as prepared for delivery, are below.

Per Jeff’s family, if you want to honor him in some way, you may make a donation to the New England Youth Theater or to your local hospice chapter.

Thanks so much for the chance to talk about my friend Jeff. I miss him terribly. Erika, Alex, Ben—thank you. The happiest I ever saw Jeff was when he was around you guys.

I was a kid when I met him—a day student at Eaglebrook School in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Jeff was a charismatic and beloved member of the faculty.

He seemed to do everything: coached football, basketball, and baseball; taught Honors English; directed, wrote, and even sometimes acted in plays; produced the “EBS Players” film series; played piano and sang in school assemblies (for some reason, he once led the student body in a singalong of “Daydream Believer”; it was pretty fun). He even led a volunteer hospice program, accompanying local people in their life’s final stages. And this is only a partial list. I simply couldn’t understand how anyone could be this gifted, this full of life.

I knew who he was long before he’d ever met me.

At Eaglebrook, students got assigned faculty advisors each year, someone to help them along and offer counsel. I knew I wanted Jeff to fill this role for me, and I lobbied for it. My mom lobbied for it, too, approaching him one day in the hallway. He told her, “I don’t know your son, but I can do that.”

And so my journey with him began. He was funny, bizarre, silly and deeply serious, eloquent and effortlessly profound. As a twelve-year-old, I wished that I could talk the way he did; I wished that I could think the way he did. Eventually I ended up becoming myself, which is what Connor was trying to help me do anyway. Still, he would groan, as though in intense physical pain, whenever I used the word “whom” incorrectly.

He saw things about me I couldn’t yet see. He helped me take myself less seriously, but he also helped me trust that my interests and passions were worthwhile. Specifically, he told me to write and write and keep writing. It’s something I still try to do. During my last year at Eaglebrook, he started calling me “Joe,” as in Joseph, my middle name, because he’d decided that “Billy” was too young-sounding and lacking in gravitas. It’s right there in my yearbook, which he signed the night before graduation:

Joe…appreciate all your wit and wisdom, and dedication and willingness to listen to me even though you didn’t really listen to anyone else (nice on the math). Anyway, I know this will be hard for you – it was hard for me – still is sometimes. Continue to have faith while you listen and change. Much luck and love – Jeff C

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve called those words to mind in the years since he wrote them. “Continue to have faith while you listen and change.” That’s the name of the game, right there—more than I ever could have known the night he wrote it.

Blessedly for me, Jeff Connor was there for me through all the years that followed, well beyond graduation: a faithful friend who kept up with me, stood with me at funerals, and sent well-timed texts that he somehow knew I needed.

And I know I am but one of so many other students, so many other friends, who could offer a similar testimony. In the year since his passing, many conversations have happened, all around the world, about this inimitable, utterly singular man. He changed how we saw the world—and each other—which is another way of saying he changed the world itself. In his little corner of it, through his humble efforts, he made things better.

I wish every kid could have teachers, mentors, and heroes like Jeff Connor.

I realize that in recent years, Jeff had a hard time accepting just how special he was. Sometimes he’d let me in on these struggles—his desire to do more, his nagging sense that he hadn’t fully realized his gifts.

So, to my friend Jeff, I simply wish to say: Do you get it now? When we were kids, before you renamed me Joe, we revered you, and now that we’re grown, we give thanks for you. We love you. Your song for the 2006 football team—the undefeated season, the season for the late Nick Whyte, which you’d never forgive me for not mentioning—was Springsteen’s “No Surrender.” But the song I listened to while I wrote this was the one you showed me all those years ago, James Taylor’s hymn to the Creator, a prayer for a new day. This is how it ends:

'Til our few atoms blow to dust
Or form again in wiser lives
Or find Your face and hear our name
In Your calm voice the end of night
If dark may end
Wellspring gold of dark and day
Be here
Be now

Until then, Jeff. Thank you.

Today I’m bringing you a conversation I’ve been trying to have for some time.

My friend Billy Peard lives in South Tucson, Arizona, where his law practice serves some of the most vulnerable members of our society. When I met him back in 2014, his main legal focus was on the rights of workers — farm workers, especially — and the rights of immigrants. When it comes to immigration law, Billy is the most knowledgeable person I know, having spent years as a staff attorney for Community Legal Aid in Springfield, Massachusetts, and then as an immigration lawyer for the ACLU in Arizona.

I reached out to Billy because I hoped he could help me understand how we’ve arrived at this moment.

I think we can all agree—no matter your personal feelings about ICE or a policy of mass deportation—that something feels fundamentally different in our country today. We’re not used to this. We’re not used to stories about ICE agents detaining five-year-old kids. We’re not used to reports of ICE agents harassing local police officers. We’re not used to seeing our fellow citizens mobilizing to alert their neighbors to the presence of ICE agents in the community. We’re certainly not used to seeing an American citizen shot and killed by an ICE agent while trying to drive away.

How do we account for this? Is the second Trump administration doing anything that’s actually all that different from what came before? Or are we just getting swept up in a media-induced hysteria?

I asked Billy about all this and more. As you listen, you may notice that the word “unprecedented” is used more than once. Billy believes that ICE’s conduct under this current administration is indeed unprecedented—and very likely unconstitutional. But to understand exactly how this moment is unprecedented, it’s important to understand how we got here, and Billy very generously helps us do that. Some topics we cover:

• Billy’s journey into immigration law

• SB 1070, the Arizona “show your papers” law, passed in 2010, which galvanized the left and inspired Billy to get involved

• Immigration law during Trump’s first term

• Biden immigration policy: Was it an open border?

• America’s complicated—and often contradictory—relationship to immigration

• Immigration enforcement under Trump 2.0

• Is ICE only targeting serious criminals? If not, is this what people thought they were voting for?

• What is due process and why should Americans care about it?

• The effectiveness of nonviolent civil disobedience

A note on the recording: Billy did the whole interview while watching his two-year-old daughter Milena. If you notice an occasional awkward cut, it’s because Billy got up to go get her a snack or find another coloring book for her. You’ll also have the privilege of hearing from the kiddo directly. Big thanks to Billy—and to Milena for letting me borrow her dad’s attention for a little while.

A few hours after recording this conversation, I made my way to the Count Basie Theater for Bob’s Birthday Bash, the main event of the annual Light of Day festival in New Jersey. Light of Day uses the power of music to raise money and awareness in the quest to end Parkinson’s disease. (Support the cause here.)

Springsteen showed up unannounced and ended up playing fifteen songs—one of which, “Promised Land,” he introduced with a speech about the moment we’re in and a dedication to Renee Good. National headlines followed. I love him. Check out his speech and his performance below. I was sitting right near the person filming; maybe you can hear me voicing my approval.

This show gave me something I didn’t know I needed. Bruce has a way of doing that; he’s been it my whole life.

Well there’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor

I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm

Gonna be a twister to blow everything down

That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground

Blow away the dreams that tear you apart

Blow away the dreams that break your heart

Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted

The dogs on Main Street howl

’Cause they understand

If I could take one moment into my hands

Mister I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man

And I believe in a promised land

— Bruce Springsteen

Happy new year.

One highlight from 2025 was getting to interview Peter Ames Carlin about his new book, Tonight in Jungleland, which details the making of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run.

An edited transcript of that interview was published on my friend Kevin Koczwara’s substack, A Fan’s Notes. I love his substack, and I think you should subscribe to it. He interviews a lot of authors and every once in a while publishes his own long-form pieces, as he did recently with a deep dive into his love of Denis Johnson.

To kick off the new year, I’ve decided to share the full audio of my Peter Ames Carlin interview. Some of you have asked about it, so here you go. Peter’s a really nice guy, and I appreciated his time. You can see my original write-up about the book below.

Among Bruce Springsteen diehards, the story of his third album is familiar—an essential part of the legend.

In his tiny corner of the universe, the scrawny kid from Jersey had earned a reputation as a magnetic, must-be-seen-to-be-believed frontman and guitar player. On the strength of his songwriting, he’d signed with Columbia Records and was hailed as the next big thing. Maybe even the next Bob Dylan! (The real Bob Dylan was still in his 30s at the time.)

But the first two albums didn’t sell. Changes were made uptown. Clive Davis, one of Bruce’s biggest backers at Columbia, left the label. The executives who remained weren’t really interested. They agreed to give him the money to record one song, and if that song was good enough to be a single, then they’d let him and the band back in the studio for a third album. But that was a big “if.”

The song he wrote would also give the album its name: “Born to Run.”

Cast in the light of the fifty years that followed—fifty years that have included life-changing concerts, culture-defining albums, presidential audiences, twenty-one Grammys, an Oscar, a Tony, a Golden Globe—it can be hard to really grasp how close it all came to not happening.

With his new book, Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of Born to Run, Peter Ames Carlin sets out to show us. But beneath the riveting human drama—managers making frantic calls, executives only half-listening to the music, skeptics becoming converts, and Springsteen himself, upon hearing the finished record, threatening to scrap the whole damn thing—Carlin tries to answer the question at the heart of the story: How did it all get so great?

There’s no denying that Born to Run represented a giant leap forward in Springsteen’s writing. But how? Was it the pressure? A natural progression in his songwriting? The partnership of the writer-turned-producer-and-confidant Jon Landau? The doggedness of his manager Mike Appel? The engineering of Jimmy Iovine? For Carlin, it’s all of these answers and more. But it also ultimately comes down to one man’s vision and his determination, bordering on madness, to realize it.

That question, the one that animates the book—How did it all get so great?—appears in the book’s prologue, spoken to Carlin by Charley Cross. Cross was a great chronicler of the life and work of Bruce Springsteen and the founder of the beloved Backstreets magazine, which covered all things Springsteen for more than four decades. Cross died just a week after posing this question. The book is dedicated to him.

This feels significant. Springsteen considers his career one long conversation with his audience, and that conversation has come to include all of us who have been graced with this connection to his work. We talk to each other; we compare notes. I know people who don’t get it, and I have a curse of recalling every critical word anyone has ever spoken about Springsteen in my presence. But for those of who do get it—who feel it and live it every day—Springsteen’s artistry reaches a very deep place. Carlin is such a person and such a writer. He is, before he is anything, a fan, a guy who knows what it means to learn more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school. Opening the book with a conversation with another person so graced is a fitting tribute, and appropriate to the book’s subject. Not to presume, but I believe Charley Cross would be proud of the result.

Sister Chris Clark of Holyoke, Massachusetts, has been a friend for years. When it comes to religious matters, religious questions, or anything spiritual, she’s one of my absolute favorite thinkers. She’s also one of my favorite human beings.

Chris made her vows as a member of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary in February 2011. We met when I was just a twenty-two-year-old kid, and I had questions. She didn’t have answers, necessarily; or at least she didn’t claim to. But she did have a way of accompanying me in my questioning, in my seeking.

Looking back, it all feels providential. I was setting up an event at DeCicé Hall, a community center in Holyoke. Chris, who worked there, came in to help me set up. And then we sat and talked.

For me, Chris is someone who makes belief in God credible. Her practice of hospitality makes people feel more at home in themselves and better able to respond to the promptings of God, of life, or what Chris sometimes calls “the mysterious center of things,” in our lives. So, to mark this holiday season, and Advent in particular, I wanted to talk to her again. I figured it would help me, and I hoped it might help you, too. Some topics we cover:

• Chris’s spiritual journey

• Dysfunctional families and the healing possibilities of the ACA program

• The human desire to be seen, known, and understood

• The meaning of being a sister

• Advent as a time of active hope

• The Christmas story and its resonance today—in western MA and beyond

• Was the Holy Family a migrant family?

• Being surprised by grace

• Finding goodness in the mess of life

• Christmas memories from Chris’s marriage

• Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker

I know the holidays can be a rough time for folks. I hope this conversation brings a little light into your season and draws you closer to that mysterious center. Let us prepare the way.

The song that plays out the episode is “St. Christopher’s Inn,” written and performed by my friend Matt Butler. The song takes its name and inspiration from St. Christopher’s Inn, a residential treatment facility in Garrison, New York, and a ministry of the Franciscan Friars of the Atonement. At St. Christopher’s, no one is ever turned away because of race, religion, or ability to pay. Matt has spent a lot of time at St. Christopher’s, sharing the gift of his music with people in recovery. As I listened to this song the other night, I realized that it was a perfect song for Advent: a song of waiting and hoping, of preparing the way, of finding grace within the mess of our human condition. Big thanks to Matt for the song, and for so much else.

You can hear this song and the rest of Matt’s catalogue on Spotify and Apple Music. And if you’re interested in supporting the ministry at St. Christopher’s, you can make a donation here.

“But on the way home tonight, you wish you’d picked him up, held him a bit. Just held him, very close to your heart, his cheek by the hollow of your shoulder, full of sleep. As if it were you who could, somehow, save him. For the moment not caring who you’re supposed to be registered as. For the moment, anyway, no longer who the Caesars say you are.” — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

I met Sandy Lowe in 2016. I was twenty-three years old, new to New York City, and still getting the hang of a new job doing communications for a nonprofit. That nonprofit, Community Access, built homes throughout the city for people with histories of homelessness and mental health concerns. Sandy was already a legend there—a veteran of the movement for housing and human rights with decades of experience and the scars to show for it.

She grew up in Greenwich Village in the 1940s and '50s, a Black girl steeped in leftist politics—a self-described “red diaper baby.” She had some struggles. She dealt with racism; she spent some time in a psychiatric hospital as a teen. The spirit of radicalism never left her entirely, but she made peace with working within the system. She went to college and law school, worked as a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer, and even served as Governor Mario Cuomo’s liaison for gay and lesbian concerns.

When I met her, she was the community relations manager at Community Access. She spent her days at our office in Battery Park, sitting at a desk in the corner, always with one headphone in, lest she miss one second of the day’s news. From that desk, when she looked up, she could see the water gleaming and, on the horizon, the Statue of Liberty still bidding welcome.

As it happened, I joined the organization right before the annual gala. Sandy was to be one of that year’s honorees, which meant she had to give a speech. That’s how I first got to know her: I walked over to her desk and offered to help with it.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said. “It’s too much about me.”

It makes me laugh now, thinking of the young guy I was, doubting myself incessantly but also convinced that I could write a damn good speech. There was no reason—none whatsoever—for Sandy to think I could help. And yet, she gave me a shot.

I asked her to tell me how her journey got started. When had she decided to devote her life to the cause of justice? She answered right away: It was when she was twelve years old and read about the murder of Emmett Till in the paper. I suggested she start there.

That’s all she needed; she knew how to write the rest. And I’d made a new friend.

After that, Sandy took to stopping by my desk, resting her elbow upon my cubicle and asking for my opinion on the latest breaking news. I loved those conversations. Because it was 2016, she liked to ask me, again and again, why I thought our preferred presidential candidate would likely win in November. So much for that.

About a week after that election, once we were both back in the office, she stopped by my desk and assured me it wasn’t my fault.

“How about you, Sandy?” I asked. “You hanging in there?”

“Oh, boy,” she replied. “I’m seventy-four years old. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s how to hang in there.”

No self-pity, no grand melodrama—just the resolve to keep going.

“What about me, Sandy?” I asked, laughing. “You think I can handle this?”

“Oh, you absolutely can. I’m counting on it.”

And with that, she made her way over to the copier, where she spent much of her time making copies of Supreme Court decisions for her weekly constitutional law workshop. These classes were held for program participants, and the rule was, as the former Community Access CEO Steve Coe once remarked, “You better come prepared with your facts, not just your feelings.”

That was Sandy Lowe. To know her was to know she believed in you. It didn’t matter who you were or where you’d been. For her, the fact that you’d spent the majority of your life living on the streets and in shelters didn’t mean you couldn’t master the facts of legal arguments. The fact that you lived with a mental health concern didn’t mean you couldn’t be a great artist or pursue meaningful work. The fact that you were just a twenty-three-year-old kid from Massachusetts didn’t mean you couldn’t help her write a speech.

She wasn’t rigid. She didn’t condescend. She not only believed that all people were equal, but she acted like she did.

Though she wasn’t a fan of religious language—a rare area where we disagreed—it seems to me that the belief that animated her life and work was that we are among souls. To deny justice to any human being is no small matter; when we mistreat our neighbors or consign them to a life of poverty or neglect, we are mistreating them against the standard of their innate capabilities and infinite worth. This is another way of saying that Sandy believed in democracy—not merely in the sense of going to the polls every few years, but as a way of life rooted in a recognition of the dignity of every person you encounter.

And now Sandy, after a long illness, has left us.

I was out grabbing lunch on a not particularly great day when the email came through. It was from Maggi Knox, another Community Access legend, now retired. “I know you were buddies,” it read.

What about me, Sandy? You think I can handle this?

Oh, absolutely you can. I’m counting on it.

Tonight I’m looking at that old speech, the one that gave us occasion to bond. (Thanks, Jon, for finding it.) It’s been a while. This line stands out: “So in one way or another I have spent my life trying to understand and fight the dark spaces between and within us.” And the title she gave it: “This Song is Not About Me.”

Well, Sandy, this song is about you, and you’re going to have to deal with it. Whether you want the credit or not, there are people throughout New York who have roofs over their heads tonight because of your efforts. And there are so many lives that are a little freer and more fulfilled—thanks to you. And here I sit, taking the measure of my own time on this earth, grateful simply to have known you. You fought the dark spaces, dear friend. Now and forever, we will walk in your light.

Here’s the full transcript of Sandy Lowe’s 2016 gala speech:

I grew up in Greenwich Village, a regular little Jewish Colored girl—a red diaper baby. I was 12 years old when 14-year-old Emmett Till was hung, castrated, burned, and drowned. I was shattered. That was the moment I realized I was not safe in this world.

In many ways, I guess I have never gotten over the pain, the shock and the anger at what people could do to each other. So in one way or another I have spent my life trying to understand and fight the dark spaces between and within us.

I spent 18 months in a mental hospital as a teenager. Later, I joined the Civil Rights Movement; had 2 children; went to college and law school; worked as a criminal defense and a gay & lesbian civil rights lawyer; and even did a stint in Governor Cuomo’s Office of Gay & Lesbian Concerns.

I want to tell you what I love about Community Access and why I love the work that we do.

I came to this wonderful organization 21 years ago with dreads and a smooth face. What I found was a group of people, then led by Steve Coe and Liz Glass, who had an absolute faith in fundamental human rights, and the intrinsic dignity and promise of people. Community Access has forged an organization comfortable with human complexity and willing to live with the ambiguity of working on the questions instead of having to have all the answers.

We believe that people are the experts in their own lives—that people are not their diagnosis. And we believe that our work is to create conditions—including beautiful housing and a variety of programs—that allow for the kind of spaces where people, who have faced systemic oppression, often in soul crushing institutions, can grow, question, recover and reinvest in their own lives.

Over the years, Community Access has committed itself to programs like the Art Collective, the Peer Training Center, Pet Access, the Crisis Respite Center and the Advocacy department that reflect thoughtful designs of collaborative healing spaces.

We value creativity and risk taking, and we aren’t afraid of the occasional failure.

I have seen the concrete ways in which our work has touched and transformed people’s lives including my own—because of Community Access’ belief in treating people like full human beings capable of growing and making decisions about their own lives.

For me, justice for all of us is the ability to move fluidly in the world, to be encouraged and encouraging, to be respected and respectful, to listen and be listened to, to be cared about and to be caring, and to be seen as valuable and to value the people the in communities in which we live.

It’s a kind of grace.

I titled this “This Is Not A Song About Me” because it’s not. It is about an organization of people—staff, tenants, and participants who rely on each other to do the daily hard work of bending the arc, inch by inch, toward change, space, and justice for all of us.

Right now, in my hometown of Holyoke, Massachusetts, there is a debate underway about the meaning of America. Or at least that’s how my friend Mimi Panitch, currently running for a seat on the Holyoke City Council, understands this moment.

At issue is an order proposed by Kevin Jourdain and Linda Vacon, two long-serving members of the council, that would officially declare Holyoke not to be a sanctuary city. Their rationale is simple enough: Holyoke relies on millions of dollars of federal funding, and the Trump administration has made very clear that it is willing to cut funding to communities that don’t comply with its ideological demands. Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s DOGE operation cut over $100 million in federal grant money Holyoke was expecting. So, by making clear that Holyoke will comply with federal immigration law—making clear that Holyoke is not a sanctuary city—the city council can help ensure that Holyoke won’t lose out on any more funding.

Mimi released a lengthy, impassioned, and deeply moving statement in opposition to this order. (You can read it in full here.) It read, in part:

We cannot be worthy of the best parts of our collective past if we collaborate, or cooperate, or pretend we don’t see what’s happening lest we be called upon to do something about it. We cannot invite ICE and Homeland Security, in their present incarnation, into our city to prey on our neighbors and be a cancer at the heart of our community. We cannot do this and remain who we say we want to be, and who we’ve sometimes been able to pretend to be.

I know money’s important. But, so is our sacred honor, and so are the people who make up our community, to whom we owe mutual loyalty. There are some things you don’t sell: who are you afterward, if you do?

That’s the backdrop for this conversation. I wanted to hear more of Mimi’s thoughts on Holyoke, immigration, American history, and how local communities ought to respond to demands from Washington. Topics we discussed include:

• The sanctuary city order before the Holyoke City Council

• The Trump administration’s approach to immigration and whether it’s a departure from American traditions

• The question of whether local communities can and should resist

• The economic costs of mass deportation

• Pope Francis’s letter to the American bishops opposing mass deportation

• C.S. Lewis’s insights on evil

• Building a local civic culture that fosters cooperation and goodness

A little about Mimi: She grew up in Holyoke, and she’s a graduate of Holyoke High School and the University of Chicago Law School. After practicing law in New York City, where she specialized in financial institutions and tax matters, she returned to her beloved hometown. She was appointed to the Holyoke Planning Board by Mayor Elaine Pluta in 2011 and has been reappointed by every mayor since. Today she’s the board’s chair.

Our paths first crossed in 2014 as volunteers for the Don Berwick campaign for governor. That’s a recurring theme here. In any event, she is as morally passionate— as passionately moral—a thinker and citizen as you’ll ever encounter. Agree with her or not—and, to be clear, I typically do—we should all be so lucky to have people like Mimi in our lives and in our communities. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Some of the C.S. Lewis lines referenced:

“This is the courtesy of Deep Heaven: that when you mean well, He always takes you to have meant better than you knew.” — from That Hideous Strength

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption…Your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” — from “The Weight of Glory”

Other sources mentioned:

• “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr.

• The Declaration of Independence

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Chief William Feehan was seventy-one years old. He was a deputy commissioner of the FDNY. And he spent the last moments of his life the way he had spent so many other moments: trying to keep people safe.

Feehan’s story serves as the centerpiece of Brian McDonald’s latest book, Five Floors Up: The Heroic Family Story of Four Generations in the FDNY. The September 11 attack is the event around which the book is organized. Along the way, we learn about the history of the FDNY through the lens of the Feehan family. Chief Feehan may be the most famous Feehan to serve in the FDNY, but he wasn’t the first. He followed in his own father’s footsteps, just as his son, John, followed in his. Some people—some families—are drawn to this life.

In this book, McDonald sets out to understand why. And in the process, he lifts up stories that are too often overlooked—stories of hidden lives lived for others.

“For periods all too brief in our country,” McDonald writes, “selflessness and a reflexive desire to help others at any price have received the respect they deserve.”

To mark the twenty-fourth anniversary of September 11, I talked to McDonald about, among other topics:

• His journey into journalism

• The process of writing this book

• Chief Feehan and the Feehan family

• Chief Feehan’s heroism on 9/11

• Chief Feehan’s funeral

• The emotional impact of 9/11

• 9/11 as a unifying national event

• The title Five Floors Up and how it epitomizes the firefighting spirit

Big thanks to Jay Ungar and Molly Mason for granting the licensing to use “Ashokan Farewell” in this episode and for generously making a donation to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation.

And, of course, thanks to Brian McDonald for spending some time with me—and more importantly, for being the kind of writer, and the kind of man, he is. He sees the dignity in the ordinary; he treats his subjects with the reverence they are due.

Last year, I attended an event at the American Irish Historical Society, where Brian was the the featured speaker. Members of the FDNY were in attendance, and they made two points abundantly clear: It deeply mattered to them that people know the story told in Five Floors Up. And they knew that they had found the perfect writer for the job.

Learn more about Brian and purchase Five Floors Up—or any of his other books—on his website.

Lord, take me where You want me to go;

Let me meet who You want me to meet;

Tell me what You want me to say;

And keep me out of Your way.

— Fr. Mychal Judge, FDNY Chaplain

I’m excited to share the inaugural episode, featuring a conversation with an old friend, Dave Marsh.

When, in January of this year, Dave Marsh left his post as chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)—a position he held in the Biden administration—he wrote the following statement on his LinkedIn:

“Federal workers serve their country tirelessly without regard for their personal political views. They have for over 100 years and America is a better place because of it. This is a nonpartisan principle worth fighting to protect.”

Today, amidst the Trump administration’s heedless and mean-spirited assault on the federal workforce, Dave is figuring out ways to help the broader public understand what the federal workforce does—and why these mass firings are bad for ordinary Americans.

Dave was two years ahead of me at Williams College, but I really came to know and admire him after he graduated and took a job with Don Berwick’s campaign for governor of my native Massachusetts. Berwick’s campaign was, for a variety of reasons, a long shot; he ended up coming in third in the Democratic primary. But I was there, and I can tell you: The Berwick campaign was everything we should want our politics to be. He should’ve won.

Anyway, I’m over it.1

I mention the Berwick campaign not only because of my own attachment to it, but because of what I believe it reveals about Dave. The Berwick campaign offered an expansive, generous vision of the common good, and expressed a belief in government’s ability to advance it.

This is a belief that’s guided Dave’s life and work, both on the campaign trail and in the halls of power, for two presidential administrations: Government can and should make people’s lives better. He’s been part of making this happen, and he’s worked alongside colleagues who have done the same—far from the spotlight, in sometimes frustrating, imperfect ways, trying to make people’s lives a little freer, safer, and more secure.

Over the past few years, and especially over the past eight months, whenever I’ve found myself in conversations with folks who think of the government as a malevolent “deep state” seeking to thwart the will of the people, I’ve thought: I wish these people could talk to Dave.

So, here he is. In this conversation, among other topics, we cover:

• Dave’s journey into politics

• The ordinary beauty of campaigns

• The difference between campaign life and governance

• The heroism of public servants on 9/11

• The disconnect between public perception and the reality of government work

• Civic responsibility as necessary for a functioning democracy

By the end of the conversation, we’ve gone fully off the rails, musing about whether the unifying power of Bruce Springsteen’s music is what will save the union. I’m to blame. He also has some nice things to say about the good people of Holyoke, Massachusetts.

For me, one lasting takeaway from this conversation—and Dave’s great gift to me—was a reminder that politics can feel different. That maybe, just maybe, we’re capable of more than the recent developments in our national life suggest. This is no small thing. To emerge from this moment of peril, we need to be able to see tomorrow—to imagine what a better tomorrow could look like. Dave helped me do that, and I’m grateful to him for taking the time to do so.

Subscribe now

This week, amidst the steady drum beat of bullshit to which we are all accustomed, an American icon used his voice to try to remind us of who we are. Or who we sometimes are, at our best.

When I first learned that Bruce Springsteen had named his current tour of Europe the Land of Hope and Dreams Tour, I knew that he would have something to say about the moment we’re in. I’m a Bruce Springsteen guy. I know what he’s about. My respect for him is vast.

And especially in the past 25 years, he’s gotten increasingly comfortable playing the role of the nation’s artistic conscience—giving expression to our grief in the wake of 9/11, denouncing the Iraq War, campaigning alongside John Kerry in 2004, decrying the “criminal ineptitude” of the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, campaigning alongside Senator Obama in 2008 (and later President Obama in 2012), lamenting the 2009 recession and the unjust suffering it inflicted on people who were already vulnerable while the rich got bailed out.

This is something he does. But until he actually launched the tour, taking the stage on Wednesday in Manchester, I didn’t know how different this particular intervention into the public discourse would feel. I didn’t realize how needed it was.

The more Springsteen has talked about politics, the more he’s opened himself up to predictable criticisms: He’s a rich guy lecturing us about the plight of the working class. He’s just another elite liberal blowhard, reciting the talking points of the Democratic Party. He’s got no skin in the game.

These criticisms were always unserious, but they sound especially so now. What Springsteen did on Wednesday night—not only speaking about the state of the nation, but having his team publish a video of his remarks online within hours of the show’s conclusion—was to invite a confrontation with the president himself.

Go watch the video. You can see that he feels the weight of the moment. He’s choosing his words with great care. Can you maybe even detect a touch of fear? Fear, maybe, but also resolve. He knows exactly what’s coming, and he knows he cannot do otherwise: This all must be said.

And when the president’s response arrived, it was quintessential Trump: sophomoric, bullying, undignified, and yes, threatening. In a Truth Social post, Trump wrote, “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

We shouldn’t shy away from naming this. The president of the United States threatened Bruce Springsteen. And he did so in a climate where we’ve increasingly numbed ourselves to the reality of political violence, where elected officials live in fear of retaliation for daring to criticize the leader, where ordinary people are abducted off our streets and shipped away without due process. Nancy Pelosi’s husband was nearly killed by an election-denying home invader, and Trump mocked the Pelosis. A mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” and members of that mob were released from prison by the president on whose behalf they had acted.

“We are all afraid, okay?” Senator Murkowski recently said. “I am oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation is real.”

This is the context for Springsteen’s remarks. This is the context in which he said, “A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.”

I am not suggesting that Springsteen is on the verge of becoming a political prisoner. Nor am I suggesting that Trump will take any meaningful action, beyond his vile pronouncements, to harm him. On that latter point, though, I am far from certain. Still, the truth is that there are millions of people who are more vulnerable at this moment than Springsteen will ever be.

But that’s part of what makes Springsteen’s words so significant. Since Trump’s return, powerful figures and powerful institutions have lined up to bend the knee, and with each of these concessions, Trump’s violations of our laws and of the basic norms of decency become more accepted. Normal. Springsteen has now upset that equilibrium. It’s as if he’s concluded—if I can’t say anything, who else can? And now he’s created the possibility that more figures of his stature will be willing to put themselves on the line.

*

Springsteen’s words were also significant, even essential, because of the comparison they invited. It doesn’t take much to draw the ugliness out of Trump, and that’s what Springsteen did.

And that ugliness stood in stark contrast to the measured, principled, patriotic remarks Springsteen offered, particularly in his introduction to “My City of Ruins,” about halfway through the show. He began with a list of this administration’s many sins.

“In America,” he said, “they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now. In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now. In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers.”

Each of these assertions is verifiably true.

“They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society,” he continued. “They’re abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They’re defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. They’re removing residents off American streets and without due process of law are deporting them to foreign detention centers and prisons.”

Again, all true.

Having made his case against the administration, Springsteen spoke of our better angels, our higher selves—America as an ideal. “The America I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real,” he said, “and, regardless of its faults, is a great country with a great people.”

What, exactly, is the America Springsteen has sung to us about? It’s complicated. It defies easy definition. In Springsteen’s America, dreams are destroyed as often as realized. People who served their country in Vietnam come home to neglect and mistreatment. Factory workers find that the source of their livelihoods is slowly destroying them.

But if I were to try to identify a through line in his work, I’d probably choose faithfulness—faithfulness to the people and places that formed you, to the price you pay, to the promises you make, to the belief that there is a promised land and you’re going to get there someday. Springsteen sings of this faithfulness in characters he loves, and whose ordinary American lives he imbues with meaning and grandeur.

And I submit that this is precisely the kind of vision that’s needed to respond to this moment—a vision of ourselves and each other as worthy of respect, a vision of our messy, sprawling, chaotic, deeply human national project as worthy and beautiful. It’s not enough to say that Trump is a wicked man, though he surely is. We must revivify those parts of the American character that are true and good and beautiful—and we have to claim them as ours, and say that no man, no matter his threats, no matter his bluster, can take those precious gifts from us.

I suspect this is what Springsteen intended when he concluded his remarks by invoking James Baldwin, one of the great writers of the American literary tradition. Born in 1924 in Harlem, Baldwin was a Black man, a queer man, an American who wrote, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” At another moment of great peril, he wrote, “Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.”

Springsteen was saying, in effect: Yes, the United States has always had its share of problems. But it’s also the home of James Baldwin, whose eloquent moral witness has challenged and consoled us for decades. We could add: It’s also the home of a guitar player from Jersey whose music has become a meaningful part of people’s lives all around the world.

“Now, I have hope,” Springsteen said, “because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, ‘In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.’ Let’s pray.”

Upon watching the video, a friend of mine texted, “And just like that, I’m patriotic again.” That’s how I feel, too. In this well timed and courageous intervention, Springsteen has helped remind us of an America worth saving. Who can say what happens from here? All we can say for now is that one of our great artists is willing to go down swinging. May others follow his lead.

Subscribe now

Here is an incomplete list of times Springsteen has met the national moment (links to videos included):

• In 2001, Springsteen opened the 9/11 telethon with an acoustic “My City of Ruins.” One his finest moments.
  

• At the 2006 Grammy Awards, Springsteen played “Devils and Dust,” a song sung from the perspective of a soldier in Iraq. He concludes by saying, “Bring ’em home!”
  

• Springsteen and the Sessions Band performed at the New Orleans Folk Festival in 2006, at the first festival post-Katrina. They performed a song called “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live” — adapted from a 1929 song by Blind Alfred Reed, with three new verses that Springsteen wrote for the occasion. He introduced the song with a speech about the cost of playing political games with people’s lives.
  

• In 2009, on the Sunday before President Obama’s inauguration, Springsteen performed at a concert at the Lincoln Memorial. He opened the show with “The Rising” and later joined Peter Seeger for a rousing “This Land is Your Land.”
  

• In 2021, Springsteen helped mark the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with a performance of “I’ll See You in My Dreams” at the 9/11 Memorial in downtown Manhattan.

My father, Robert Francis Glidden, died 15 years ago today.

At the time, I was newly 18, weeks away from my high school graduation. I’d committed to attend the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. “Where Cousy played,” my dad had told me—as in, Bob Cousy, the Celtics legend. On the school visit, his one and only priority was to pay our respects at the Cousy statue. I didn’t end up going to Holy Cross, but that’s another story.

Come to think of it, the first time my dad ever told me to “Shut up!” was when I talked over an ESPN Classic feature on Cousy. I was five. I fled the room, dramatizing my feeling of injury. I curled up on the stairs, pretending to cry. A few minutes later, my dad came to get me. “Bill, I’m sorry,” he said.

That story feels essential somehow, emblematic. People reading this who knew him will nod in recognition.

On the night he died, I was home in Holyoke, and he was 90 minutes away at a hospital in Boston. I was jotting down other stories, trying to arrange them into a speech. The speech wasn’t a eulogy; it was one I intended for him to hear. He had been sick for a little over a year, and a party was planned for later that week, a tribute to his life and work organized by his friends and colleagues. The term “living wake” was never used, but it would have been appropriate.

Here’s a story that made it into the speech—one from before I was born that had been handed down by eyewitnesses.

My dad played basketball in highly competitive local leagues into his late 40s. In this game, he was both player and coach, and his team was playing against a fast-paced, trash-talking, highly skilled team called the Pacers. The trash talk was relentless, and it was aimed squarely at my dad. Geniuses that they were, the Pacers noticed that my dad was older than everyone else on the court. “Can’t keep up, old man,” someone said. “Don’t hurt yourself, old man,” another said. The Pacers opened up a sizable lead, and my dad called a timeout.

In the huddle, he tore into his players. By all accounts, it was brutal, but effective. They returned to the court reenergized, and before long, they had climbed all the way back, eventually taking the lead themselves. The Pacers called a timeout, and the teams went to their respective huddles. Except, when my dad’s team gathered, he wasn’t there—he was in the Pacers’ huddle. There was shoving, swearing, and my dad shouting, “WHO’S THE OLD MAN?”

Man, it’s so good.

I chose that story because I knew he’d love it. But he died that night—never made it home, never heard the speech. I awoke to my uncle’s hand on my head and a cell phone being placed to my ear. “Bill,” I heard my mom’s voice say, “we lost the battle.”

I’ve been writing about him, writing for him, ever since.

***

Not long after my dad died, my cousin Shannon came to tell me about the last conversation they’d had. The conversation was at our house on Allyn Street, and he was up in bed, exhausted and out of breath, as he so often was. She went upstairs to say goodbye.

My dad knew how much I wanted him to get better. He knew that I thought he could get better by trying harder—and he also knew that he wasn’t going to get better. He felt that he was in God’s hands. He looked at Shannon and said, “Please make sure Billy knows I never quit on him.”

Here are some essays in which my dad is featured:

• A Day at Fenway. This one’s about a trip my mom and I took to Fenway Park on the one-year anniversary of his passing, and my homage to the Updike classic, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.

• Souls Passing Through. Published in , this one’s about my dad’s friend, Henry P. Dowd.

• Learning from Bruce. This one’s about Bruce Springsteen. But my dad’s in it!

Shifting the Sun

by Diana Der-Hovanessian

When your father dies, say the Irish,
you lose your umbrella against bad weather.
May his sun be your light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Welsh,
you sink a foot deeper into the earth.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Canadians,
you run out of excuses. May you inherit
his sun, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the French,
you become your own father.
May you stand up in his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Indians,
he comes back as the thunder.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Russians,
he takes your childhood with him.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the English,
you join his club you vowed you wouldn't.
May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Armenians,
your sun shifts forever.
And you walk in his light.

When you think of Pope Francis, what comes to mind? I’ll bet it’s that smile of his, the light in his eyes. You saw him and knew you were looking at a human being fully alive.

But Pope Francis wanted us to know, first and foremost, that he was a sinner.

It’s the first thing he told us about himself when he was elected pope in 2013, and he kept telling us every chance he got. Everywhere he went, he asked other people to pray for him. It was as though he was saying: Hey, I’m just another guy. I need all the help I can get.

I have to believe there’s a relationship between this sense of himself—just another flawed, fucked-up person, nevertheless loved by God—and that smile we will all remember. For Francis, joy was an indispensable part of the Christian life; so, too, was having a sense of humor, especially about yourself.

“Gratitude and unworthiness are the feelings that accompany this reflection, these thoughts,” he writes in his autobiography, published this year. He knew it was all grace, a freely given gift. He understood that his job was to keep saying yes to the gift, to keep delighting in the givenness of things.

A human being fully alive is a wonder to behold. The miracle of Francis was always in the personal encounter—washing the feet of prisoners, welcoming migrants, dining with the unhoused, consoling a young boy who had just lost his father, always taking time to shake the hands of the faithful in St. Peter’s Square.

These encounters stirred something in people’s hearts, including mine; they were beautiful and were recognized as such. Beauty, like truth and goodness, makes a demand upon us; we see it, and we know we need it. To see this beauty in how Francis treated others was to feel hopeful, even reconciled. Sure, the world was still going to shit, as it always is. But apparently it was still possible to live a different kind of life—to drop the defenses, to get to the heart of the matter. And for Francis, the heart of the matter was always others, our brothers and sisters, our neighbors.

Some people take responsibility for making the idea of God credible; some people, no matter how dark the times may seem, live with a sense of trust—trust in a love that loved us first, a love that will win in the end. And in living this way, they give us a glimpse of a different kind of reality, a reality beyond the endless cycle of fear, competition, and exploitation. Through them, we see the world made new.

I submit that Francis was such a man. Not a perfect man, not a perfect pope. There are questions he failed to resolve, problems he left to the next generation; he was sometimes frustrating, often contradictory. But he was a trusting, and trustworthy, man. A man who took responsibility. A man of great joy. It was partly due to his influence that I returned to the pews on Sunday mornings, and for that I am grateful.

And he was also just another guy, a loved sinner with hope in his heart. Toward the end of his autobiography, Francis tells us what hope means to him. “To have hope doesn’t mean being naïve optimists who ignore the tragedy of human evil,” he writes. “Hope is the virtue of a heart that doesn’t close itself in the dark, doesn’t stop at the past, doesn’t scrape along in the present, but can clearly see tomorrow.”

I won’t lie. Tomorrow feels like a long way off. Francis must have felt this way, too, at least some of the time. He smiled anyway. He knew suffering, and he knew humanity’s fallenness—all of ours and his own—and he lived joyfully anyway.

Was this madness? Was it folly? Some might say so, and there’s no shortage of evidence to back them up.

But maybe Francis was right. Maybe our best days really do lie ahead. Maybe, through what he calls a “revolution in tenderness,” we will learn to see tomorrow clearly. Maybe, as he writes, “one single man, one single woman is enough for hope to exist, and that man and that woman can be you. Then there is another ‘you,’ and yet another ‘you,’ and then we become ‘we.’” Maybe the future really does have a name, and that name is hope. Pondering this, who could help but smile? Who could hide their joy? Folly or no, that’s the world I want to live in.

Subscribe now

Here’s Francis at his best.

Hi, friends. Happy Easter. In what follows, I’m trying to think through some stuff. Hope you enjoy.

David Brooks has a new piece out in The Atlantic, in which he, a self-described conservative, reflects on the conservative movement’s descent into reactionary madness. For Brooks, today’s conservatism isn’t so much an ideological project as it is a sustained and highly lucrative effort to make liberals sad.

But Brooks identifies another motivation behind today’s MAGA movement: a distorted desire for meaning. Today’s popular right-wing culture warriors, Brooks notes, frame today’s political disputes as a “civilizational war.” This framing, according to Brooks, has a seductive power. “This message gives you a kind of terrifying thrill: The stakes are apocalyptic,” he writes. “Your life has meaning and urgency. Everything is broken; let’s burn it all down.”

This kind of drama has its appeal. Who wants to think of themselves as just another bozo on the bus, muddling through, tossed about by forces beyond their control, until, one day, they die? Better, apparently, to see yourself—as Elon Musk apparently does—as a hero on a quest to save civilization.

But these fantasies of crusade come at a great cost, as we’re now seeing. It’s often only in times of great peril that another kind of heroism comes into focus: the ordinary heroism of routine.

Subscribe now

***

I am borrowing the term “heroism of routine” from a short book by Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust, written in the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

On the morning of September 11, Rowan Williams, then the archbishop of Canterbury, was in a building used by Trinity Church, blocks away from the World Trade Center.

Throughout his book, Williams explores the contrast between the martyr’s thirst for dramatic action and the ordinary person’s efforts, however futile, to do the next right thing. It’s worth quoting him at length:

Yet at the same time, one of the main memories of those closest to the events of September 11 will probably be of the prosaic heroism of firefighters and police in Manhattan. Memories of that morning for me include the enormously careful calm of one of the building staff, trained as a volunteer fire officer, deliberately talking us through the practical things to do next; and of the staff who were supervising the children’s day care centre on the first floor, putting their own fear on hold while they reassured the children. Small examples of what was visible in much more costly ways outside, a couple of streets away. If we are to remember that day, we had better remember this too, remember, for example, that one firefighting unit in New York lost all its members that day. It puts a different perspective on heroism for a moment. It tells us that heroism is not always bound up with drama, the sense of a Great Cause, but is something about doing what is necessary for a community’s health and security. For most of the time, this will be invisible; it is only in crisis that the habits slowly and even drearily formed over years emerge to make possible what can only be seen as extraordinary and selfless labours.

“…we may well be sobered,” he continues, “by the conjunction of heroism for the sake ‘martyrdom,’ with its attendant death and devastation, and the heroism of routine. In one way, we have been reacquainted with a local and unexciting heroism that we have ignored in our restless passion for drama.”

For Williams, there is the boring, dreary heroism of showing up every day, trying to solve some problems, accepting even the frustrating parts of life as necessary and meaningful. And then there is the false heroism that inflates the self, feeds a sense of one’s importance—no matter what’s destroyed or who gets hurt. Everything is broken; burn it all down.

Throughout my life, I’ve been a witness to the local and unexciting heroism of the ordinary, and I’ve been a beneficiary of it. When I worked at City Hall in my hometown, I got to know people who’d been working for years to fix problems—to get the streets plowed, the streets paved, the budgets balanced, the parks reopened. And when I worked at a housing nonprofit in New York City, I worked alongside people who were literally walking the streets to connect some of the community’s most vulnerable members to the support system they needed.

But I’d better be careful here. Some of the folks I’m describing, no doubt, have politics that differ from mine. I’m not borrowing their experience to score a cheap point.

Rather, I’m thinking, along with Williams, about different ways of being in the world, about the stories we consent to live within.

I don’t know. It seems important to note the contrast between, say, a guy storming the Capitol, armed with zip-ties, play-acting revolution, and, say, government workers at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) trying to manage a bird flu outbreak. One is living in a fantasy—the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, after all—while the others, out of sight, out of mind, are trying to do their jobs and keep us all safe. One made a martyr’s drama of a crime, while these others were just doing what little they could to help. Under this administration, though, the zip-tie martyr gets a pardon, while the healthcare workers are denounced and shown the door.

Perhaps now, as systems break down, as government workers are laid off, as preventable suffering spreads, we can consider anew the heroism of routine. Right now, away from the screens, there are people taking responsibility for the world around them, doing what little they can. There’s beauty in hidden lives, and there’s meaning in the habits we form while muddling through.