It’s a Darwinian trait. Groups of people (tribes, organized religions, communities, nations) socialize through the stories they tell. Those stories are often enhanced, embellished, even fantasized to strengthen our resilience against external threat. Exceptionalism binds us to a common cause. “United we stand, divided we fall.” (Fact-check: Many of us attribute the expression to Abraham Lincoln. But that’s wrong. The phrase comes from Aesop’s Fable “The Four Oxen and the Lion.” In his famous House Divided Speech in 1858, Lincoln quoted a line from the Gospel of Matthew: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” So the credit goes to an authority even higher than Lincoln.)

Then there are tales that appear mythical--or so dramatized that they’re ready for a Netflix limited series--yet might be genuinely, or mostly, true. They deserve curious exploration. Curiosity, after all, is more useful than certainty.

Consider the pea-soup fog that may have saved George Washington’s army just weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It has been called a miracle, an act of providence, a sign of God’s favor. Or merely a lucky break.

We know it as “The Battle of Long Island.” It unfolded 250 years ago in late August 1776.

Here’s what happened--and what didn’t--with thanks to Barnet Schechter’s thoroughly engaging The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution.

Just over a month after the Declaration of Independence was signed, the British fleet began arriving in lower New York Bay. By late August, the waters of Manhattan were clogged with 390 warships, 400 transport ships, 24,000 soldiers, and 10,000 sailors. An American officer wrote to his son:

“You would be surprised if you was here to see what a mighty fleet of ships our enemies have got; they lie down against Staten Island more than a mile in length from east to west and so thick and close together for the greatest part of the way, that you can’t see through where they are no more than if it was a thick swamp and the regulars expect as many more soon and then we expect bloody work of it.”

The British strategy was to expel the Americans from New York City and seize the region, cutting off the southern colonies from New England. It was textbook British military doctrine: control the high ground, waterways, and cities, while minimizing casualties.

Long Island was the main objective.

The Battle of Long Island, a National Guard Heritage Painting by 21^st century artist Domenick D’Andrea, created for the National Guard Bureau. The painting depicts the Delaware Regiment at the Battle of Long Island, August 27, 1776.

General William Howe’s forces held a two-to-one advantage over George Washington’s Continental Army: roughly 20,000 men, with another 4,000 in reserve on Staten Island, to about 9,000 Americans. The ground invasion began on Thursday, August 22nd, a clear and bright day. Howe launched a flanking march across Brooklyn, defeating American forces in several engagements and effectively pushing them toward Brooklyn Heights, where they were pinned against the East River.

Washington’s army appeared on the verge of existential defeat. Behind it, a river crowded with enemy ships. In front: the advancing British army.

Retreat seemed impossible.

As Schechter writes: “The East River was fully a mile wide, with a strong tidal current, and Washington had only ten flatboats at the ferry which he needed to transport the army’s horses, cannon, gunpower and shot in addition to barrels of flour and salt pork.”

Late on August 29th, Washington convened a war council at his headquarters in Brooklyn Heights. He had received timely intelligence that additional British warships had come through the Long Island Sound, further enveloping the American army. His only remaining option was a retreat as daring as it was improbable.

The embarkation began at 8 p.m. on the night of August 29th. It went smoothly at first, until the tide ebbed and reversed direction, and high winds threatened to sweep the American boats into the grasp of the British warships. The gale subsided around 11 p.m., and the wind shifted more favorably. Throughout the night, small boats went back and forth.

But thousands of men remained trapped in Brooklyn.

Here’s a first-person account from a young lieutenant named Benjamin Tallmadge:

“As the dawn of the next day approached, those of us who remained in the trenches became anxious for our own safety, and when the dawn appeared, there were several regiments still on duty. At this time a very dense fog began to rise [emphasis added] and it seemed to settle in a peculiar manner over both encampments. I recollect this particular providential occurrence perfectly well, and so very dense was the atmosphere that I could scarcely discern a man at six yard’s distance.”

“[Even after the sun arose] the fog remained as thick as ever. Finally, the second order arrived for the regiment to retire, and we very joyfully bid those trenches a long adieu. When we reached Brooklyn ferry, the boats had not returned from their last trip, but they very soon appeared and took the whole regiment over to New York; and I think I saw Gen. Washington on the ferry stairs when I stepped into one of the last boats that received the troops.”

By about 7 a.m., as the fog began to lift, the British could be seen on Brooklyn Heights, occupying the abandoned forts.

Tallmadge continued: “In the history of warfare, I do not recollect a more fortunate retreat. Gen. Washington has never received the credit which was due to him for this wise and most fortunate measure.”

Schecter calls Washington’s flawless evacuation of Brooklyn “one of the greatest moments in the annals of warfare.” Historians have debated whether Washington’s daring ways--or British General Howe’s delays, excessive caution or ineptitude-- made the American escape possible.

One thing is clear: On August 29th and 30th, 250 years ago, a thick fog concealed the evacuation of the remaining (though not all) elements of Washington’s army from Brooklyn Heights. It kept the cause of liberty alive for the next battle, and the battles after that. Washington retreated up Broadway to Harlem, skirmished with the British at Throgs Neck and White Plains, crossed the Hudson to New Jersey, continued south to the Delaware River, then crossed back on Christmas night to defeat the Hessian garrison at Trenton--a turning point after months of retreat. (The famous Emanuel Leutze painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware, is an entirely mythical representation.

Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851.

The boat would have been much larger; Washington would not have been standing freely on the icy river; the flag shown in the painting did not yet exist; and the crossing occurred in darkness, not at a dramatically sunlit dawn. I prefer this image by the artist Mort Kuntsler, commissioned by Rep. Tom Suozzi:)

Mort Kuntsler’s Washington’s Crossing is a deeply researched rendition of the event in December 1776 . Available here.

You can make your own judgement on whether the pea-soup fog was a “miracle,” “providential,” or simply a meteorological event exploited through the combination of daring and sound military logistics.

But it happened. And even a skeptical eye should leave room for the possibility of a miracle.

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I’m talking about the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial at the foot of Capitol Hill.

Monuments soar and celebrate. The subjects become stone deities, and idols that force our eyes upward in reverence. They are high, vast, deep. They are larger than life, putting us in our mortal places.

They inspire awe.

The Grant Memorial triggers awe in a different way. It is grim and dark; not a single, soaring statue, but kind of a stone storyboard, its separate pieces telling the hellish story of war. Taken together, the memorial is cinematic, in bronze and marble.

At its center, Grant sits atop his horse. In contrast to the usual symbols of heroism—the raising of a sword, for instance—Grant seems almost slumped in the saddle. His hat is pulled low over his head. Some have said he looks calm. Many see something else: a man wearied by the carnage of battle.

The flanking pieces stand at eye level, bringing the observer into the center of battle. On one side, a cavalry charge features a fallen horse pinning its rider beneath it as the rest of the troops thunder past.

On the other side, an artillery unit desperately maneuvers a cannon. Its lead horse has somehow slipped the bridle, and rears uncontrollably. Faces are eternally frozen in fear, exhaustion, and grim determination.

This is not a celebration of greatness. It is a snapshot of reality.

The sculptor, Henry Merwin Shrady, spent roughly 20 years on the work (and died just weeks before its 1922 dedication). His goal was to depict, as realistically as possible, the violent chaos of the battlefield.

Which brings me to a specific moment in time, when Grant resisted snap judgement—a convenient, bias-confirmed decision.

On April 6, 1862, , Grant’s army confronted Confederate forces in Shiloh, Tennessee, close to the Mississippi border. Grant was heavily outnumbered, facing more than 40,000 Confederate soldiers versus 33,000 Union troops.

The battle generated approximately 24,000 casualties over two days, greater than any battle in America to that point. Its toll would be soon surpassed by Antietam, with roughly 23,000 casualties in a single day, and Gettysburg, with about 51,000 over three days.

Excerpts from Ron Chernow’s epic biography of Grant bring us into the battle, but also Grant’s fortitude in the face of sheer chaos:

“Even with dead bodies heaped up around him, Grant retained his equanimity and unwavering faith in victory. When General Buell suddenly materialized on the scene and glimpsed the crush of terrified stragglers at the landing, he asked Grant about his plans for retreat. The thought having never entered his mind, Grant replied coolly, ‘I haven’t despaired of whipping them yet!’ He had the gift of believing in his men and simply refused to concede that things looked so gloomy. At around 5 p.m., right after a scout reported to Grant, the man’s head was blown off, spattering him with blood. Grant didn’t flinch, staring fixedly ahead. ‘Not beaten yet by a damn sight,’ he mumbled, going about his business. One journalist said Grant glanced at the sinking sun and observed evenly, ‘They can’t break our lines tonight. Tomorrow we shall attack with fresh troops, and of course will drive them.’ Here was Grant’s matchless strength: he did not crumble in adversity, which only hardened his determination, and knew that setbacks often contained the seeds of their own reversals….He now kept up his spirits despite a ghastly toll of seven thousand Union soldiers killed or wounded and up to three thousand captured that day.” (Chernow 203).

Chernow continues:

“On that stormy first night, two thousand corpses lay strewn across a reeking battlefield that stretched for twelve square miles. In this nightmarish landscape, thousands of wounded men lay writhing and moaning in drenching rain, their contorted figures lit by sporadic lightening. The ground was slick with blood and carpeted with torn limbs and decapitated heads. Wild pigs rooted among putrefying bodies, their snorts audible to the dying soldiers.” (Chernow 204)

“‘This night of horrors will haunt me to my grave,’ swore a Confederate soldier.” (Chernow 204)

Still, Grant maintained an inner strength. During the night, General William Tecumseh Sherman found him standing under an oak tree “streaming with rain, hat pulled low over his face, collar upturned, holding a lantern and chewing a cigar. ‘Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?’ Sherman remarked. ‘Yes,’ replied Grant with a drag on his cigar. ‘Lick ‘em tomorrow though.’” (Chernow, 204)

The real strength of Grant’s thinking was that he was not reacting, he was innovating.

According to many Civil War military scholars, both Union and Confederate armies routinely retreated after losing a tactical engagement. A retreat was considered a sound way to preserve forces or seek more favorable conditions.

But Grant refused to accept conventional thinking. He would not retreat into the safety of standard orthodoxy. He thought critically, strategically … patiently.

The next day, reinforced Union troops began a concerted offensive. After hours of brutal fighting, the momentum shifted to Grant’s army.

Back to Chernow:

“Grant didn’t burden division commanders with detailed instructions, giving them freedom to be spontaneous. The clatter of arms grew earsplitting as rain thickened the dense smoke hanging over the battlefield. Union troops regained territory lost the day before, tripping over numberless cadavers and groaning men abandoned on the battlefield overnight.” (Chernow 205-206)

“Taken by surprise, Confederate soldiers yielded ground all morning.” (Chernow 206)

Grant won Shiloh.

The Grant Memorial does not capture the specific moments of Shiloh, but something larger: all the Shiloh’s of the Civil War.

And it offers a lesson for our overheated age.

Grant observed. He assimilated. He accommodated new information.

Today, we scroll, click, and tap. Instead of thinking critically, we clog our brains with the fat of confirmation bias. True, our species has always relied on fight-or-flight impulses in the survival of the fittest. But now, it seems like survival of the fastest.

The Grant Memorial compels us, particularly in moments of volatility, to put away our phones and tablets, dig inside ourselves, and think.

Question doctrine. Motivate and innovate.

Think—and win—like Grant.

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I’m writing this on August 2, in a summer of frantic headlines, war in the Middle East, domestic strife, and a profoundly disappointing season for the Mets.

In other words, just another August 2.

Except that this is the anniversary of one of the most critical historic events that you probably never learned about. And it helped change the world. It helped set in motion the American effort to build the atomic bomb, contributing to victory in World War II and shaping generations of relative peace, stability, and democracy.

I love hidden hinges of history, largely forgotten moments that change the course of humanity. Most Americans recognize the major landmarks of the American experience: the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the first shots at Fort Sumter, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the civil rights movement and 9/11, for example. But there are overlooked historical events that prove every bit as transformational as the marquee moments.

Here is how I stumbled upon one of them, and how it led to my latest novel, The Einstein Conspiracy.

As a member of Congress and a history geek, I was very easily distracted by historic sites that were part of my workplace.

On several occasions, I met with President Obama in the Oval Office and struggled to keep my mind from wandering. I would imagine FDR in that very room; visualize Theodore Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Reagan behind the Resolute Desk. Even when racing to an important meeting in the Capitol, I couldn’t help slowing down to absorb the site of Congressman Lincoln’s desk on the House floor, or the corridors where Adams, Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Taft, and LBJ once held hushed conversations (you can read more on this topic in my essay on Fillmore and Lincoln).

That curiosity has taken me to some obscure places. Several years ago, I learned that Albert Einstein had summered in 1939 in a modest cottage not far from the home my wife and I own on Long Island’s rural North Fork.

Most of our neighbors enjoy romantic dinners or viewing wondrous sunsets over the Long Island Sound. My wife somehow agreed to join me on a hunt for Einstein’s cottage.

We found it in plain sight on a bluff overlooking a harbor. It’s a simple two-story structure with an unkempt, scrubby lawn. In fact, not much appeared to have changed since Einstein lived there eighty-six years ago.

Gazing at it from our car, I had questions. Why had Einstein lived in that particular house? Why Long Island? What had he been doing there?

I begin digging.

That’s when I learned that history had been made on its little porch.

Einstein had come to Long Island that summer to relax and sail the local bays and harbors. Meanwhile, at Columbia University, another physicist named Leo Szilard was working frantically to save the world.

Months earlier, a German scientist had succeeded in splitting an atom. Szilard and others understood that a nuclear chain reaction might generate enough power to create a super weapon: an atomic bomb. Hitler certainly believed it, and had ordered his scientists to research, develop and build the weapon.

Szilard managed to split an atom in March 1939. He initially wanted Einstein’s help warning the Belgian government that Germany might try to obtain uranium from the Belgian Congo. But there was one problem: Einstein didn’t agree with Szilard’s theory. He compared the release of nuclear energy to “shooting birds in the dark in a country where there are only a few birds.”

On July 12, 1939, Szilard and fellow scientist Eugene Wigner decided to force the issue. They drove from New York City to Einstein’s cottage and lectured the great master on how an explosive chain reaction might be produced.

Finally, Einstein said, “I never thought of that.”

Imagine the audacity of the moment: two younger scientists had traveled to Long Island to teach Albert Einstein a lesson in physics.

The three men began drafting a letter to the Belgium ambassador. Soon, however, they changed course and decided to warn President Franklin D. Roosevelt directly.

The process took weeks. Drafts moved back and forth. Einstein dictated language. Szilard refined the argument. Eventually, two versions of the letter were prepared for Einstein’s signature.

Both were dated August 2, 1939.

Still, it took months for the letter to reach FDR. Alexander Sachs, an economist at Lehman Brothers and personal friend of FDR agreed to deliver the letter personally to the Oval Office. Walter Isaacson’s seminal biography, Einstein His Life and Universe, describes what happened:

“On the afternoon of Wednesday, October 11, [Sachs] was ushered into the Oval Office carrying Einstein’s letter, Szilárd’s memo, and an eight-hundred-word summary he had written on his own. The president greeted him jovially.

‘Alex, what are you up to?’

Sachs could be loquacious, which may be why the president’s handlers made it hard for him to get an appointment, and he tended to tell the president parables. This time it was a tale about an inventor who told Napoleon that he would build him a new type of ship that could travel using steam rather than sails. Napoleon dismissed him as crazy. Sachs then revealed that the visitor was Robert Fulton and, so went the lesson, the emperor should have listened. Roosevelt responded by scribbling a note to an aide, who hurried off and soon returned with a bottle of very old and rare Napoleon brandy that Roosevelt said had been in his family for a while. He poured two glasses. Sachs worried that if he left the memos and papers with Roosevelt, they might be glanced at and then pushed aside. The only reliable way to deliver them, he decided, was to read them aloud. Standing in front of the president’s desk, he read his summation of Einstein’s letter, parts of Szilárd’s memo, and some other paragraphs from assorted historical documents.

‘Alex, what you are after is to see that the Nazis don’t blow us up,’ the president said.

‘Precisely,’ Sachs replied.

Roosevelt called in his personal assistant. ‘This requires action,’ he declared.

That evening, plans were drawn up for an ad hoc committee, coordinated by Dr. Lyman Briggs, director of the Bureau of Standards, the nation’s physics laboratory. It met informally for the first time in Washington on October 21. …

The following week, Einstein received a polite and formal thank-you letter from the president.

‘I have convened a board,’ Roosevelt wrote, ‘to thoroughly investigate the possibilities of your suggestion regarding the element of uranium.’”

It was the embryo of the Manhattan Project.

I return to that cottage from time to time and wonder: What would’ve happened had that letter not been written? Is it possible that the United States would not have developed a bomb? Is it possible that Hitler would have acquired one before us?

Most likely not.

Hitler had purged Germany of its most brilliant physicists because they were Jewish, even denouncing “Jewish physics” in favor of an ideologically approved “Aryan physics.” In doing so, the Nazis helped produce one of the greatest transfers of brainpower in history. Scientists capable of advancing nuclear research fled Europe and landed in the halls of Columbia, the University of Chicago, Caltech, and other renowned American institutions.

The brain trust with the ability to build the bomb was now composed, in large part, of immigrants living in America, committed to defeating the Nazis.

Still, those hinges of history wink at us.

Without Einstein’s letter, the United States might have taken far longer to recognize the urgency of nuclear research. Without his name attached to the warning, Roosevelt might not have been persuaded that the threat required action.

And without that afternoon on a quiet Long Island porch, history might have turned differently.

It all became the basis of The Einstein Conspiracy: a historical spy thriller that pits two FBI agents against a diabolical Nazi operative embedded in the United States and determined to capture Einstein.

I’ve recently been on a book tour, traveling from Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena to Politics and Prose in Washington D.C., and dozens of events in between. I’m also looking forward to discussing the novel at the National Book Festival in D.C. on August 22.

I invite you to read The Einstein Conspiracy and make your own judgments as to whether that hinge in history created the ripple that changed the world for the better.

You can order The Einstein Conspiracy here:

Theodore’s

Bookshop

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

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The Rose Garden at the White House is seen, Tuesday, July 21, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

The headlines of the past week recalled two political satires with chilling relevance: Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here” and Christopher Buckley’s 1986 “The White House Mess.”

Lewis’s dark satire takes readers through an authoritarian takeover of the United States. Buckley’s novel opens with a pajama-clad president who refuses to vacate the White House when his successor arrives for the inauguration.

Satire uses humor and exaggeration to make a point about societal folly. But the actual news coming out of Washington suggests that both Lewis and Buckley’s fantasies may not have been exaggerating enough.

Last week, President Trump escalated his claims that the 2020 election was a fraud, invoking a similar playlist of “rigged,” “stolen,” and “deep state.” Much of the media attributed the speech to Trump’s obsession with the past.

They are wrong. Trump’s focus is not on November 2020, it is on November 2026. By reviving doubts about the last election, Trump lays the groundwork of paranoia to make Americans question the next one.

Less noticed was a headline about Trump’s latest White House pet project: a “beautiful” (Trump’s words) granite helipad on the South Lawn.

It joins an expanding portfolio of presidential home improvements: the big, beautiful ballroom; the trendy new patio paved where portions of the Rose Garden once bloomed; and a refurbished bathroom off of the Lincoln bedroom featuring floor-to-ceiling black and white Statuary marble and gold fixtures.

These are not exactly the signs of a tenant counting down the months until his lease expires on Jan. 20, 2029.

Given Trump’s affection for princely habitats adorned in gold, one might expect him to be planning his next phase of post-presidential residences in New York, Florida… maybe even Scotland. Instead, he appears intent on making the White House fit for a king, or perhaps a crown prince.

The election rhetoric and the royal renovations may seem unrelated. Together, however, they reflect an administration keen on treating democratic norms as temporary inconveniences, and presidential power as a permanent possession.

Until now, I have resisted theories that Trump could invalidate enough midterm results to preserve his House majority, or somehow extend his own presidency. The stuff of conspiracy theories, some say. I have been assured that American traditions, laws and systems can counter a Trump-style coup.

Perhaps they can. But reading history, and even literary satire, teaches us not to confuse institutional endurance with institutional invincibility.

We read history not because it predicts the future but to grasp the recurring weaknesses of human nature: the allure of power; the tendency to bend facts around our prior beliefs; and the willingness, across the ideological spectrum, to exchange democratic principles for the promise of security.

There are several “flashpoints” which Trump could exploit during the midterms. He could deploy federal forces to polling places in certain swing districts to coerce and intimidate. His administration could attempt to seize and invalidate ballots in targeted districts. He could pressure friendly Republican governors in purple states, as he did after the 2020 election, to fish for additional votes. He could lean on Republican congressional allies to manipulate — or even disregard — the rules for governing the seating of new members on Jan. 3, 2027.

He does not necessarily need a neat, definitive victory. He needs constitutional chaos: competing claims, disputed ballots, emergency court filings. Just enough uncertainty to allow the full weight of his presidential thumb on the scales.

The administration and its enablers have built the scaffolding on which democracy will hang.

They have cultivated a modern-day version of Lewis’s “minutemen,” the paramilitary force that enforces his fictional regime through intimidation and violence. Today’s would-be minutemen have allies in Congress willing to shrug at the 2021 attack on the Capitol, and Trump’s pardons for some of its most violent participants.

Trump’s signal is unmistakable: I had your back then. I’ll have it again. And that message matters.

Democrats, meanwhile, have been studying this political battlefield, war-gaming every offensive and rehearsing for their first breach. Alongside bipartisan allies, they have marked red lines and fortified democracy’s defense. But they may need to prepare for more than carrying legal briefs to a knife fight.

In 2016, when Hillary Clinton appeared certain to defeat Trump, my literary agent suggested that I write a political satire based on an alternative history. My premise was that Trump defeated Clinton, won reelection, and then organized a nationwide strategy to repeal the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two elected terms.

Trump’s victory made the project obsolete. Reality overtook a $28.99 political satire before I could even write it.

If we have learned anything from Trump, it is that the most imaginative satiric stretch shrivels against the reality of his headlines.

Bulldozers turn the White House into a palace. The Pentagon announces testosterone screenings for troops. ICE agents fatally shoot people during street encounters. A nominee for director of national intelligence refuses to say plainly that Biden won the 2020 election. And the president delivers a national address invoking conspiracy theories that could help undermine confidence in the next one, all in the last week.

You couldn’t make this stuff up. Or, more precisely, you could … but an editor might send it back for being too implausible.

Satires are warnings. When the unimaginable happens, we can’t say we were not warned.

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Even now, nearly ten years after leaving Congress, my passion for history motivates me to lead tours of the Capitol Building.

There are perks to serving in Congress (though fewer than internet myths would have you believe). You can visit foreign capitals, rub sharp elbows with celebrities at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and bypass metal detectors in most congressional offices. For me, however, the most glorious perk was the ability to take long walks through the Capitol Building, alone and late at night, immersed in history. I’d reflect while standing in the very places once occupied by Congressmen Adams, Lincoln, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. If I listened carefully enough, I could imagine their faint echoes against the granite and marble.

Which brings me to two places that are well trodden by tourists: one as popular as a Disney attraction; the other often overlooked. They are stark and vivid contrasts between folklore and authenticity in our interpretation of history.

Statuary Hall

The first is Statuary Hall, where the House met between 1807 and 1857. It’s a small semicircular space, with a coffered half-dome supported by imposing marble columns. The floor is a checkerboard pattern of white and yellow marble tiles scattered with small, metallic plaques marking the desk locations of House Members who also served as President, including Lincoln, Jackson, Fillmore, Hayes, and Adams.

Let’s zero in on the Adams plaque.

It triggers one of the strangest rituals in the Capitol Building, known as “The Whispering Spot.” Here, where President John Q. Adams sat (the only president elected to Congress after leaving the White House) tourists gather in a football-like huddle. They bend their knees, cup their ears, crouch as low as possible … and listen to the floor.

A tour leader (usually a congressional intern or staff assistant) takes position some twenty feet away, bends towards the floor as well, and whispers:

“Hellloooooo”

“Can you hear me?”

In this acoustically quirky room, the voice carries from the stone floor, up and across the concave ceiling, and lands with HD clarity right where Adams sat. The guide explains how Adams had somehow figured out this acoustic anomaly, and was able to listen in on the hushed conversations of opposing party leaders. The tourists oooh and ahhh, as if standing in the presence of Old Faithful at Yellowstone, then move on.

It’s a good story. Exceedingly unlikely. A myth. Or, at the very least, a wild exaggeration that has outlasted the banal truth.

Yes, the present-day room offers clear, sharp acoustics in certain areas. But the chamber where Adams served from 1831 to 1848 was very different.

Matthew Wasniewski, the official historian of the House, told me in an email: “The whispering lore gets repeated a lot and I hear it told to many groups in that space. But it’s almost certainly apocryphal.” Indeed, the room would have been quite different from how it appears (and sounds) now. But the Samuel Morse painting from 1822 is the best depiction I know of. It shows the carpets, desks, and drapes, while also giving a sense of the wooden riser on which the desks were arranged in a semi-circle.

Samuel F. B. Morse, The House of Representatives (1822)

Wasniewski continues:

“All these things would have dampened the sound; the echoes would have remained as well as the din of loud voices seeking recognition or jostling to hear in front of the Speaker’s baldacchino. Moreover, after the House left the space and moved into the modern chamber, and the Old Hall of the House was designated as National Statuary Hall, it underwent an initial 19th-century renovation in which the original wooden ceiling was replaced with the current ceiling, and the old floor was leveled and replaced with the current marble. Another partial renovation occurred around the time of the Bicentennial. All of which is to say that the acoustics of the room in 1831-1848 were quite different.”

“Plus,” he wrote, “I always like to tell guests, JQA was just so damned smart that he didn’t need to listen in on his political rivals. He was usually several steps ahead regardless.”

Say it out loud: there was likely no whispering spot.

The Senate Vestibule

But don’t worry. Authenticity is–literally–around the corner.

Exit Statuary Hall, past the suite of offices of the Speaker of the House. Keep walking across the familiar Capitol Rotunda, where tourists crane their necks and stare 180 feet high to the eye of the dome. Just on the other side is the Senate Vestibule, showcasing some of the oldest architectural features in the Capitol. Here, President John Adams passed on November 22, 1800, to welcome the members of Congress to their permanent home. Just months later, Thomas Jefferson entered the space and proceeded to the Senate chamber to take the presidential oath of office on March 4, 1801.

In August 1814, during the war with Great Britain, invading troops burned the Capitol and destroyed most of its interior. But the Senate Vestibule survived relatively unscathed.

The floors are gray and undecorated. The columns are unembellished. The walls are rather inelegant.

The space looks like the Republic our founders intended: plain and unpretentious.

In this small space, I like to imagine that Adams, Jefferson, Clay and Webster, saw what I see and heard what I hear. And felt what I feel: I often trace the granite walls of the small Senate rotunda just outside, wondering whether Congressman Lincoln did the same when he served.

Within these walls, I am connected to history.

And buoyed by the future.

In a city of memorials and monuments, these quiet places testify to simple resilience. They survived flames in 1814, a civil war, two world wars, 9/11, an insurrection that defaced–but did not destroy–them.

They are a reminder that stories evolve and myths weave in and out of our national experience. But the foundation of our history remains in plain, sturdy and hidden corners, waiting to be discovered.

Francis Scott Key wrote about the American flag as a symbol of resilience.

So, too, are the authentic truths standing proud in the Capitol.

Recommended Reading on the History of the Capitol:

The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building by Brian Day Jones
Under The Dome

The House: the History of the House of Representatives by Robert V. Remini

History of the United States Capitol: A Chronicle of Design, Construction , And Politics by William C. Allen

John Quincy Adams by Robert V. Remini

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From the left, those questions include:

A) Will Trump cancel the midterm elections?

B) Is democracy as we know it over?

C) Why do you sell books written by right wing extremists?

From the right:

A) Will the Democrats be taken over by left wing socialists?

B) Has the left become a bastion of anti-Semitism?

C) Why do you sell books written by left wing lunatics?

Here are the answers to both sides:

A) No.

B) No.

C) It’s called freedom to read.

The frequency and urgency of the questions recently persuaded me to visit our classics section in search of a book that reflected a similar distress in American politics.

I found it in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, about a fascist takeover of our government. But the title is misleading. What the book really asks is: “can it?”

Lewis’s title is as provocative now as it was when the book was written in 1935. At the time, fear and insecurity created the conditions for demagogues from both the left and the right. There was widespread concern that America’s liberal tradition was unraveling.

Lewis had a unique understanding of this dynamic. He was married to Dorothy Thompson, who interviewed Hitler and wrote a series of articles between 1931 and 1935 warning Americans about the Nazi agenda. His plot integrated real events in Germany (such as the growth of the Gestapo and the Bundestag’s willing surrender of its constitutional authorities to Hitler) and wrapped them in an entirely American veneer. A demagogue runs for president, exploiting the misery and insecurities of Depression-era voters, he wins, and soon consolidates his power. Congress surrenders its powers to the administration. Soon, an armed militia, “The Minutemen,” is deployed across the country. Citizens are detained, harassed, beaten, arrested, and murdered. Detention and concentration camps are set up. The media is regulated. Dissent is quashed. Courts become tools of the state to exact vengeance. Some citizens willingly, even jubilantly, support the new authoritarian government. They become the cogs, gears, and cranks of a fascist machine that crushes our freedoms in the name of security. Others resist. Many prefer to be left alone.

The protagonist in Lewis’s novel is Doremus Jessup, a “mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal,” who happens to publish a local newspaper in Fort Beulah, Vermont. Jessup is a proud individualist. He shrinks from political activism, believing that the organizing of collective movements can only replace one set of absolute dogmas with an opposite set of absolute dogmas. But as events worsen, he wonders if “The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in without fierce enough protest.”

The book itself raises fraught comparisons to today’s politics.

Several months ago I wrote about an extraordinary, but little known novel, The Oppermann’s, which follows a prosperous German Jewish family and their neighbors as they confront the escalating repression and violence of the Third Reich.

It was written by Lion Fuechswanger in Germany around the same time Lewis was pondering It Can’t Happen Here. (Fuechswanger even makes a cameo appearance in Lewis’s book). However, I’ve been criticized for suggesting that while some of today’s policies and political rhetoric may be reminiscent of the past, comparisons between contemporary America and the totalitarian reality of Nazi Germany are ultimately more evocative than accurate. Let me be clear: the totality of the Third Reich included a takeover of the constitutional authority of the parliament (The Enabling Act of 1933), and the methodical and systematic scaling up of the national means to identify, persecute, discriminate, confiscate, segregate, concentrate and annihilate Jews, dissenters and other “enemies of the state.” We’re nowhere near that totality. We have an authoritarian administration that caters to the impulses of extremists. But the question remains: can a fascist (or for that matter, Marxist) dictatorship, complete with concentration camps and the quashing of all dissent, happen here?

The answer in Lewis’s story: it depends on you.

Jessup initially chooses a path of least resistance. He doesn’t march, distribute leaflets, or support his favorite candidates. The people around him choose their own responses. Some succumb, others fight to the death.

It’s only when Jessup realizes that events require more than his own individualism that he escalates his plans. The plot progresses through moments that are by turns chilling, depressing, and exhilarating.

The lesson - applicable to the 1930s, 1950s, and now - is that political tipping points are indeed possible, and it requires an informed citizenry to pull us back from sliding to any extreme.

Jessup (Sinclair) writes near the end: “I am convinced that everything that is worthwhile in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever.”

That’s the very basis of why I opened Theodore’s Books after a lifetime in the political trenches. And speaking of Theodore Roosevelt, Lewis’s book reminds me of the answer I give people who ask, in their deep uncertainty, from the left or right (but mostly in the center): “What can I do?”

Roosevelt’s response: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”

That is the ultimate lesson of It Can’t Happen Here.

If you’d like to continue the conversation, join us for Steve Israel’s Book Club on July 7 as we dig deeper into the themes and enduring relevance of It Can’t Happen Here.

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Not so breaking news: somehow, the universe manages to evolve despite the fact that Donald Trump just (fill in the blank) and the Democrats reacted with (fill in the blank). Somehow, as we yank our politics further left and right, there are forces that bring us both higher and deeper.

Take, for example, the mystery of consciousness, which remains entirely unanswered (in any verifiable way) in our science. Last month I read two books that explore the nature of consciousness and cosmic purpose. Michael Pollan’s bestseller A World Appears, and Philip Goff’s “Why: The Purpose of the Universe” (our booksellers can order it for you from Oxford University Press).

Pollan takes us on a whirlwind tour of scientists, philosophers and artists who have been grappling with how (and why) consciousness works? In other words, what is it to be like you? The “easy problem” is understanding mental operations like learning, memory and perception. The “hard problem” which Pollan explores, is “the puzzle for why any of these mental operations are accompanied by any conscious experience whatsoever.” Despite our exquisite technological breakthroughs in DNA, genetics, A.I., medicine and space travel, we aren’t close to solving the hard problem of consciousness.

Goff’s book is lesser known (though referenced by Pollin) and deserves prominence. It helps us explore fundamental questions:

1. What is the meaning of life?

2. What is the purposes of universe?

3. Is there a God?

4. What is cosmic purpose?

All in about 175 pages.

The politician in me is used to grappling with questions on taxes, social security, the Middle East, or whether I approve putting up a stop-sign to stop speeding on a suburban street. No one ever asked me my position on the meaning of life. Which is why I enjoyed Goff’s book. Whether or not a reader agrees with his theories (is the universe a conscious entity with its own distinct purpose?), they’ll lift you from the latest cheap volley of insults on social media. Better to be curious than angry, these days.

Like many, this book has a character arc: the universe itself. It begins, well, downright depressing. Here’s the opening paragraph, which is the mother of all spoiler alerts:

“One day all of the energy in the universe will be used up. The stars will go out. All matter will be swallowed up by black holes, black holes that will eventually evaporate away. This will be the beginning of an infinitely long epoch in which all activity and interaction has ceased. There will never again be intelligent life, anywhere, forever more.”

Why go on? Why turn to page 2?

Because, we learn, the universe may have its own distinct purpose, as does every life form within it. Even facing existential threat, the universe continues to fine tune itself, so that life can continue and emerge. Our purpose, as a species, is to support that fine-tuning.

Goff writes:

“Even if our lives lack cosmic significance, they can still be filled with meaning in the here and now, provided we are able to engage in activities which are objectively meaningful, such as creativity, learning and showing kindness to others.”

I get it — heady stuff. But a feature of the book is that each chapter presents arguments and theories in a coherent, understandable form, followed by an option to skip to the next chapter, or dig deeper for more complex consideration.

This time of year, customers walk into Theodore’s Books in search of a “beach read.” I believe that every book is a beach read. But consider Philip Goff – for that matter, any deep exploration of the nature of life – as a special kind of reading for your next beach day. Look up from the page, study the flow of the waves, the hue of the sky, the feel of the sand and ask, as Goff does:

“Why?”

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FILE – Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., questions a witness during a Committee on House Administration hearing about noncitizen voting in U.S. elections on Capitol Hill, May 16, 2024 in Washington. (AP Photo/John McDonnell, File)

Some members of Congress beam under national spotlights and become household names (in households glued to cable political talk shows). Their work product — legislative or political — is well known; their acclaim usually but not always well-deserved. 

At the opposite end are the few who occupy their seats in Congress as if they’re swivel recliners. They lay comfortably low; show up for votes and committee hearings, service their districts, and generally stay out of the line of camera lenses. 

Then there are the workhorses who toil in relative national obscurity. It’s not that they shirk attention, it’s just that they prioritize work product over self-promotion. 

A case study: Rep. Joe Morelle, a Democrat from upstate New York. He is the ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, a panel that typically induces yawns among cable television bookers and newspaper editors. But watch him, because in the coming midterm election, Morelle will be at the center of gravity. 

A very narrow House majority may rest on the outcome of a handful of races. Bipartisan observers, lawyers and journalists are bracing for attempts by the Trump administration to use every tool in its arsenal, lawful or not, to preserve the Republican majority.

The possibilities range from voter suppression (sending ICE agents to selected polling places in hand-picked districts) to coercion (pressuring friendly local and state election officials not to certify certain Democratic victories) to co-option (using federal agencies to seize ballots) to a virtual post-election congressional coup (attempting to stop or manipulate the legitimate certification and swearing-in of certain members).

The latter may be fanciful, conspiratorial, even unlikely. But wasn’t the Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021 all of those things, right up until until it wasn’t? 

Article I, Section 5, Clause 1 of Constitution stipulates that “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” That responsibility falls under the Committee on House Administration, which means that the committee that typically deals with controversies as epochal as office spaces, parking designations and member budgets may find itself determining the next majority.

That’s where Morelle comes in. I first met him in 2009, when I was exploring a run for the U.S. Senate. He was in the New York State Legislature and the powerful chairman of the Monroe County Democratic Committee. The path to statewide office veered toward his front door. 

He came across as affable, even gentle. My research memo told me that in his early years he had sold dry-cleaning equipment for a local firm. Frankly, I have never met a dry-cleaning equipment salesman that I disliked. (Actually, I had never met a dry-cleaning equipment salesman.) 

But the memo I read didn’t capture his policy depth. At a meeting of local business and political leaders, he asked me my views on the nature of risk in insurance markets. When I fumbled, he sent me a copy of “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk,” Peter L. Bernstein’s brilliant history of insurance. 

But in New York politics, substance alone won’t cut it. A sharp mind requires sharper elbows. Morelle served as the State Assembly Majority Leader from 2013-2018. Within even that deep blue body, there are interests as diverse as Manhattan progressives and exurban moderates. Leadership in that context requires political survival skills, especially when serving under a mercurial governor like Andrew Cuomo (D). It’s not like swimming with sharks — it’s like swimming with sharks while someone is lobbing depth charges at you.

Morelle kept his members united, not by using sharp elbows alone, but by consistently pulling them in, at times even standing in the background.

I have had several recent conversations with him about the work he is doing to protect the outcome of the midterm elections from partisan subversion. He and others have engaged in table-top exercises, plumbed the depths of state and local laws and regulations governing elections in dozens of separate jurisdictions, dissected the House rules on the seating of members, consulted with legal experts in both parties. They have considered multiple trajectories and scenarios that could play out between now and January, when the new Congress is sworn in, and even later.

It is tragic that we are “war gaming” a democratic election in America; that we have plunged from the high ideals of our Founders to a scene in Woody Allen’s ”Bananas.” But Jan. 6 demonstrated just how far the MAGA movement will go to seize power. And so supporters of election integrity must therefore be prepared.

That’s where we need not just a workhorse, but someone who knows how to buck and kick when necessary — not performative, but prepared.

Morelle may not be a household name today. But if crisis strikes, he will be. So keep your eyes on him. 

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Following two recent interviews with two very different authors, I was offered an unexpectedly similar prescription for America’s political exhaustion. Keep in mind, their audiences and ideologies differ widely, but both arrived at the same conclusion that our collective politics has the ability to improve when we loosen our grip on certainty.

I interviewed both authors on Long Island months apart. The first was Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling chronicler of human behavior whose books, from “The Tipping Point” to “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” examine how societies think and change. The other was Dana Perino, co-host of “The Five” and former White House Press Secretary for George W. Bush. Her new novel, “Purple State,” explores political division through an unlikely romance.

I asked both versions of the same question: What can we do about the polarized state of American politics?

Gladwell’s answer. “Hold your values close, but your ideas loosely.”

It was an elegant way of saying to leave room for the possibility that you may not possess the full truth, and that strong convictions need not require intellectual rigidity. This is something that has become almost radical in modern politics. However, our Founding Fathers knew best. Our democracy depends on the willingness to test our assumptions and arrive at a common ground.

Disagreement, in that sense, is not a threat — it is a safeguard.

Weeks later, Perino echoed almost the same sentiment. Discussing her novel, she told me, “I encourage people to wear their politics loosely.”

That line sits at the heart of “Purple State,” a story about Dot Clarke, a Democratic operative from New York who moves to Wisconsin hoping to flip a deeply Republican congressional district. Instead, she finds herself falling for local Republican Danny Dawson.

In one revealing scene, Danny’s family friend explains to Dot why voters in the district once reliably supported Democrats but now vote overwhelmingly Republican. The family friend’s explanation is rooted in economic frustration. The feeling among many voters that national Democrats no longer understand their lives or respect their concerns.

Dot’s instinct is immediate and familiar: argue back. Correct the facts. Win the debate.

But the conversation does not culminate in ideological theater. Dot stops herself. Instead, she listens. She does not abandon her beliefs. She simply recognizes that there is more to be gained by hearing another person than by defeating that person.

“We have to listen to each other more,” Perino told me during our conversation.

She is right. As opposed to a free exchange of conversation and ideas, social media has become a performance hub. Algorithms reward outrage and tribal loyalty. Nuance disappears. Curiosity looks weak. Every disagreement becomes a moral emergency. Americans increasingly retreat into ideological echo chambers where there is little listening and plenty of shouting.

So we clench our arguments like fists and let our political identity harden into a personal identity. Soon enough, every debate becomes an existential ping-pong match, or worse, an exchange of bunker busters.

Yet outside the fever swamps of social media and cable television, most Americans do not live this way. Most citizens are not ideological absolutists, interested in permanent warfare. They hold conflicting views simultaneously; they worry about inflation and democracy; they value both freedom and stability; they distrust institutions but still hope those institutions can work.

America is not entirely red or blue. It is a far more complicated shade in between, and that middle ground is where democratic citizenship actually lives.

As the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of the American experiment, it is worth remembering that the Founders built a republic on disagreement managed through compromise. They understood that a diverse democracy would survive only if citizens accepted that no faction could permanently impose its will on everyone else.

That responsibility now belongs to us.

We do not need to abandon our principles. But we do need to leave room for the possibility that people we disagree with may still possess valid experiences and pieces of truth we ourselves cannot see.

That requires patience and discipline to suspend judgment long enough to understand why another person thinks the way they do.

While many political books today are built to inflame rather than illuminate, Perino’s novel takes a different approach with a deeper message that is surprisingly hopeful: our shared humanity is more durable than our ideology.

Like “The American President,” one of the great political films of the modern era, “Purple State” suggests that if our politics cannot always unite us, perhaps our personal relationships still can.

And perhaps this is where the country begins to find its way back.

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Hill staffers operate in a kinetic and combative environment. I’m not necessarily talking about Republicans versus Democrats. I’m talking about constituent demands, work deadlines, and sometimes mercurial and hard-driving bosses (myself included). The pressures take their toll, not only on the staffers but on discourse. Operating in constant conflict ignites the fight-or-flight impulses of our amygdalas and releases stressors like cortisol and adrenaline. It clenches our fists, accelerates our heartbeats, and pushes us deeper into our protective ideological bunkers. We resort to our tribal truths. Our attention spans narrow, and we erect mental barricades that resist the flow of contrary opinions.

Partisanship and ideology don’t emerge from the headlines; they’re embedded much deeper, near our brain stems, as Leor Zmigrod argues in The Ideological Brain: The Radical Science of Flexible Thinking. They become hardened, reinforced, and sharpened by algorithm-fueled doom scrolling and cable TV channel surfing. All of this becomes even more persistent and pervasive in any political office, where the staff is trained to contribute to one imperative goal: win.

That’s why I was so heartened to see a group of congressional staffers gather at the museum on a warm April morning for a workshop on how the experience of awe can help change the culture on Capitol Hill. The workshops are nonpolitical and nonpartisan, designed instead to explore awe as a way to elevate our thinking and expand our dialogue.

(I’ve written about awe before: it’s the experience of encountering something vast, then cognitively working through our wonder. It’s based on research by Jonathan Haidt, Dacher Keltner, Marc Berman, and others).

Our group gathered in a minimalist room at the museum. Three walls exhibited massive sculptures by Chakaia Booker, an American sculptor known for creating monumental, abstract works. The medium was black rubber: old tires, treads, swaths, and strips. At first glance, they appear “brutish,” “alien,” “dark,” and “angry.” (These were the exact words volunteered by the participants.)

(Chakaia Booker, Acid Rain, 2001, rubber tires and wood, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Museum purchase: Members’ Acquisition Fund, © Chakaia Booker.)

But after taking some time with the sculpture, allowing our minds to work through the awe, and sharing our observations with one another, our opinions grew more nuanced. The rubber was designed to tell a story. The deeper we looked, the deeper we thought. To one observer, the form and figure went from “industrial” to “floral.” In other words, from “awful” to “awesome.”

A second exercise asked us to split into smaller groups and build maps around the word “tire.” My group of Hill staffers presented this sequence:

Tire

= Danger (blowouts, flats)

= Dad moment (learning how to fix a tire)

= Road trip

= Best time of my life

A slightly less poignant but equally uplifting sequence:

Tire

= Michelin Man

= Michelin rated restaurant

= Amazing food and company

By the end of these 90-minute exercises, we’d learned something about shared values, our connection to the physical world, and our ability to communicate with one other from the heart, rather than our amygdalas. To the partisan warriors, the “win at all costs” crowd, this may sound squishy. But hard data—as demonstrated in the work of Zmigrod, Haidt, Keltner, and others—tells us a different story: Peak performance requires that we decondition our algorithm-fueled minds, unclog our systems of the stress and anxiety that clouds our judgement and holds back critical thinking. When we do those things, we’re sharper, more creative, and more collaborative.

Imagine how much better the country would be if every elected official and staffer spent 90 minutes in the National Gallery, or a national park, or anywhere capable of instilling them with a sense of awe.

For information about my work at the Birch Creek Dialogues, please visit:

https://www.birchcreekdialogues.org/

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On a cold evening last March, several thousand people gathered at the Long Island University Tilles Center for a discussion with Malcolm Gladwell and me about the nature of anger.

I’m a Gladwell geek. A devout reader of his books and listener to his podcasts. I’m fascinated by his unique ability to spin a story that actually unspins conventional assumptions and orthodoxy. I marvel at his ability to reverse-engineer a social trend and methodically dissemble it until we reach an unexpected, but thoroughly feasible, core.

Our freewheeling conversation covered the state of the union (or disunion), human nature, technology, artificial intelligence and more. But his thoughts on the importance of changing one’s mind hit home.

I asked him what advice he had for people regarding “opinion overload,” the constant, unremitting, soul-crushing flood of social media posts, algorithms, and opinion-fueled news that’s trapped us into frozen states of intransigence.

Gladwell’s response: We should hold on to our values, but hold our opinions loosely.

Most of my adult career as a politician has instructed exactly the opposite. In elected politics, there’s no room to change an opinion, but adequate tactical berth to recalibrate values. In primaries, for example, some candidates’ value systems appear to harden along the far left or far right, only to soften in pursuit of a more moderate general election population. Positions on specific issues don’t necessarily change, but positioning (framing, messaging, prioritizing) often does.

Think about how our politics, policies, and discourse would improve if our elected leaders could master the art of adhering more to their values and less to their opinions.

Science itself is built on the premise of fidelity to values, but also, the constant challenging of ideas. A hypothesis is developed, and ideas are subjected to a rigorous, testable challenge through repeated, replicable experimentation. The process is designed to maximize refutability. You are wrong until absolutely proven right.

Our current politics, however, has no patience for Gladwell’s prescription. A candidate or office holder who changes a position on an issue is a flip-flopping, fence-sitting, finger-in-the-wind, vacillating, vote-panderer. Or worse: a traitor.

I faced the accusations on occasion, from both the left and right. For example, in 2003, I voted for initial House passage of President George W. Bush’s massive new Medicare prescription drug benefit. But after the bill was changed in negotiations between the House and Senate, I voted against the final product (that’s right, I voted for it before voting against it). The more I explained how the facts had changed my position, the higher and heavier eyes seemed to roll on both sides of the aisle.

Political orthodoxy insists that one never admits to being wrong. Never claim that you’ve evolved on an issue, because, according to the playbook, voters aren’t interested in nuance, complexity, or even facts for that matter. They want you to reflect their intuitions on right or wrong.

But here’s the problem. A significant part of our political division stems from illusion based opinions. We gorge ourselves on news algorithms that confirm our biases, reinforce our opinions, harden our positions, and enable us to continue watching and scrolling. Our discourse rests on a mass hypnosis, dulling us into believing in a form of delusion as absolute reality.

Soon enough, our slew of ideas entrap us in an endless maze of carnival mirrors. Our basic reality becomes warped, enlarged, and reduced to a distorted reflection of a truth.

Critical thinking—the discipline to question our assumptions, examine evidence, recognize biases, and consider multiple perspectives—isn’t easy. Because everyone loves to be proven wrong. Right? Critical thinking can feel uncomfortable, even distasteful at times. It requires mental and emotional conditioning and the willingness to unlearn reflexive responses. But our national survival requires common ground, and reaching it requires both clarity of values, and accommodation of diverse ideas.

How?

It starts with reading versus scrolling. Some issues demand time and texture to truly understand. There is little to be fully learned from a “Breaking News” alert or a social media meme. Want to finger point? Do it across 300 pages of a book. Test your ideas by digging deeper and broader. Move from inciting to insightful.

Speaking of books, here are 5 picks that will help you reclaim your critical thinking skills:

1- Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell: It’s Gladwell’s own test of ideas. A revisiting of the concepts from The Tipping Point, but with a more mature and critical perspective, acknowledging the potential for negative consequences.

2- Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant: A self-help book that argues for the importance of rethinking and unlearning in a rapidly changing world, emphasizing mental flexibility, intellectual humility, and curiosity over rigid beliefs.

3- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman: Explains the two systems that drive human thought: System 1 (fast, intuitive, emotional) and System 2 (slow, logical, deliberative), revealing how cognitive biases and heuristics influence our judgments and decisions in both our personal and professional lives.

4- The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli: Identifies and explains 99 common cognitive biases and logical fallacies that cloud human judgment, offering short, accessible chapters with real-world examples to help readers make better decisions in business, investing, and daily life. It serves as a practical guide to recognizing systematic errors in thinking, such as survivorship bias and the sunk cost fallacy, and provides actionable tips to avoid them.

5- On the fiction front, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro: This is about an aging English butler reflecting on his life of service, particularly his loyalty to his former employer, Lord Darlington. The novel is a poignant exploration of duty, regret, and missed opportunities, set against the backdrop of pre-World War II and post-World War II England.

Read these books. Or explore others. And be sure to maintain your values, but hold your opinions loosely.

I welcome your thoughts. Especially if you think I’m wrong!

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I’m talking about a 2003 paper written by Jonathan Haidt and Dacher Keltner for the journal Cognition and Emotion: “Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion.” By explaining the psychology behind awe, it helps answer the most frequently asked question in American politics: How does Trump — a billionaire who brazenly exploits his presidency to pad his net worth, adorns the Oval Office in gold, and affixes his name to the marble facades of government buildings — manage to connect with so many voters struggling in the shadows? How does he appeal so successfully to lower-income voters when he raises these voters’ bills through inflationary tariffs and expensive wars?

You may think the answer is simple, but it goes deep — to the areas of the brain that activate emotion. It turns out that many voters experience the same neurophysiological response that we get when we observe a majestic landscape, a feat of athletic prowess, or a spiritual awakening.

He triggers awe.

Haidt and Keltner’s paper is a relatively early contribution to the study of awe as an emotion — a field of research that has proven especially relevant in today’s politics. (Full disclosure, I have been studying awe recently as chairman of the Birch Creek Dialogues, which explores how we can leverage the power of awe to enhance civic engagement.) In a nation divided by ideology, the intangible quality of a candidate’s ability to command awe may be a greater factor in winning elections than we previously realized.

In Haidt and Keltner’s framework, there are two criteria that must be satisfied to induce awe as an emotion. First, something so vast — bigger than ourselves — that it diminishes our own self-perception. Second, an experience that challenges or negates our mental structures as we accommodate to make sense of it. When combined, the experiences can trigger a neurophysiological response that widens and glistens your eyes, lifts your head, sends shivers across your skin, reshapes your mouth to emit a breathless, “Whoa!”

How does Trump fit into that framework? Are we supposed to consider him in the same light as the awe induced by seeing the Grand Canyon, the aurora borealis, or Albert Bierstadt’s painting “Among the Sierra Nevada, California” in the Smithsonian? Well, Trump’s awe is different, but it is equally powerful. It stems from “primordial awe.”

Haidt and Keltner built on the work of others to propose that the primordial form of awe is the individual’s feeling toward a vastly more powerful other. In simple terms, it stems, in part, from our tribal origins, when survival required cohesion and cohesion demanded hierarchical leadership. “This feeling is likely to involve reverence, devotion, and the inclination to subordinate one’s own interests and goals in deference to those of the powerful leader,” they write.

When Trump wields his bombastic rhetoric from his gold-adorned Oval Office; as cranes construct his new ballroom nearby; as he commands masked and armed paramilitary forces that sweep into our cities, he cultivates a sense of awe in his supporters that reinforces his perch at the top of the hierarchy of American politics.

Trump’s awe has proven so powerful because his arrival to the political scene coincided with large swaths of the electorate feeling vulnerable. They were threatened by a unique convergence of events: 9/11, the 2008 economic meltdown, the implosion of previously trusted institutions (scandals that rocked sports, churches and banks), the rise of social media, the technological sea-change of automation and artificial intelligence, the pressures of increasing migration and globalization, and a devastating global pandemic.

When we feel most vulnerable, we turn to leaders who represent strength and authority: Leaders who will protect us (or our stock portfolios) invoke a sense of awe.

Trump isn’t the only politician who’s been propelled to office by inducing awe among supporters. President Barack Obama was the last Democrat on the national stage who managed to project awe, with his commanding oratory and charismatic presence. Elsewhere, in international politics, look to larger-than-life figures such as Giorgia Meloni, who is poised to become the longest continuously serving post-war Italian prime minister, and Volodymyr Zelensky, whose powerful voice has helped steer Ukraine through the crisis provoked by Russia’s unlawful invasion.

As Democrats try to define what voters think about Trump’s presidency, we cannot make the mistake of reducing voters’ attitudes to a discrete set of poll-tested policy leanings. Campaigns are about polls and points and data; but it’s often the secret sauce that wins. What counts is not how voters think about Trump’s ideological positioning — or that of Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, or whoever else might emerge as Trump’s MAGA successor — it is what emotions are motivating their behavior.

Yes, a leader’s policies still do matter. There are, of course, countless variables that go into winning a national election. But in this era of politics, one thing is clear: The candidate that inspires awe in voters is the one that can win awesome victories at the ballot box.

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That’s the ambitious subtitle to conservationist Paul Rosolie’s Junglekeeper. And Rosolie has some justification to claim such an attention-grabbing subtitle — he’s already protected over 110,000 acres of the Las Piedras River Basin in the Amazon. That’s roughly eight times the size of Manhattan.

The entirety of the Amazon is nearly the size of the continental United States. It’s an ecological linchpin that has protected us from climate extremes by storing 150-200 billion tons of carbon in its trees and soil. But the jungle is under constant attack, as vividly documented by Rosolie: massive deforestation, illegal mining and logging, record-breaking wildfires that have burned over 44 million acres in the Brazilian Amazon, and accelerating rates of species extinction. Repairing this ecosystem isn’t easy. Rosolie points out that when a thousand-year-old tree is cut down, it won’t regrow “in our lifetimes, and not in the lifetimes of our great-grandchildren.” Rosolie has done critical work in the Amazon, but his conservation efforts still face an uphill climb.

I read the book just as the Trump Administration announced the revocation of a key component of the Clean Air Act earlier this month. There’s never a good moment to weaken efforts to manage the climate crisis, but Trump’s action seems especially ill-timed.

In a recent essay in The New York Review of Books, Trevor Jackson reminds us that “the calendar year 2024 was the first in which global mean surface air temperatures exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius relative to the preindustrial baseline, a threshold widely taken as a tipping point beyond which irrevocable climate disaster becomes practically impossible to avoid.” You don’t need to understand advanced scientific jargon to grasp the message: we’re entering a new, dangerous era of climate change. Extreme heatwaves. Severe droughts. The destruction of 70-90% of global coral reefs. Radical heavy rainfall events. A world where natural disasters are more frequent and devastating than ever before in human memory. By gutting policies designed to ameliorate the crisis, our current leaders are pushing our children into a more hostile natural world.

And yet. . . Maybe Paul Rosolie offers us hope.

Rosolie has always been an unlikely candidate to change the world or even a small slice of it. He grew up in New York, performing poorly in school:

“Years of being picked on by kids and being told by teachers that I was a loser were making me into a bad person. I was getting angry. Long-term angry. You can only be told you suck so many times before you start to believe it. Only so many teachers can tell you you’re going to work at a gas station if your grades don’t improve. Those test scores start to make you wonder if there really is something wrong with you.”

Paul Rosolie went from a high school drop-out to becoming one of the most impactful activists working to save the Amazon, inspiring scores of other conservationists to join the fray. Somewhere along the line, he found a sense of autonomy, strength, and resilience.

But most of all, I think Paul Rosolie found awe. And it ignited his life’s mission.

                                                                 On Awe

Readers of my past essays are familiar with my recent study of the “science of awe” as it relates to our broken politics. I’ve proudly helped found the Birch Creek Dialogues, a nonprofit organization seeking to use 160 acres of land in Idaho to explore whether awe in nature can elevate public discourse and heal some of our political divisions.

As described by Professor Dacher Keltner in his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, awe — whether “awful” or “awesome” — requires two experiences:

1- Something so vast that it reduces your own perception of your place in the universe. (Standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, catching a meteor streaking across a black sky, studying an artistic masterpiece, witnessing an act of supreme virtue, experiencing a spiritual epiphany).

2- Undergoing a cognitive adjustment as you attempt to fathom, define, process what you are experiencing. (Thinking differently, more critically and expansively).

Rosolie writes beautifully about his own experience finding awe in the jungle:

“Confronted for the first time with an observable magnitude of symphonic output, the heartbeat of the forest — sunrise igniting the world and casting the miraculous spell of the divine, peeling back the quotidian curtain of the observable world to render the unseen fleetingly visible.”

The jungle isn’t simply a physical retreat for Rosolie. It’s “a state of mind…a superorganism that often feels like it is aware — it has a kind of consciousness, different moods. Getting to know its secrets, its rules and boundaries was thrilling.”

This sense of connection is vital to experiencing awe, by removing us from the immediacy and impermanence of a headline, and grounding us in something far more critical to our well-being:

“Time in the forest made me look on a society as a massive disruption in our connection to nature, and I suspected that at least some of my feelings of depression, anxiety and disassociation might be a symptom of a larger societal problem: that we as a species are perpetually a fish out of water…I only knew that my brain became bearable when I was deep in the woods.”

Rosolie’s experience of awe in nature enabled him to heal himself, and in doing so, helped him heal the jungle. He experienced something akin to a divine moment which provided clarity and resilience. He discovered the requisite quality to happiness: a sense of “mattering.” (Two recent books on mattering are worth reading: The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose by Jennifer Breheny Wallace.)

Rosolie went deep — within himself and the jungle, learning with every weary step and setback. Along the way, he had near death experiences, grew a business, became an international celebrity, stumbled, traveled around the world, and, ultimately, returned to the jungle to find his freedom.

And what is his freedom? A sense of awe and connectedness. A stoicism that accepts obstacle as opportunity:

“The (boat) motor was bound to break. The trails were always going to have fallen trees. The river would rise and ruin your plans. The way to survive the jungle was not to fight it. You can’t hold back a river with your arms; you can’t argue with the ocean. You simply have to float long enough to survive. In the jungle, you have to let go of the presuppositions of your programming and commit the sacrament of relinquishing control to the jungle gods.”

You don’t have to travel to the Amazon to take value in Rosolie’s sage advice. Look no further than his earlier quoted self-diagnosis. Do you feel “depression, anxiety and disassociation” with each distressing news headline that flashes across your television or smartphone screen? Have you felt that the modern world feels like a “massive disruption in our connection to nature,” as we’re constantly besieged by social media algorithms designed to spike our flow of cortisol and adrenaline, putting us in a perpetual state of fight-or-flight? Rosolie tells us that in the absence of instant, easy solutions to our modern ailments, there is a way forward for a generation of doom-scrolling Americans with national attention deficit disorder: awe.

It’s a prescription for empowering ourselves in a time of seeming powerlessness. If there’s one indispensable paragraph in the book’s 312 pages, it’s this:

“What I’ve seen is that it doesn’t take traveling to far-flung countries to rescue exotic species – it’s what happens in our own homes, in our own backyards. It’s people voting for leaders who care about the environment. It’s planting trees, saving old ones. It’s making our backyards wildlife friendly – being allies to the wild things of this world. It’s being allies to one another.”

It reminds me of my favorite quote from another wilderness advocate, Theodore Roosevelt, which guides me every day: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

If not in a jungle, try it in your own neighborhood.

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Nowhere has that been made more clear than in Minnesota. Last weekend, millions of Americans watched in horror on their televisions and social media feeds as a peaceful protester was brutally gunned down by federal agents. Yet at the same time, millions of other Americans saw an armed protester with violent intentions be killed by federal agents acting in self-defense. In a polarized nation, where provable facts are easily overtaken by ideological illusion, solidified and reinforced by technology-supercharged bias confirmation, we can no longer agree on fundamental realities.

I’d like to take a step back from Minnesota to grapple with this fact. To do that, start off by looking at this picture:

I use this classic illustration in my Cornell University course on political communications. Some of my students instantly identify a duck. Others, a rabbit. The immediate but opposite judgements help exemplify the root of our present national dilemma. You can see a version of this illustration refracted in real-time on your television — just flip between Fox News and MS NOW for a few minutes. Frequently, it seems like the networks are not just on different stations but different planets. The same “breaking news” breaking in radically different directions.

I’ve studied this deeply. Ahead of the 2016 congressional elections, Nancy Pelosi asked me to spearhead a project to develop a concise message that would unite House Democrats and resonate with both the Democratic base and more moderate swing voters. I considered the assignment nearly impossible. Democrats, if you haven’t heard, have long had a “message problem.” It’s not that we don’t sing from the same hymn book; it’s that we can’t even agree what denomination we’re in.

But Pelosi reminded me of the Democratic messaging that helped win the House majority in 2006. It was called “Six for 06” — a powerful, digestible message that tapped into voter anxieties in six themes. National security. Jobs and wages. Energy independence. Affordable healthcare. Retirement security. College Access for all. “If we did it then, find out how we do it again,” Pelosi directed.

Those instructions kickstarted a two-year deep dive into the art and science of political messaging. Almost weekly, a group of my House colleagues and I gathered to hear from message experts. We engaged psychologists, neuroscientists, message gurus, branding professionals, and advertising leaders. We learned that the essence of message is story-telling (I was privileged to spend time with the consummate storyteller: Steven Spielberg). I learned how specific political content activates different parts of the brain. I came to a rudimentary understanding of the role of the amygdala and the pre-frontal cortex in processing, forming, and forging opinions. (Not bad for a guy who barely passed science in high school.)

We didn’t come up with a particularly effective 2016 version of “Six for ‘06.” But what I learned in the process proved invaluable in helping me to understand the deep and growing chasm in the American electorate — why some people see a duck, others a rabbit, and are willing to battle relentlessly to prove their snap judgements are correct.

The classic book on the topic is George Lakoff’s The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics. Lakoff writes:

“The political divide in America is not just a material divide, as in the ‘two Americas’ Nor is it just a religious divide. Nor is it just a matter of who controls what power. The divide is located in our brains — in the ways Americans understand the world. There we find two competing modes of thought that lead to contradictory ways of governing our country, one fundamentally democratic and one fundamentally antidemocratic.”

He goes on:

“And it’s not simply black and white — or blue and red. Most of us have within us versions of both modes of thought, which we each use differently in various aspects of our lives. But the anti-democratic mode of thought -- better funded, better organized and more thoroughly worked out — has been winning and fundamentally changing how our lives are governed.”

Lakoff’s use of the word “anti-democratic” may be a trigger to some on the right, who view themselves as supporting democracy (or at least their version). Because words and phrases are activators, I’d use the less subjective “pro-authority” rather than “anti-democratic.”

Drew Westen’s The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation furthers the work of Lakoff. Westen argues that Democrats tend to frame their arguments to appeal to those parts of the mind that activate reason and rationality. We love twenty-point plans and footnoted policy platforms. Our heartbeats are propelled by crisp, empirical evidence. Our dreams are data! Republicans, on the other hand, go for the gut. They use words and images that set off an emotional cascade. They activate our fight-or-flight responses, creating a brew of neurochemicals that elevates heart rates, induces deep breathing, and clenches muscles, from “lower taxes and less spending” to “Build the wall!”

Consider President Trump’s phrasing of a Truth Social post, even as he sought to de-escalate the events in Minnesota. I’ve bolded a few phrases for emphasis.

“I am sending Tom Homan to Minnesota tonight. He has not been involved in that area, but knows and likes many of the people there. Tom is tough but fair, and will report directly to me. Separately, a major investigation is going on with respect to the massive 20 Billion Dollar, Plus, Welfare Fraud that has taken place in Minnesota, and is at least partially responsible for the violent organized protests going on in the streets. Additionally, the DOJ and Congress are looking at “Congresswoman” Ilhan Omar, who left Somalia with NOTHING, and is now reportedly worth more than 44 Million Dollars. Time will tell all.”

Trump’s verbiage embraces what the philosopher David Hume recognized three centuries ago: “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” For better or worse, feelings matter more to us than facts.

That brings me to Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics by J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood. It was required reading for my colleagues in our messaging project and recommended to my Cornell students. Oliver and Wood write:

“Much of what seems to be irrational in American politics arises from the growing divide in how its citizens make sense of the world. On one side are rationalists. They use science and reason to understand reality. On the other side are the intuitionalists. They rely on gut feelings and instincts as their guide to the world. They embrace conspiracy theories, disbelieve experts, and distrust the media. They are stridently nationalistic and deeply authoritarian in their outlook. And they are the most enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump. The primary reason why Trump captured the presidency was that he spoke about politics in a way that resonated with how intuitionalists perceive the world.”

In other words, we tend to see things not through the process that connects light to the cornea, pupil, and retina, then converts the image into electric signals which travel via the optic nerve to the brain, and finally are interpreted into an upright image. No, we see with our guts. Appearances are deceiving because we trust our intuitions and hunches.

One of the most important works that ties all this research together is Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. (An excellent summary can be found in Haidt’s Why Do They Vote That Way?) Haidt lays out five evolution-based moral foundations for how we receive, process, interpret and act on events:

1. Care/harm (how we care for vulnerable children makes us despise cruelty and want to tend to the suffering).

2. Fairness/cheating (reaping the rewards of cooperation without exploitation).

3. Loyalty/betrayal (forming and maintaining coalitions).

4. Authority/subversion (forging relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies; punishing those who don’t behave properly).

5. Sanctity/degradations (how we respond to a world of pathogens and parasites including symbols of such objects. Consider Trump’s use of the word “vermin” to describe his political opponents).

What’s fascinating about these moral foundations is how the importance of each fluctuates depending on whether one has a liberal or conservative orientation. Haidt uses the chart below to help explain why voters respond differently to the same political messaging. A “fairness” message ranks high with liberal thinkers but declines as orientations grow more conservative. An “authority” argument ranks low with liberal thinkers and rises as orientations grow more conservative.

This all helps explain, in large measure, why different voters have seen different versions of the calamity in Minnesota. One side saw uniformed officers trying to do their job to uphold the sanctity of the law. The other side saw an innocent protester being treated cruelly by a heavily armed occupying force.

I saw this divergence play out when I posted an opinion about the Minnesota situation on Facebook. I echoed the words of Governor Walz, who suggested that people use cameras to record ICE activities — not just for posterity but for legal prosecution, where appropriate. One follower (perhaps not anymore) reacted by telling me how “ashamed” he was of me for suggesting that “ICE agents doing their jobs should be recorded, cursed and spit at.” But I never used the words “spit” and “curse.” He did. It didn’t matter. His gut, his intuition had convinced him that despite what I wrote, what I really intended was to incite people to assault federal agents. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Truth, in our time, is in the gut of the beholder. Truth is an emotion, fired up and forged by social media algorithms and cable news platforms that peddle conflict and reinforce bias. Once upon a time, we had a consensus on the basic elements of our national experience. We had fairness requirements in news, greater literacy, and civics taught in classrooms. We had heterogenous neighborhoods where one could hear dissonant views. We had congressional districts that actually could flip between Democrats and Republicans, rather than echo chambers where every Member of Congress seeks to appeal to the most intense ideological elements of their own bases to survive primaries. Once we had the mental and emotional stamina to entertain uncomfortable disagreement. We’re losing that.

It turns out the problem isn’t in Washington. It’s in our hands: in the phones we doom scroll on and the remotes we use to turn on our preferred confirmation bias news stations.

If we really want to save democracy, it’s going to have to happen outside of Washington. It means taking back our agency as citizens. We have to reclaim our critical inquiry. Spend less time being manipulated by social media algorithms and spend more time reading books. We have to expose ourselves to content that makes us feel uncomfortable and engage with people we think are wrong about politics. We have to be able to see both ducks and rabbits.

As for political leaders and campaign strategists, I hope they’ll consider a point that David Brooks made in a (not entirely flattering) review of Drew Westen’s book. Brooks argued that there’s more to political discourse than emotion versus reason:

“Emotions partner with rationality. It’s not necessary to dumb things down to appeal to emotions. It’s not necessary to understand some secret language that will key certain neuro-emotional firings. The best way to win votes — and this will be a shocker — is to offer people an accurate view of the world and a set of policies that seem likely to produce good results. This is how you make voters happy.”

After two years of researching, that’s pretty much all I needed to know.

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A customer shops at the Green Hand Bookstore in Portland, Maine, on Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)

As an independent bookstore owner, one of my favorite New Year’s projects is asking key members of Congress to share the most influential books they’ve read during the year. It’s a heartening effort, reminding me that books provide some bipartisan connectivity; and that in an age of algorithms and AI, our policymakers continue to rely on real books to influence their judgements. Here, lightly edited for brevity, are this year’s top selections.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.): “‘A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II.’ The Nazis were petrified of this gutsy spy, and she’s a portrait of individual bravery, relentlessly determined to defeat evil. Extra bonus, the book shows character is more important now than ever.”

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.): “As a mom, I’m very deep in the wonderful world of children’s books as we work to instill the importance of literacy and love of reading to our four-year-old son Sam. Some children’s books I highly recommend for parents to consider: ‘How Do Apples Grow?’ by Jill McDonald, ‘What the Road Said’ by Cleo Wade, ‘Nesting’ by Henry Cole, ‘Owl Babies’ by Martin Waddell, ‘Happy Birthday Moon’ by Frank Asch, and ‘Grandpa’s Tractor’ by Michael Garland. We’re very discerning when it comes to illustrations and prefer the beautiful artistry of illustrators rather than the overly graphic AI designs that are creeping into children’s books. The power and love of reading and imagination is among life’s greatest gifts. You can follow our family’s reads with Sam on Instagram.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.): “It’s a tie for #1: Zaakir Tameez’s remarkable biography, ‘Charles Sumner: Conscience of a Nation,’ tells the story I never knew, of how passionate abolitionist Charles Sumner, who hated politics and politicians, ended up in the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts in the first place and then came to be violently assaulted on the Senate floor by South Carolina Rep. Preston Brooks. It then follows Summer’s difficult convalescence and the central role he played in the coming of the Civil War and everything to follow. Absolutely riveting.

“The other book I loved was ‘Doppelganger: A Journey into the Mirror World,’ Naomi Klein’s dazzling meditation on conspiracy theory, fake news and intertwined streams of extremist politics in the Internet age. Obsessively interesting and provocative.”

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.): “‘Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm’ by Katherine Carter. No one lived life better than Winston Churchill. Carter shows how Churchill used his wilderness years to prepare for the coming trials of the Second World War.”

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.): “While people may have their opinions, Walter Isaacson’s ‘The Greatest Sentence Ever Written’ goes word by word of the second sentence of The Declaration of Independence, which lays out the singular vision and guiding philosophy of our founding fathers, when they decided to create a free nation from a tyrannical king. Though I do wish they had remembered the ladies! As we approach the United States’ 250th anniversary, it is the sentence that I continue to find hope in for our country and our democracy, as we strive to achieve common grounds, truths, rights, and aspirations.”

Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.): “‘Secret History of the Five Eyes’ by Richard Kerbaj. New in 2025, this book provides tremendous insight in the historic relationships between the United States and its English partners in espionage. It provides great context on the mutual benefits of intelligence sharing between longtime allies. As a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, I found it quite good in providing historic context and outlining early strengths and weaknesses of the services of each of the partner nations.”

Rep. Susan Bonamici (D-Ore.): “‘Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us.’ This is a fascinating book by Susan Magasmen and Ivy Ross. I’m an avid supporter of arts education because it helps students become confident, creative, critical thinkers, and I support the arts and culture in society because they can connect communities, grow the economy, and bring us joy. This book introduces the reader to neuroaesthetics, which is the study of how the brain and the body respond positively to the arts. There is convincing scientific evidence that the arts heal, and this book explains why. ‘Your Brain on Art’ truly makes the case for more arts in schools and everywhere!”

Rep. Sharice Davids (D-Kan.): “‘Merchants of Grain’ by Dan Morgan may be decades old, but its lessons feel urgent in 2025. It shows how global shocks or market instability can create real risks for our fragile supply chains — insights that guide my work in Congress to strengthen food security, support farmers, lower grocery prices, and protect America’s food supply.”

I am no longer a member of Congress, but I’m going to exercise editorial prerogative and throw in Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet.” It centers on the family of William Shakespeare, brilliantly using historic, perhaps inventive fiction to guide us through the nature of grief, loss and resilience. Forgive the cliché, but I could not put it down.

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