By Ted Genoways
Illustrations by Carl Carbonell

On January 24, 2025, Switchyard gathered dozens of writers, radio producers, nonprofit leaders, educators, and thinkers at our headquarters at 101 Archer Street in Tulsa to collectively imagine—and reckon with—what the next four years will be like.

The group included the biographers of Michelle Obama and Mitch McConnell, authors of books about the Koch Brothers and The Family, books about Amazon and Google and Facebook, about the rise of white supremacy and the cash value of racism. There were winners of the Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the MacArthur fellowship, writers and editors for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, for StoryCorps, This American Life, and Reveal. We also had musicians, filmmakers, novelists, essayists, and poets.

In short, these were some of the smartest and kindest people I know—mentors and sources of inspiration, longtime collaborators and old friends, former students and interns, and beloved colleagues from my time as an undergrad to my time at the University of Tulsa. The group also included my teachers from Bread Loaf, my successors at the Virginia Quarterly Review, my editors at the New York Times, Harper’s, and Mother Jones, my fellow editors at the Food & Environment Reporting Network, co-reporters and fellow fellows from Knight-Wallace and the Watchdog Writers Group, past attendees of the Between Coasts conferences, editors from the new Tulsa Local News Initiative, and numerous Switchyard contributors.

The mini-essays in this portfolio grew out of that gathering and those conversations. I hope they will be a source of hope and maybe a little solace, but I also hope they will serve as a call to action and a chance to recommit ourselves to our values and best practices as journalists and a rekindling of our belief in the power of storytelling, in all its forms. But let’s not kid ourselves: these are unprecedented and difficult times. We are once again faced with a president who characterizes journalists, writers, and college professors as enemies of the state—and sometimes jokes about killing us.

Gathering on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears seemed like an appropriate place to grapple with the dark past of American exceptionalism and also to address a solemn question: What are we going to do now?

Sindya Bhanoo

I am both a journalist and a fiction writer. I am frequently asked about these parallel paths that I pursued. Why one, why the other? What is the value of each?

I don’t do as much reporting as I used to, but I rely on accurate, thorough journalism to learn about what is happening in the world, and to make decisions. Decisions that affect my life, my family’s life, my community, and broader society.

The role of literature is trickier to speak about because, in the end, both the consumption of and the making of fiction is a mysterious process for me. Reading a good story is more akin to listening to a magnificent piece of music than it is to reading an article in the newspaper. Sometimes it’s about meaning, but it’s always about feeling.

What I do know is that literature is a powerful tool. The simple act of telling a story is a form of resistance. It is a quiet demand. The writer asks the reader to take a break and to pay attention to something unknown and unfamiliar.

My own fiction centers the lives of immigrant families. My parents are immigrants from India and I was born while my father was a graduate student in Philadelphia. I was born at Penn Hospital and issued a birth certificate by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

On Day 1 of his term, our new president signed an executive order called Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship. Under this order, I would not be considered a United States citizen because when I was born, my mother was in the country on a temporary visa and my father was not yet a permanent resident. If this order were in place forty years ago, many of the stories in my book, Seeking Fortune Elsewhere, would look very different.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I see it as my job to write down the stories and capture the particular aspects of the human experience that I am most tuned into and concerned about.

Through fiction, what I am actually doing is requesting a pause. This is so simple, and yet it is clear that we need the reminder.

During the 2016 presidential election, I was an MFA student, studying under the great Elizabeth McCracken. The election was on November 8. She emailed us on the morning of November 9. “One of the essential things art can do is to imagine, to describe, to perform extraordinary acts of empathy to explain the inexplicable,” she wrote. She added, “The work of literature is to empathize. We cannot give it up.”

It’s 2025 now, and we still cannot give it up. In a chaotic world, writing is a refuge. Writing fiction provides me with a quiet space, and in that quiet space, I can think. I can line up words to make sentences and tell a story.

“Look,” it lets me say. “Look at these people in my story. They experience joy and sorrow and heartache. They are not just like you, but are they really so different?”

Ted Conover

In these terrible times, the mission stays the same: to serve as a check on power, to publish the truth. And speak not only to the choir of those who agree with us but to the universe of those who might.

Twenty-five years ago I wrote a book about my work as a corrections officer titled Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. I imagine it has been read by more people than anything else I’ve published.

I was proud when Newjack was declared contraband by the New York State Department of Correctional Services unless several pages were redacted. I was mortified when a teacher in a public junior high school compared his experience to mine in an article for the Harvard Educational Review. But I’m particularly pleased when I receive emails from corrections trainees who have read the book—parts of it are required reading in different states—and from veteran staff and ex-offenders. Sometimes students who are contemplating surreptitious reporting write to get my take on their ideas. Most recently, a magazine writer asked for my thoughts about the new film about a prison theater group, Sing Sing (see it!); my book’s latest translation was in Catalán.

We dream of sparking reform like Upton Sinclair did; his book The Jungle had passages set in fetid Chicago slaughterhouses that led to Congressional hearings and laid the foundation for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Newjack wasn’t that successful. Instead, I learned, from an email sent by a reader who had recently visited her incarcerated husband, that shortly after the book was published the state had, for apparently the first time in decades, washed the windows in Cell Block B, which I had observed were so dirty you could hardly see through them.

Ah, well. Sometimes it feels like a victory in today’s social media culture to have readers for our books at all. And while the internet has caused considerable damage to journalism, book publishing, and apparently democracy, it also has given our work a “long tail,” when pieces that might otherwise be forgotten can be rediscovered via search.

Of course it’s disappointing when something we’ve worked on long and hard fails to move the policy needle. Now we must grok the why. We need conversations with each other, like we had in Tulsa. And also we need conversations with those who believe we’re the enemy.

As journalists, so many of our foundational beliefs are under attack. Facts, for one, and fact-checking. For another, empathy.

I knew this, subconsciously, but hadn’t thought to articulate it until I read New York Times Opinion columnist David French’s “Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy.” And then, on National Public Radio, came a five-minute segment from Sarah McCammon titled, “How empathy came to be seen as a weakness in conservative circles.”

“People tend to think of empathy or caring about other people’s feelings as a good thing,” McCammon begins, “but in some conservative circles, there’s a growing chorus of voices arguing that empathy could be bad.” The first soundbite is from “The Joe Rogan Experience”:

ELON MUSK: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy...There’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MUSK: So we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.

Also quoted were right-wing pastors and the author of the new book, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits. A bestseller last year was Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.

French explains that the right is hating on empathy due to the way that “progressives emotionally manipulate evangelicals into supporting causes they would otherwise reject. For example, if people respond to the foreign aid shutdown and the stop-work orders by talking about how children might suffer or die, then they’re exhibiting toxic empathy.”

I try to be empathetic and have always considered that a good thing. The first course I taught at New York University was “The Journalism of Empathy.” Journalists could inform, I said, journalists could investigate … and journalists could also powerfully empathize—with people who lived in Hiroshima when the A-bomb fell (John Hersey), with kids who lived in a Chicago housing project (Alex Kotlowitz), with people living in a slum in Mumbai (Katherine Boo). I assigned my students to try, over the course of a semester, to really get inside someone else’s head. We looked at the rise of the novel and how, in order to create realistic characters, novelists had to deeply imagine the world through their eyes.

I found that students loved Jon Krakauer’s empathetic recreation of the last days of Chris McCandless in Into the Wild. We watched the film adaptation, in which Sharon Olds reads from one of her poems in voiceover. I read Olds’ collection, Stag’s Leap, which is partly about the end of her marriage, and when I met her at a writers’ conference I told her about my class. She taught me the term “toxic empathy,” which she defined as feeling another’s pain too strongly, to one’s own detriment (as in, say, the pain of your spouse, when you’re getting a divorce). The idea of too much selflessness, in that context, I found fascinating.

But toxic empathy in the context of fear about being manipulated by the pain of children or the unemployed strikes me as ugliness and derangement.

Michael Croley

When I was in graduate school, my dad sent me a list of movies he watched as a young man that stayed with him. On that list was Hud, the 1963 film starring Paul Newman and Melvyn Douglas. Newman plays Hud Bannon, a womanizing and callous playboy, pushing against a moral system and attitude embodied by his principled father, Homer, played by Douglas. One of the key tensions in the film is that Homer’s other son, Norman, was accidentally killed when Hud, drunk at the wheel of the car, wrecked. Norman’s lone son, Lonnie, reveres both his grandfather and uncle, and the movie, in some ways, seems to be about the boy’s fight to choose oppositional paths symbolized by both men.

When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, a scene from that movie came to my mind and has stayed with me ever since. After a night of revelry and drinking, Lonnie and Hud return to Homer’s house drunk and in good spirits, but Homer is displeased by Hud’s influence on Lonnie, and the two older men go at it, with Hud telling him of Norman’s death, “You had fitteen years to get over it, that’s half of my life.”

Homer says, “That’s not our quarrel and never has been.”

“The hell it isn’t,” Hud says.

The camera zooms in on Homer and he says, “No, boy, I was sick of you a long time before that.”

This surprises Hud, who has been looking away but now looks his father in the eye. “Well, it’n life full of surprises? And all along I thought it was because of what I done to my little brother,” he says.

“I took that hard,” Homer says, “but I buried it.” He then tells Hud his problem with him is that he doesn’t “give a damn. That’s the whole of it.” He’s never been able to see how his son could have no concern beyond his own immediate desires. There’s a limitation to what print can do with such a stirring scene, but after Homer has gone after Hud, Lonnie, who has been watching and tried intervening, turns to his grandfather and says, “Why pick on Hud, Grandad?”

The line Homer speaks after this is the one that has stayed with me since that November night in 2016.

“Lonnie,” he says, “little by little, the look of the country changes because of the men we admire.”

I’m of a mind that there’s been a little too much hand-wringing about this masculine identity crisis—even if, to some degree, I understand it. I grew up in Appalachia and there were definite things that were expected of me as a man from that region. From the old-fashioned and chivalrous, like opening the car door for your date and honoring your mother, to perhaps what we might now call more toxic traits, where in our own families to the sports teams my brother and I played on there was a clannish obsession to sticking to and up for your own.

My father was stoic to a fault. A trait my late brother also bore—though he was known to crack from time to time—and which I have more or less, with no small amount of shame, not been able to uphold.

“Little by little, the look of the country changes because of the men we admire.”

The men I admired, all my life, were these two men. They bore their pain—emotional and physical—without complaint. This also meant they cared little for or never made a fuss over their successes. I am proud to say, much to my wife’s chagrin, that I have been able to uphold this family trait and rarely find joy in my accomplishments.

My point is this. I was raised to believe that men who were leaders were not the loudest voices in the room. They were not boastful. They certainly did not rise up on the backs of others. I don’t mean that there was a blind allegiance or belief in some meritocracy, but I mean that your strength was reflected in your grit.

To be more pointed: when and where I grew up, Trump was the guy in the locker room no one followed, and he has now been elected president, twice. I grew up among hard and proud people from a region he was widely supported in, and I continue to struggle to square these ideas of manhood that seemed indicative of that region, that indeed seemed widely ingrained, and this new strain of masculinity that has risen to the fore and been embraced.

I do not have answers or even coping mechanisms for how we meet this moment except that the work we all do must continue. We must ensure that stories—fictional and journalistic—offer us a truer picture of our neighbors and friends and that through those stories we can find some commonality and, dare I say, community. The more we can make the ideals we believe in concrete rather than abstract, the more the government isn’t The Government or Trump but the scientist engaged in curing your child of cancer or the border agent who carries extra water for the migrants she meets, perhaps we will draw nearer to the humanity we seem to have lost sight of and gain some sense that we are all one human family.

Siddhartha Deb

In February 2024, I traveled to South Carolina to write about the Republican presidential primaries. I remember thinking, when the assignment came in, that no self-respecting writer with the misfortune to live in our times could turn down a chance to see American dysfunctionality in full flow. For over two decades, I’ve written extensively about the breakdown of Indian democracy and its virulent turn toward Hindu nationalism. Having tracked that perilous trajectory, from the disenfranchisement of Muslims in the distant, border state of Assam to the building of a garish Hindu temple on the site of a demolished mosque in the heartland of the nation, how could I say no to a Donald Trump rally?

Nothing that Trump did or said on that windy, cloudy afternoon inside a basketball stadium emblazoned with giant American flags was unpredictable. But there is a value to the granular details of experience, and that, for me, came not from Trump’s energetic, incoherent, and always personalized performance, but from the adoring crowd in whose company I watched the show.

The limitations of that crowd—its racism, its sexism, its innate sense of America-first superiority, and its conspiratorial gestalt of the world—are well known, especially in wealthy liberal enclaves in New York. These are limitations Trump’s supporters share with Hindu nationalists in India, which is fairly predictable. What is more disturbing is the ways these traits are shared by many nominally opposed to Trump, those in the West who have been able to watch a genocide unfold in Gaza for over a year, people who have applied to Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims the same atavism that Trump and his supporters manifest towards migrants, minorities, and women.

This isn’t surprising to me, given the blatant support in the United States for the majoritarian project of Narendra Modi. Since Modi’s first national victory in 2014, he has been courted by every president from Barack Obama to Joe Biden to Trump, his regime largely cheered on by liberal media and Silicon Valley. In June 2016, when I wrote a profile of Modi for The New Republic, he had just been invited by Obama to address a joint session of the Congress. Later, in a discussion on NPR, Alyssa Ayres, a former Obama official and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, challenged me, saying my critique of Modi and India was unfair because India was a fledgling democracy. This was in keeping with the generally admiring, even fawning coverage, of Modi in the Western liberal media, his violence towards Muslims treated as an unfortunate side effect in a man otherwise admirable in his ability to cut through sclerotic unions and bureaucracies in a fledgling nation.

And so, the Hindu right’s admiration for Hitler and the Italian fascists has easily been papered over by the Modi government’s close ties with Israel, as has its widespread use of the Israeli spyware Pegasus to carry out clandestine surveillance of journalists and civil rights activists and to plant malware and false evidence on people who are then held for years in prisons under anti-terror laws. When Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook worked assiduously to support the Hindu right in its widespread campaigns of misinformation and hate speech, that too was seen as business as usual.

The truth is that neither Modi nor Trump rose from nowhere or were simply voted in by so-called bad guys. They emerged from a global system that values violence and wealth over all else, one that will not come to terms with climate collapse on a planetary scale, that divides the world into winners and losers, into advanced democracies and fledgling democracies. If you measure the world in this manner, it is always going to be fertile territory for fascism.

The exit from this is never going to be simple. If that illusion could be harbored in the past four years, the first coming of Trump treated like an aberration, a bad dream, or an interruption, his triumphant return should make apparent the enormous scale of our collective task. But I think that is our responsibility, and it will have to begin by challenging fundamental assumptions about the world, about what you can ignore—or even encourage—elsewhere.

W. Ralph Eubanks

The memorial statue for Fannie Lou Hamer in Ruleville, Mississippi, stands at five feet and four inches, exactly the height she possessed during her brief life. One quote at the base of the statue demands attention: “Whether you have a PhD or no D, we are in this bag together. Whether you are from Morehouse or Nohouse, we’re still in this bag together.” Those words could only come from Mrs. Hamer—and I purposefully use the honorific “Mrs.” denied her for much of her life—yet the sentiments couldn’t be more relevant. Many Americans today willfully ignore that the direction of this country affects everyone, not merely a select group. As Mrs. Hamer wanted the world to understand, there is more that unites than divides us when you believe we’re in that bag together.

In the Trump era, we have fallen far from the vision of a united beloved community that Fannie Lou Hamer and the activists of the civil rights era envisioned. The idea of the beloved community did not come to be simply as a lofty utopian goal. Instead, it was conceived as an achievable vision—but only if American society focused on ending historic inequities connected to race, poverty, hunger, and the criminal justice system. But the dismantling of the idea of the beloved community did not begin with Trump, nor did it begin when Chief Justice John Roberts stated in an integration case that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating based on race.” Nor did it start when Ronald Reagan symbolically began his run for president by proclaiming support of states’ rights in Neshoba County, Mississippi, only a few miles from where the 1964 Freedom Summer murders took place. The desire to dismantle racial progress always existed in American politics and culture, hidden in plain sight. As a white politician in Alabama declared in June 1964 to a civil rights activist about the fight Tuscaloosa’s Black citizens had just waged for equal rights—one that resulted in an event known as Bloody Tuesday that same year—“Just give us fifty years and we’ll take it all back.”

The effort to take back racial progress began as a slow, calculated process more than five decades ago, and a second Trump presidency is part of this process. The systems of power and greed that shaped the Mississippi Delta, that Mrs. Hamer knew, have simply manifested themselves in other regions and places. It is as if we all now live in the Delta.

Despite all the hurdles she confronted, Mrs. Hamer never gave up her struggle toward equality. Whether it’s renewed attacks on voting rights or forces that seek to dismantle education, Americans, like Mrs. Hamer, must not give up on a vision of racial equality.

Working against the forces that seek to pull America back into the past will be difficult. As I teach the civil rights movement in the years to come, I will remind students of Mrs. Hamer’s belief: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

Caleb Gayle

I recall the degree of upended expectation at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government as results rolled in on Election Night in November 2016. Every four years, in a celebration of American democracy, the school suspends balloons overhead in the forum until the presidential election is officially called. When the losing candidate concedes, the balloons drop. Patriotic music blares through the PA system. People from either side of the aisle shake hands. And professors who have not so subtly submitted their resumes to presidential transition teams begin to scroll housing websites for DC relocation opportunities. But as the states considered a lock for Clinton were called for Trump, as the states that seemed toss-ups tipped toward Trump, and the day and night of the election became the day after the election—as Clinton supporters gathered in the Javits Center in New York to mourn shattered dreams under an unbroken glass ceiling—the forum of the Kennedy School cleared out, its balloons still suspended.

The next day, as the protests that became part of the resistance were in the infancy stages of their planning, it seemed an obligation for the students, staff, and faculty to regather in the forum. Professors were canceling classes—some I imagine to mourn the jobs as the Deputy Assistant’s Assistant Secretary of Assistance at a forgettable yet equally important agency. The then-dean of the school, Douglas Elmendorf, with his high-waisted pants, thin oval glasses, and too-wide tie stood with former Democratic Congressman Bill Delahunt. They offered what I imagine they thought of as words of encouragement, reflections on how resilient American democracy could be, how it was essentially up to us, an odd admixture of Gen-X and Millennials to reshape the world as we desired it to become. These words came in loud tones and did little, it seemed, to comfort anyone—perhaps because this vastly diverse group of students, faculty, and staff from around the globe felt that these two men did little to reflect their experiences and fears.

So, instead of adulation, applause, and jeers, there was just silence. The demographic destiny that seemed to gift each person in that room with a clear sense of what could be possible for America felt more like doom—doom for those who were not white men, wondering whether the country’s electorate resented them and saw their progress as zero-sum. It was that reckoning that built a deafening silence. The dean finished his diatribe, placed the microphone he was holding back on its stand, reminded the audience of the importance of democracy, took a beat, and then yelled, “Release the balloons!” The delay of the balloons’ release from their netting, for a moment, pointed everyone’s eyes up.

And as the balloons finally began to descend, a professor whose singing voice cracked, struggled through a wobbly rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Perhaps it was meant as a balm, but when soon the chorus began, it seemed less a balm than a plea for God to have mercy. And soon, the songs turned to strategy—and that strategy came in all forms: walkouts, protests, teach-ins, and the list would go on. But 2016 was different.

The disbelief that filled the Kennedy School on Election Night was raw, immediate—a visceral rupture in the order of things. There was still a sense that something had broken but might be rebuilt, that the institutions designed to withstand democratic turbulence might find their footing again. The reaction was one of upended expectations but also of energy, of protests that spilled into the streets, of op-eds drafted with the feverish urgency of those who still believed the right words, spoken at the right time, might stem the tide.

By 2024, that urgency had dulled. The outrage remained, but it had been tempered by familiarity, its edges worn smooth by years of crisis layered upon crisis. This time, there were no stunned silences in lecture halls or suspended balloons awaiting an unspoken cue. The sense of inevitability had settled in long before the election returns were finalized. What had once been met with shock was now met with a weary, knowing gaze. The takes flowed, but the resistance—once a kinetic force—had taken on the slow churn of dread. It was no longer just a matter of one man returning to power; it was the realization that the scaffolding of democracy had been hollowed out in the years between. The response was no longer improvisational, but almost procedural: statements were drafted, strategies debated, but the gravitational pull of disillusionment was stronger than before.

And so, unlike in 2016, when resistance felt like an imperative, in 2024, the question loomed larger: What now? Not in the frantic, urgent sense of a world newly shaken, but in the quiet, unsettling way that lingers when one realizes that, perhaps, the shaking would never stop.

Reverend Charles Adams addressed this feeling some thirty years ago in his sermon, “Drunk on the Eve of Reconstruction,” a reference to the moment in the Bible when Noah, after the destruction of the great flood, becomes drunk when offered the chance to begin again, to repopulate and resettle the earth. Adams compares this to the moment following the Civil War, when Black people were offered what seemed a new opportunity to begin again, creating a sense of excitement and hope, sometimes bordering on overzealousness, when they were finally presented with the potential for true equality and freedom after centuries of slavery. In essence, they were “drunk” on the promise of a better future.

Today, journalists find themselves as enemies of a president, in a profession in precipitous decline, with a pursuit, truth, whose value is questioned and often deemed unattainable. In such a moment, we might be lulled, like the faculty and staff at the Kennedy School, into singing a song to soothe ourselves. We might be tempted to believe that gathering on social media to bemoan the reputational damage to our field is doing something. But I write to warn against that very thing. These activities are their own kind of intoxication, partaking of our own sorrow, when we should be using our pursuit of the truth through words to build the world we desire to see, giving people the language needed to create that world with us. Let us not be drunk on the eve of reconstruction.

Donovan Hohn

A couple of years ago, a colleague of mine in the English Department of Wayne State University in Detroit, where I teach creative writing, was trying to work up some fresh material for the department’s website. Since April was approaching—and since April, according to the American Academy of Poets, is National Poetry Month—she decided to solicit from students, alumni, and faculty a “crowdsourced list of must-read poets.” I like very much this particular colleague and wanted to help her out, but as soon as I sat down to make my recommendation, my mind mutinied. It mutinied because there were too many poets to choose from but also because I disliked that adjective “must-read,” familiar to me from dustjacket blurbs. Aside from assigning readings to students who’ve elected to take my classes, I’d rather not say what anyone must read. There’s a mystery and a privacy to the encounter with a poem, or with any work of art, literary or otherwise. In my teaching, I like to encourage students to sample work by writers whose aesthetics and experiences may be like but also utterly unlike their own. You never know where you might find what you didn’t know you were looking for.

But I had to choose one poet, and just one, and since I always consider it wise to remain on good terms with the local ghosts, and since the local ghosts that haunt the classrooms where I teach include a number of poets, I chose Robert Hayden, 1936 graduate of Wayne State University, then known as Detroit City College. I first encountered Hayden’s anthology pieces (“Those Winter Sundays,” “The Middle Passage”) as an undergraduate, but it was only here, on his home ground, that I’d spent time with his Collected Poems. There’s a poem in there— “Monet’s Waterlilies,” from the final sequence of 1970’s Words in the Mourning Time, about a must-see encounter with a painting at the Toledo Museum of Art—that I have taught many times and keep coming back to.

It begins prosaically, like a lineated diary entry:

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

Hayden doesn’t tell us the date, but we can infer it from the reference to Selma and Saigon. It must be March 1965. Prosaic as these opening lines are, they imply much drama, counterposing as they do the poisonous fallout of the news with the serenity of the “great picture” (“great” gesturing toward its magnitude as well as its excellence), as if the latter might provide an antidote to the former. And yet—spoiler alert—as you read on, riding the shifts in register, you will arrive, two brief stanzas later, not at remedy or succor, at least not at an easy kind of remedy or succor. You will arrive at shadow and loss. You will arrive at grief.

The particular painting in the collection at Toledo comes from the late series of water lily paintings Monet began in 1914 and kept working on right up until the year of his death in 1926. That is how Monet spent World War I: in his garden in Giverny, trying to paint the “impossible things” that “troubled” him, “such as water with vegetation undulating in its depths.” You probably know Monet’s late water lily paintings, if not from a visit to a museum then perhaps from the posters and tote bags and coffee mugs on which they’ve been mechanically reproduced. They’ve become so famous, it is difficult to see them.

Hayden doesn’t try to make us see the one at the museum in Toledo. He doesn’t attempt to paint a lily pond in words. He might have, but doesn’t. It is hard for poets to compete with painters when it comes to making images. If color and light and three-dimensional space are the essential media of visual art, language and time and consciousness are the essential media of literary art. Hayden teleports us to the gallery of the museum, but instead of describing the painting on the wall, he dramatizes in language the effect it has on his speaker’s mind, a mind poisoned by the fallout of the news.

The first few times I read the poem, the second stanza puzzled me. It is a kind of riddle, or series of riddles. It begins with this enjambed sentence: “Here space and time exist in light / the eye like the eye of faith believes.” You read that first line and think you’ve come to the end of the declaration, but then the next line qualifies the noun “light.” What kind of light is this? A kind of light that “the eye like the eye of faith believes.” Why is the viewer’s eye like “the eye of faith”? The riddle continues:

The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

We are far now from the diaristic lineated prose of the first stanza. Hayden is speaking in riddles, and he is speaking in iambs. To solve the riddles, I sometimes ask students to imagine a blackout. What would you see if, while looking at Monet’s painting, all the lights went out? You’d see nothing. If there were some ambient moonlight coming through a window, you might see the dark square on the dark wall. Monet’s painting seems luminous, but its luminosity is an illusion. It is illusive, not elusive. The paint reflects but does not generate light. To see the light that shone on a lily pond in Giverny a century ago requires, therefore, not just any eye but an eye of faith. Monet performed a kind of incarnation, making light flesh. The light that fell on Giverny a century ago was not this light, this illusive flesh of light, but it did fall on Giverny a century ago, and unlike the daily news, it, through the miracle of Monet’s painting, endures. That is the sense I make of Hayden’s riddles.

But the poem does not end there. In its third and final stanza, it resolves the drama of its first stanza, that opposition between Monet’s serene painting and the poisonous news, and in so doing the closing lines suggest what it is the poet loves about the painting, and what it is he seeks when visiting it one day in March 1965:

O light beheld as through refracting tears.

Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

No joy, only joy’s shadow. Only grief. And now here we are, in 2025, encountering a poem about the poet’s encounter, in 1965, with a painting by an elderly French painter who, decades before, in a garden during time of war, encountered light on water and beheld it “as through refracting tears.” And if you’re me, Hayden’s closing lines will haunt you, and you will keep returning to the poem that you love, as if visiting a museum in Toledo.

Esther Honig

The first time I spoke with Jose Segovia Benitez, he was at a dog park in Los Angeles. He’d brought his emotional support dog, Lucas, a young Siberian husky and over the phone I could hear him chide the dog, like a little kid. The afternoon sun was setting and Segovia sat on a bench, in a hoodie and orthopedic sneakers, talking to me while Lucas played. He said this was his “happy place” but that day he was scared.

It was January 14, 2025, six days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

Segovia enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1999. He wanted to travel the world and get money for school, which he eventually did. But by 2001, the U.S. was at war and he was deployed to Afghanistan and later to Iraq. He watched over fields of poppy, lest they be sold by the Taliban and he fought in the battle of Fallujah. When his tank was hit by a rocket grenade, he sustained a TBI and shrapnel in one leg. He walked out of war a different person and with a slight limp.

Stories from war remind me how far some are willing to go in defense of our country. It’s a sacrifice I admit I’ve never understood or felt compelled to make and yet no one’s ever questioned my patriotism, or my place in America.

As part of a recent project, I spoke to over a dozen men like Segovia, veterans who’ve all been deported. For most, the U.S. was the only home they’d ever know, their country of origin a distant, abstract memory. Some said they enlisted to give back to the country that had given them so much. Others wanted the opportunities and the benefits. The fact that they only had a green card but not full U.S. citizenship felt like an unnecessary formality, a fine print that no one cared to read. The military certainly didn’t.

Some of the men, including Segovia, believed the military would take care of their paperwork for them. Others were given false information by eager recruiters. One man, Edwin Salgado, was suddenly deployed to Kuwait, two weeks before a crucial immigration appointment, and his application rejected. Whatever the case, these men were overseas and risking their lives for a country that they felt intrinsically connected to. Of course, for America, the feeling wasn’t mutual.

Before Segovia was deported as a criminal, he returned from Iraq an American hero. He moved in with his mom. Some nights she would find him outside in the backyard, alone and talking to himself. He started drinking and using drugs to cope with what would later be diagnosed as PTSD. I’ve heard similar stories from most of the men I spoke to; they came home from war, fell into substance abuse, and caught a felony.

In 1988, Congress created a broad category of crimes for which legal non-citizens were deportable. It was called “aggravated felonies,” and it includes everything from murder to theft and drug possession. No one knows how many veterans have been deported over the years. Some estimates are in the hundreds while others are in the thousands and even tens of thousands. Ultimately, what matters is who’s in office and their appetite for deportations.

The thing about these veterans is that they are both the heroes that President Trump purports to admire while also being the immigrants and criminals who he wants to get rid of. It’s an inconvenient reality, and I can’t help but wonder, would they have committed these crimes had they never gone to war in the first place?

In 2019, Segovia landed in El Salvador, handcuffed in his seat. To hide from violent gangs who might try to recruit him for his military training, he fled to a remote corner of the country. For three years he got by doing odd jobs—planting corn, building fences, chopping wood. He assumed this is how he’d live out the rest of his life.

But then, in his 2020 campaign, former president Biden proclaimed that “anyone who has fought for the United States of America should not be in a position to be deported.” Under his administration, around one hundred veterans, including Segovia, returned with temporary humanitarian visas. They were allowed to live in the homes they’d left behind, to see their families. Some had been gone so long that their young children were now adults.

Now, just as they settled back into their former lives, Trump has threatened to pull that rug out yet again.

As part of my job at StoryCorps, I work with archives at the Library of Congress. I record interviews with everyday Americans and I store them in the bottomless receptacle that is our nation’s historical record. If twenty years from now, someone wanted to understand what life was like in 2025, they might sift through some of these recordings. But how do I archive recordings from someone like Segovia, people whose belonging is contingent on who’s in office?

As his life dangles in this painful yo-yo, who will ultimately have the last say on how he’s remembered by history—a hero we’ve brought home or a criminal we’ve banished, again?

C.J. Janovy

We have to solve America’s bathroom problem.

Let’s go back to the spring of 2016. Historians might one day call it America’s Bathroom Spring. That year, North Carolina passed a bill banning transgender people from using bathrooms that matched their gender.

Attacks on trans people weren’t new. In Kansas, Republican lawmakers tried to put a $2,500 bounty on the head of any transgender student caught in the wrong bathroom. That bill said school kids “have a right not to encounter a person of the opposite sex” in the bathroom. Students “aggrieved” by such an encounter were entitled to a cash reward for “all psychological, emotional and physical harm.”

Can I get a payout for psychological and emotional harm every time I see a dude peeing in public?

Trans people in bathrooms were not a danger.

Gender fluidity is as old as humanity, but positive attention for trans people was new. Caitlin Jenner had been on the cover of Vanity Fair. Laverne Cox had been on the cover of Time. Critics were raving about Amazon Prime’s Transparent.

Growing acceptance—celebration, even—of trans people wasn’t the real problem, though. The problem in 2016 was that the U.S. Supreme Court had recently legalized same-sex marriage, neutering a cause that had rallied Republicans for a decade. Politicians needed a new target.

Transgender folks are a minority so minuscule that not many people actually know someone who is trans, so they’ve had no opportunity to hear trans stories or even try to understand trans lives. The past decade has shown how easily they could become prey.

In 2016, big businesses, governments, sports leagues, and celebrities all around the country rallied to defend trans people in North Carolina, and the state reversed what had been an enormous political and cultural blunder. But the backlash has been crushing. Lawmakers in dozens of states have since proposed or passed hundreds of bills banning transgender people not just from bathrooms, but from getting health care. From participating in society. From existing.

Demonizing this tiny group of people proved so potent that it’s getting credit for helping Republicans take the House, the Senate and the presidency.

What’s so infuriating is that we’ve heard this all before.

Fear and bathrooms weaponized against Black people during Jim Crow.

Fear and bathrooms weaponized against gay people in the ’60s and ’70s.

Fear and bathrooms weaponized against trans people now.

What’s worse is that most people probably know bathrooms aren’t that dangerous, so the bathroom scare is just another lie to validate America’s fetish for cruelty.

Bathroom rhetoric doesn’t just distract the public while politicians cause greater damage elsewhere, which hurts everybody. In a just world, trans people should be the ones who get cash payouts for psychological, emotional, and physical damage.

To create that just world, the rest of us must teach our fellow Americans to quit buying into it.

Everybody poops. Everybody pees. Everybody needs to fix their hair. Next time a politician starts talking about bathrooms, ask them what their real problem is.

Joe Kloc

For my book, Lost at Sea: Poverty and Paradise Collide at the Edge of America, I spent almost a decade getting to know a community in Northern California whose members slept on abandoned, derelict boats floating in an estuary. They were known as the anchor-outs, and throughout much of their century-long existence, they maintained an uneasy truce with their rich neighbors on shore. But during the pandemic, all of that changed. The county and city where they resided spent well over a million dollars to evict them—crushing their boats, forcing them into muddy encampments, and eventually scattering them to the winds.

Their situation was as outrageous as it was grave. Residents of one of the wealthiest counties in America were quietly driving from their borders these vulnerable, often elderly people, some of whom had lived in the community for fifty years. I’m reminded of one resident who explained at a city hall meeting that homelessness, while tragic, had no place in the town because it was scaring off the customers at the caviar shop.

Early on, when I’d recount the anchor-outs’ saga to others, the plain sad facts often failed to elicit much empathy. Sure, it’s heartbreaking, people would say, but why should the locals be forced to tolerate it? What’s wrong with asking them to go somewhere to get the help they need? At first, I was compelled not to even confront these questions, because they felt so crass. But the fact that they kept being asked eventually made me reconsider how I told the story.

Over time, I noticed that responses to the anchor-outs’ hardships changed when I took the time to share the quotidian details of their lives: how they had invented their own wedding and funeral traditions, how the church they’d founded broke off into two sects after an ontological dispute between its leaders, and how some members played Grand Theft Auto on old laptops hooked up to car batteries. Small additions, maybe, but somehow important to how the story was received. Listeners would reply: How could anyone do this? The townspeople should be ashamed!

What’s going on here, by my guess, is that these things are the ligature that holds together the life the anchor-outs built. They imply the century of feuds, jokes, and traditions that define this singular, peculiar place on earth. Most importantly, they hint at this world unlike any other that will vanish for everyone—including the reader—if those who tend to it are sent away.

These days, when I’m telling stories of people facing all different types of destruction, I remind myself to take the time to try, as best I can, to understand and convey all they have built up, and all they stand to lose. Even the saddest circumstances contain those meaningful, happy moments of life worth missing.

A final example: Once, about five years ago, an anchor-out told me how she was harassed by some of the men in their community. She wished she could call the police for help.

Why couldn’t she? I asked.

Because, she said, the authorities would use it as justification to evict the anchor-outs, to crush everyone’s boats. They didn’t understand that the anchor-outs wanted to live just like them. In the world on land, if someone called the police because a man broke into their home, the officers would stop the intruder—they wouldn’t bulldoze the entire neighborhood. The anchorage was her neighborhood. It had problems like any other. But she cared for it—and she wanted everyone else to care too.

Quraysh Ali Lansana

I am a historian, a scholar of Black American Studies and Literature/Creative Writing, a poet, an author, and a journalist. My life’s work is rooted in truth-telling, providing access and platforms for ideas and information, and the Black experience in the diaspora. Trump’s policies and Executive Orders are semi-automatic weapons aimed at every aspect of my existence. They are all extremely damning and worrisome, and all of them keep me up at night. But, the pervasiveness of the revision and erasure of information, while at the same time limiting and dictating access to information, is usually what rests on the throne of my dis-ease. The duPont-Columbia Award-winning show I produce, Focus: Black Oklahoma is broadcast on two of Oklahoma’s National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate stations. NPR, along with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, are all under the knife for offering balanced, ethical alternatives to more favorable White House narratives. The Oklahoma Educational Television Authority (OETA) is the state’s PBS affiliate and is the most-watched PBS station in the nation. Trump plans to gut the CPB, which means, for a state that ranks 49th in education nationally, our children will no longer visit Sesame Street. However, they will have personal copies of the Trump/Lee Greenwood “God Bless the USA” Bible, complete with an ominously shortened version of the Bill of Rights. All 77 counties in Oklahoma have voted Republican since 2001.

I have been of the strong opinion that July 1, 2024, marked a significant, yet underexplored moment in the history of this country. That day, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the Office of the President criminal immunity. Of course, this occurred before Trump was reelected, but now that is superfluous. He has returned to the White House, and in a short few months has unleashed unprecedented, and mostly unethical, attacks on anything or anyone that has questioned him, his beliefs, and his policies. The Trump Administration has targeted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and ideologies in all aspects of life, from education to museums to the Department of Defense (DOD), even dead soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery, who have no voices to respond. The Allies do not win World War II without the Navajo Code Talkers, yet they were briefly removed from the DOD website due to their ethnicity: not being white. This fact, in and of itself, should be unsettling to any sentient human. I believe it is well past time to “Speak truth to power,” as Black Arts Movement poet Mari Evans wrote, and call it what it is: the boldfaced, blatant, exceedingly racist erasure of the past, present, and future of melanated people. My friend, MacArthur Genius Fellow and fellow poet Terrance Hayes was on point when he published a book titled American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin in 2018. Here we are again, only more so.

Christopher Leonard

The news of Donald Trump’s re-election could be repurposed as the opening line of an obituary, a death notice that finally declares the end of broadly shared truth in the United States. This obituary has been a long time in the writing and comes as news to nobody. But Trump’s inauguration made it definitive.

Trump’s very campaign was defined by impassioned movements of Americans who operated in opposing mental realities. Donald Trump is, depending on where you get your information, either a crypto-fascist authoritarian bent on destroying American democracy, or a champion of the little guy buoyed by the votes of masses seeking to depose the Deep State elite. If you watched MSNBC or read The New York Times, Trump’s criminal conviction in New York was the long-delayed verdict on years of fraudulent schemes by a con man and serial sex predator. If you got your news from Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, or from OAN, then the conviction was an act of legal warfare carried out by Trump’s amoral enemies in the government bureaucracy, determined to derail the first successful populist political movement in decades. The January 6th rioters were either violent insurrectionists, or brave patriots, depending on the scroll in your phone.

The death of shared truth was illuminated, in the days before Trump’s inauguration, by the blinding light of wildfires that raced down the parched mountainsides outside Los Angeles and consumed whole neighborhoods in flame. The wildfires are a totemic event that show how things are going to go over the next four years.

A diligent and hardworking group of journalists reported what was happening. These reporters worked for The Associated Press, KNBC television, The Los Angeles Times, and other outlets that shared news of events as they unfolded. Most Americans, however, didn’t get news about the fires from these firsthand reports. They got it from an ecosystem of online personalities who didn’t report the news but instantly interpreted it, using the events to reinforce and enliven their broader political narratives. The flames instantly stoked politicized stories, leaving the underlying facts in ashes.

On Steve Bannon’s show, which enraptures an audience of millions of Trump faithful, the fires were a casestudy in liberal incompetence. The fires exposed the rottenness of the “illegitimate Biden regime” and its corrupt proxies in California’s government. These smug liberals, Bannon explained, weren’t just corrupt and incompetent, but might very well be driven by their hatred of normal Americans to let the fires burn. On “Democracy Now!,” which reaches millions of liberal radio listeners and millions more online readers, host Amy Goodman interviewed a series of experts who explained that the fires were the culmination of years of corrupt public policy allowing climate change to accelerate to the benefit of the fossil fuel industry. This is the new normal, they explained, in a world which is warmer and more unstable, with 2024 being the hottest year on record. Hurricanes, fires, and floods are increasingly overwhelming our government’s ability to respond.

What this means is that Americans will emerge from the conflagration with diametrically opposed visions of what the fires meant, and what we should do about them. We have seen this before, of course, with the Covid pandemic. And we should accept that going forward, the idea of a broadly shared narrative is over.

Those who write and report the news for a living need to figure out what this means for the business of truth. They face an audience that has been fractured, re-fractured, and then splintered again into countless silos of narrative. So what does this mean for the future of reporting and fact?

First, reporters need to look at the bright side. The media structures of the past have been consumed in their own kind of fire, and their collapse has restored to journalism something that has been missing for a long, long time: humility. Readers no longer trust reporters and no longer take reporters’ word on anything. A journalist has to show their work. They can’t take a reader’s trust for granted. They must realize that a reporter’s word is no more sacred than anyone else’s now. When a reporter’s voice loses authority, then the only remaining thing with authority is the reported fact. And this is how it should be. Big media outlets earned the derision of the public over many decades by speaking down to it, condescending to believe that journalists could tell people what to think. A small example: It was once commonplace for the political press to decide early on in election season which presidential candidates were serious, and which were a joke, a judgment the press communicated relentlessly to shape campaigns. If voters rebelled against anything in the repeated elections of Donald Trump, they rebelled against this.

Humility can lead journalists to see a second ray of hope in the smoke. Reported fact really is still important. Original reporting is the endangered headwater of today’s riotous media ecosystem. One original fact, derived from a reporter on the ground, now echoes out and feeds into the entire sprawling network of Instagrammers, Tik-Tokkers, YouTubers, podcasters, and commentators. The new generation of influencers interpret everything, but report nothing. They would wither and die without real journalists on the ground, who discover what’s happening. So reporters can know that they are carrying this system on their backs, even if reporters can no longer dictate how their reporting is interpreted, believed, or acted upon. Only humility can keep a reporter sane in this world. The reporter must continue the work, even if they have lost control of its immediate outcome. Everyone depends on it.

But does the reporting still matter, after the death of shared truth? Of course, it does. Politicians might brag and provoke and fill the airwaves with bluster. But all politicians, including Trump, know that their hold on power is tenuous. American politics is more contingent, more unstable, and more vulnerable to competing blocks of power than ever before. Every election is a change election, and nothing seems to last for long. Facts and reporting feed into this political arena as well. Narratives drive political movements, and facts do still drive narratives.

So every reported story matters. This is another, deeper lesson of the wildfires. One spark can carry far.

Tracie McMillan

I was taught to believe in the American Dream.

For a Gen-X white girl in a white-flight exurb in the Rust Belt, that meant I grew up believing that the Founders meant what they said, that we are all equal. I was taught to believe that to be a good American was to be colorblind. I was taught to believe that if I worked hard enough to prove my merit, I would get what I deserved. That was my American Dream.

On January 20, 2025, our president promised to make that American Dream come true. He promised to “forge a country that is colorblind and merit-based.”

It is a lovely idea, to be “colorblind and merit-based,” but this country has never been either. I can tell you that as someone who has reported on class in this country for a quarter century. I can also tell you that as someone who has lived here nearly twice as long.

When I was forty-two, I reported on Maximus, a corporation that profits from the paperwork of public benefits. The more paper there is, the more money Maximus makes. In Indiana, I met Sue, an illiterate white gas station attendant with high blood pressure who kept losing her public health insurance. Every time Sue missed an appointment or failed to pay the $1 a month the state required (the fee was supposed to be a demonstration of “personal responsibility”), she lost her insurance and got sicker. She also faced more paperwork, which made Maximus more money.

Sue’s merit—what she deserved—did not seem to matter. That was in 2017. But the myth of merit goes back further than that.

When I was thirty-three, I worked undercover at a Walmart outside Detroit, where I had a Black male co-worker in his twenties. His name was Brian. He had worked in produce markets for years and knew the ripening schedule of every piece of produce by heart. He had applied for the manager position, but Walmart hired Randy instead. Randy was twenty-two years old and white, and he did not know that plantains were related to bananas. So far as I could tell, he showed no signs of aptitude for his job.

Brian’s merit—what he deserved—did not seem to matter. This was in 2010, but the myth of merit goes back further than that.

When I was twenty-one and paying part of my way through NYU, a financial aid clerk gave me bad information. I ended up with a bill for $750 that I could not pay. I put on a thrifted blouse and went to an office. I asked a man in a suit, the financial aid dean, to cover the balance.

I was at NYU because financial aid made it cheaper for me than in-state tuition at the University of Michigan, which I’d also gotten into. In-state tuition was unaffordable because the state funding for public higher education had been dropping for years. I didn’t know that legislators cut funding, over and over, because white voters stopped supporting taxation for public services. I didn’t know that white support for taxation for public services began to dwindle once the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional in 1954.

In New York, I made my case in my thrifted blouse. The dean sighed. There was nothing he could do. Then he asked my name a second time; it rang a bell. He rifled through papers and told me, with a smile, that I was on a list of nominees to Phi Beta Kappa, an honor society to which he belonged. Now he smiled. Now he winked and told me he’d wipe the slate clean; after all, I was Phi Be.

I had thought that my merit depended on some mix of justice and need. Instead, it was membership in a club to which I had not applied—and the benefits of which I was in no position to refuse. That was in the 1990s. But the myth of merit goes back further than that.

When I was eight, my mom was hit by a drunk driver while she drove home on a curvy rural road in February. She ended up with a brain injury. There was no public health insurance to help her. There was no public health insurance for her because, in the 1960s, Southern legislators who talked about dissuading Black women from depending on government assistance insisted on limiting public health insurance to those who deserved it.

My mom, according to the rules set by our government, did not deserve public health insurance. The insurers argued that she did not deserve their private insurance, either, because she had already had a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. We ended up in a lawsuit. As the lawsuit dragged on, my mom had no consistent care. Nine years later, on April 4, 1993, Michigan’s supreme court ruled she had, in fact, deserved coverage. It didn’t matter by then. My mom had died five weeks earlier.

My mom’s merit—which is to say, what she deserved—did not seem to matter, at least not when it counted. That was in the 1980s. But the myth of merit goes back further than that. And so it goes, year after year, story after story.

In America, we learn the myth of merit through the logic of race. Our first lesson is that some people merit more than others. As a journalist, my job has often been to show that people who are not white deserve the same consideration as people who are. That is true, insofar as it goes. It also misses the point.

If my work is to be of any use, now or in the future, I cannot fixate on proving who deserves what. I need, instead, to show that we all deserve to have enough.

Benjamin Peters

President Trump’s forced deportations, freeze on refugees, and threats to birthright citizenship brought my youngest daughter to tears in January 2025. The night before, she had cradled Maverick, a one-year-old who had fled Nicaragua’s violence with his family just a month earlier. My perceptive twelve-year-old couldn’t understand why wonderful asylum-seekers like Maverick and his hardworking parents—who named him after the Top Gun protagonist and now labor in Tulsa factories to raise him in safety free of Ortega—might no longer find refuge here.

Her tearful questions haunted me: Why? Why would we turn away families like Maverick’s? Her inquiry reminded me of that classic revolutionary question posed by Chernyshevsky and Lenin: “What is to be done?” But my daughter’s version carried more urgency in the plain English (closer to the original Russian): What to do?

My proposal is this: the U.S. press and all true storytellers must reconsider America’s military presence, systemic inequalities, and the limitations of our “bad actor” geopolitical narratives. Perhaps developing a language that examines the U.S. as an imperial corporate-state can give lasting power to the flood of horror stories emerging from what I call the current Dread Pirate Roberts’ White House. While the Trump administration victimizes many, we urgently need language for calling out the system-level violence that operates behind our backs through states, prisons, and empires.

May we observe with horror but without surprise: as my colleague Marijeta Bozovic put it, there has never been a progressive imperial state.

Beyond Bad Actor Narratives

A properly critical and democratic media should refocus on anti-imperialism to make sense of current events. Just as framing Trump as merely a bad actor no longer suffices, the Cold War’s moral framework—Soviet state socialism versus American capitalism—never made sense. Both represent imperial states, and how else could large countries take shape except by first colonizing their own lands, then others?

Every legitimate concern about, say, Russian nuclear threats or the invasion of Ukraine should prompt reflection on America’s exceptional global military presence: approximately 800 military bases abroad, conducting at least 165 military operations in the last century alone. Britain maintains about a dozen bases. The average non-U.S. country operates roughly 0.25 foreign military bases. Before Trump, the U.S. was already in a permanent state of exception.

Every comparison between Putin poisoning enemies and Trump pardoning allies should be contextualized within America’s carceral state, which imprisons Black citizens four times more often and for longer periods than white citizens. Maverick’s parents fled Nicaragua’s incarceration rate of 332 per 100,000 for Oklahoma’s rate of 550 per 100,000. The CIA has profited from Syria’s torture prison Sednaya too.

The Imperial Baseline

Since slavery’s arrival in 1619—or at least since George Washington granted Ohio’s Native American lands to white German mercenaries for betraying the British—one aspect of the big picture has remained clear: structural oppression by our white ethnonational state is the historical norm. Large countries cannot establish themselves across continents without becoming settler colonial empires. It’s Woody Guthrie with a realtor’s twist: this land was your land, this land is my land—now who loses which land?

These observations justify neither past nor present violence, nor do they create false equivalencies with other hostile states’ imperial aggression. But bearing in mind the larger picture can help storytellers explain quite a bit. Perhaps only by acknowledging our own dark histories can we clearly identify those of others.

The Limits of Reductive Narratives

Bad actor stories that reduce empires to mere states often miss the mark. They failed to understand Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or Russian interference in U.S. democracy, which, while upsetting, should not surprise once we realize no imperial state is progressive. For example, American cyber intelligence experts wrongly predicted that Russian hacking would quickly decapitate Kyiv in February 2022. Instead of sophisticated cyber warfare, Putin sent prisoners to dig trenches in mud, beneath homemade drones and between missile batteries, in a WWI-style war of attrition. The Empire strikes back.

While only democratic states can be progressive, empires exert economic and cultural power that corrupts through overextension. Despite the common centrist position that pro-Putin Russian hackers gave Trump the 2016 election, most Russian hackers merely tolerate Putin, and many aren’t even Russian. The vast majority—at least 20,000 gray-market IT professionals—were fatherless young men raised in the 1990s and 2000s in the poverty of shock therapy, before Putin’s petrostate rebuilt a middle class for some. Most Russian ransomware-as-service hackers today simply target flush imperial entities like the Koch brothers’ Colonial Pipeline for bitcoins; only a few staff Putin’s notorious yet underwhelming Internet Research Agency.

Putin, like Trump, like the next Dread Pirate Roberts, represents not a break from but a continuation of the imperial corporate state and its complex relationship with bad actors. Their goal is piratic: hollow out and privatize the public coffers for the ultrawealthy and oligarchic classes.

A Path Forward

It’s a mistake to reduce our worldview to white-hat good guys versus black-hat bad guys. Nor should we simply flip the script and excuse bad behavior globally because it exists domestically, or vice versa. If we’re going to speak truth to power, we must resist with eyes wide open.

Let us rebuild. Let storytellers develop new moral language for telling true stories that matter. Even as the Oval Office issues forth an amalgam of chaos, incompetence, and cruelty, let us focus on broader vistas of the imperial corporate state and all sources of systemic violence—there lies the beating heart behind breaking news. As James Carey pointed out, almost every new story performs an archetypal narrative: let ours tell the drama of the imperial state more clearly. But let us also inoculate ourselves against cynicism: goodness still abounds within empires (Maverick’s parents adore Tulsa, as do I); convenient oversimple bad actor discourse lies in shambles around us, having reaction-cycled the liberal establishment’s “bad guy” into the Oval Office.

Would-be truthtellers must not repeat those mistakes. We must learn to see our imperial corporate state’s outline in telling local and global stories that matter at every level.

Maverick—or rather the looming empire behind the name of an innocent young asylum-seeker seeking liberty in the United States—helps explain why the empire he may or may not be fortunate enough to grow up in is not a progressive state. Six months in, Maverick’s father is considering military service to support his family of five. Thus the story of Top Gun: Maverick and our imperial state repeats itself.

I see no comfort for my daughter’s tears except the truth—the truth about ourselves.

Monica Potts

I’m from Clinton, Arkansas, which is a town of about 2,500—it never gets any bigger—the north-central part of the state, just on the southern edge of the Ozark mountains. I write about it often, and it’s sort of my muse and inspiration. As soon as I’d made it to a point in my career where I could decide what kind of journalism I wanted to do and what I wanted to cover, I started to focus on writing about families in little places like my hometown—in the middle of the country, far from city centers, and full of low-income and working-class people. Many rural counties are also overwhelmingly white. Very many writers call this group of people “the white working class”; I have some quibbles with that I’ll save for another day.

When Trump won in 2016, my mission took on a different urgency, in part because there suddenly was a lot of reporting about rural America, but I felt that much of it was superficial and lacked nuance. Readers also tired of it quickly. Someone on social media derisively called them “Cletus safaris,” and I think that stuck. And so people felt like they’d heard enough of these kinds of stories and called for them to stop.

But I kept returning to my hometown, both mentally and imaginatively—and then finally literally. I moved back in 2018. And I lived there until a little over a year ago. While Trump did improve his margins in cities in 2024, places like my hometown are still, by and large, Trump country: rural, home to sizable populations without college degrees. They’re also relatively low-income: the median household in my home county earns about $47,000, and it’s always about half of the national median income.

But when you talk about those kinds of broad statistics, it leaves out a lot of variation. Small towns still have internal class stratification and divisions and hierarchies. For most of the time I lived in Clinton, a large landowner and local business owner flew a Trump flag along with the American flag from a pole in a large field along the highway, in front of his store. He’s not just a local business owner: he’s the son of the family that once owned the furniture store in town. I don’t know his yearly income or net wealth, but every year he hosts a local rodeo-like event that draws people from surrounding states and kind of stops the town so that everything revolves around it, even police and health and veterinary services, because there are always horseback riders who get hurt. Most people think he’s one of the richest men in town, and I’d be shocked if he wasn’t. I saw that often: Trump flags flying outside of these huge houses and barns on huge properties up and down mountains.

So while people generally make less money and the cost of living is lower in a small, poor county like mine, that doesn’t mean everyone is poor, or thinks of themselves as poor. But to put that in perspective, a family that makes $200,000 a year might be one of the richest families in town, while that just might be a middle-class salary in parts of the East Coast. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild noted this in her most recent book, Stolen Pride, in which she found that what she called “local elites” were the most likely to vote for Trump. So they’re often people who might not have gone to college, but who own car dealerships and businesses or work in construction and have managed to do better financially than many of their neighbors. Even a family making $80,000 or $90,000 a year might be doing fairly well. But in the national news, they might be reported on as a family who is struggling. And they have struggles, but their thoughts about their own struggles should be put in their own words.

And I bring this up because I think it’s important to remember this in the context of Trump’s 2024 win. In survey after survey, voters named the economy as one of their top issues, along with immigration.

So what, exactly, were their economic objections? A lot of national reporting is influenced by expectations that people with college degrees who live on the coasts have for status and wellbeing and a middle-class life. If you live in that context, you might look at a family making that salary and see people who are struggling. But how do they see themselves? Do they even think about economic class in this way?

When I talk to voters and interview people from this part of the world, many simply wanted to pay less for goods, and they thought the government needed to cut spending to make that happen. They blamed Biden and government spending for inflation. Is that a story of hardship or of a middle class that wants to spend less money on services? Are they local elites rebelling against an effort during the Biden administration to spend more on low-income families? In fact, the Economic Policy Institute has found that in the post-COVID recovery, wages rose from the bottom, and the wages grew fastest for lower-wage workers. The Trump voters I knew were anti-immigration, but they were also against taxes and against a system that distributed cash assistance, health insurance, and food to low-income families in their own communities. Another kind of phenomenon I saw often while I lived in my hometown post-COVID was local business owners complaining about having to pay higher wages to their workers. They also objected to things like enhanced unemployment benefits, but I knew people who used those benefits to leave their jobs in fast food and get training for a career, like being a paramedic.

All of those complaints from Trump voters are about economics, but we would approach them differently than we’d approach a story about a lower-income family struggling to pay rent.

I think my goal has always been to keep those kinds of multilayered stories in mind. There are internal class divisions, internal classism, in hometowns like mine, and so while I have focused my career on writing about low-income places, the lowest income families in those places are not the only ones there. In fact, they’re not the ones who vote in the highest numbers, or are the local decision-makers and leaders. And I think that’s important to keep in mind when we watch what happens during a second Trump term.

Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

The morning after the 2016 presidential election, as he got ready for school, my younger son asked me if the result of the election meant we had to leave the country. He was twelve years old.

He was only eight months when he, his older brother, my wife, and I moved to America, as Americans love to call it even though it’s only one of 35 countries in the continent—an oblivious expression of exceptionalism that, following the results of the last presidential election, no longer applies.

My family arrived on companion visas—I did on an H-1B, a visa for so-called skilled workers whose future, like everything else, is now in the air. Years later we got our green cards and later became U.S. citizens—I did in 2016, just two months before the election.

The fact that my son was now an American citizen, that this was his country, too, didn’t matter. The son of immigrants, an immigrant himself, all he knew was that he wasn’t sure if he could stay.

I probably said something like, “Don’t be silly, we don’t have to leave, don’t worry about that,” but I don’t really remember how I did it—blocking traumatic moments from my life and then probing my own memory to turn them into words is what I do. But I have no doubt that’s what I said.

Parents will always say whatever it takes to keep their children from harm. I would’ve said we could stay even if it wasn’t true—even if we lacked papers or had deportation orders hanging over our heads. We live at a time where facts seem no longer relevant—but some facts are more irrelevant than others.

Amid the vomit-inducing headlines we’re drowning in again these days, what I think the most about is the kind of conversations families less lucky than mine are having right now.

The great thing about coming to America is your capacity for wonder, your gullibility to believe this country is like no other and your right to pursue your own happiness on this land is real.

That is—until this country starts flirting with the idea of proving you wrong.

Throughout its history, America has dazzled the world with its promise of leading us all toward a less anxious future. That’s why so many of us come. That—and because America needs us, because nothing moves without us, and we might soon get a taste of what that looks like in real life.

But America has also demonstrated repeatedly its craving for cruelty toward its own people, its relentless dexterity for self-harm. Such a wild, immature country still.

Last November, my kids voted by mail—my wife and I are empty-nesters now. My younger son has spent the last four years living abroad, pursuing his dreams across the pond.

Shortly after moving to Europe, he hung an American flag in his living room. He’s twenty-one now, the proudest American you can find. Every day, he dreams of coming home.

I recently asked him if he remembered what he said to me the morning after the election in 2016, and he said he didn’t. That’s why we write out the words, so we can all remember them—even if those who said them don’t or say they don’t.

Peter Slevin

Four more years! Of what? Of Donald Trump, his courtiers, his cronies, and his incompetence.

We’re seeing it already and it’s bad. Really bad.

Trump’s triumph, and his return to Washington with his gilded pitchfork, also means four more years of lies. Four more years of saying that up is down and black is white. Four legs good, two legs bad. Four more years of pretending that tariffs are paid by foreign governments and that the 2020 election was stolen, and immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” (They’re eating the dogs; they’re eating the cats.) Doctors kill babies after birth. The United States faces an energy emergency. DOGE cares about efficiency. The Trump presidency is committed to law and order.

Twenty years ago, I had rarely, if ever, used the word lie about what a politician said. (Though maybe about Bill Clinton who did, indeed, lie about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.) But Trump is a different animal. He lies and misrepresents facts with abandon. The Washington Post identified precisely 30,573 false or misleading claims by Trump in his first term.

He lied so much during last year’s campaign that the fact-checkers couldn’t keep up. He was at it again in the first minutes of his second term, in his inaugural address; in his first hours with that chaotic press conference; in his first days when his PR team posted his glossy biography on the White House website.

Of course, the bio opened with a lie: “After a landslide election victory in 2024...”

It was no landslide. Trump’s margin of victory was 1.5 percentage points, the fifth narrowest margin since 1892. As we know, if roughly 115,000 of the eight million people who voted for Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania had voted for Kamala Harris, she would be in the White House.

This is not an error but a strategy. Repeat a lie often enough, Trump has learned, and lots of people will believe it. Remember “the Russia hoax” and “the perfect phone call” and “stop the steal.” And don’t forget his years of lies about Barack Obama’s birthplace, which led 41 percent of Republicans to believe Obama was born in another country, and 31 percent more to say they weren’t sure, according to one survey. This was in 2016, mind you, after Obama had been president for nearly eight years.

Tony Schwartz, ghostwriter of Trump’s Art of the Deal, phrased it this way in the book, with Trump’s approval: “I play to people’s fantasies... People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”

Truthful hyperbole is, of course, an oxymoron. Just like “alternative facts.”

He is, of course, right about lying as an effective strategy. Tens of millions of American voters do believe him. Of those who don’t, many find him entertaining and come along for the ride.

I was doing some reporting in eastern North Carolina last fall and spoke with a farmer who introduced himself by saying, “I am a Trump man.” He said Harris is “more communist than anything else. In four years, we won’t have Social Security. Everything all the time goes to the migrants.” He believes that Democrats led the January 6 assault on the Capitol and when I asked what he likes about Trump, he pointed to the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania last July. “He’s a fighter,” he said. “He proved that when the Democrats tried to kill him.”

We’re probably not going to reach that farmer, no matter what we do. But let’s remember others whom we might just reach. In round numbers, 77 million Americans voted for Trump, 78 million voted against him, and nearly 90 million eligible voters stayed home. The ones who didn’t vote, because they couldn’t see why or didn’t understand the stakes or recognize the facts—they may be our greatest hope to save the republic.

Listening to the opening conversations at Switchyard’s “Covering Chaos” conference, I heard plenty of gloom, and some doom, too. In the discussion about the limits of journalism, I was reminded of that scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where a man pushing a cart, shouts, “Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!” The wheezing patient says, “I’m not dead. I’m getting better.” The customer, keen to get rid of the ailing man, responds, “You’ll be stone dead in a moment.”

I’d like to suggest that journalists, artists, and storytellers aren’t dead yet. And we may be the heart of the best resistance we’ve got to Trumpism and its roots in disinformation. We need to be a bulwark against the lies and the gaslighting. We need to hold the liars, the hypocrites, and grifters to account, as difficult as that might be in their moment of triumph.

So, cheesy as it sounds, yes, four more years. Four more years of relentless truth-telling. Four more years of amplifying myriad voices from around the country, and four more years of sticking to the facts.

Unsexy, I know. But essential.

I would also add that Donald Trump and what happens in Washington is not the whole ballgame, not nearly. What’s happening outside the Beltway is essential—and, in many places, hopeful. I daresay the national media, in the early days of Trump 2.0, has been looking for the resistance in the wrong places.

Many of the challenges, the solutions, and, yes, the resistance will be local. And where we can support and, if necessary, resurrect local news and share the fruits of local reporting, we have a fighting chance.

Is This the End of Democracy?

On January 24, 2025, Switchyard gathered dozens of writers, radio producers, nonprofit leaders, educators, and thinkers at our headquarters at 101 Archer Street in Tulsa to collectively imagine—and reckon with—what the next four years will be like.

Gathering on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears seemed like an appropriate place to grapple with the dark past of American exceptionalism and also to address a solemn question: What are we going to do now?

Sindya Bhanoo

I am both a journalist and a fiction writer. I am frequently asked about these parallel paths that I pursued. Why one, why the other? What is the value of each?

I don’t do as much reporting as I used to, but I rely on accurate, thorough journalism to learn about what is happening in the world, and to make decisions. Decisions that affect my life, my family’s life, my community, and broader society.

What I do know is that literature is a powerful tool. The simple act of telling a story is a form of resistance. It is a quiet demand. The writer asks the reader to take a break and to pay attention to something unknown and unfamiliar.

My own fiction centers the lives of immigrant families. My parents are immigrants from India and I was born while my father was a graduate student in Philadelphia. I was born at Penn Hospital and issued a birth certificate by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I see it as my job to write down the stories and capture the particular aspects of the human experience that I am most tuned into and concerned about.

Through fiction, what I am actually doing is requesting a pause. This is so simple, and yet it is clear that we need the reminder.

It’s 2025 now, and we still cannot give it up. In a chaotic world, writing is a refuge. Writing fiction provides me with a quiet space, and in that quiet space, I can think. I can line up words to make sentences and tell a story.

“Look,” it lets me say. “Look at these people in my story. They experience joy and sorrow and heartache. They are not just like you, but are they really so different?”

Ted Conover

In these terrible times, the mission stays the same: to serve as a check on power, to publish the truth. And speak not only to the choir of those who agree with us but to the universe of those who might.

Twenty-five years ago I wrote a book about my work as a corrections officer titled Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. I imagine it has been read by more people than anything else I’ve published.

Of course it’s disappointing when something we’ve worked on long and hard fails to move the policy needle. Now we must grok the why. We need conversations with each other, like we had in Tulsa. And also we need conversations with those who believe we’re the enemy.

As journalists, so many of our foundational beliefs are under attack. Facts, for one, and fact-checking. For another, empathy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

MUSK: So we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on.

Also quoted were right-wing pastors and the author of the new book, The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits. A bestseller last year was Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.

But toxic empathy in the context of fear about being manipulated by the pain of children or the unemployed strikes me as ugliness and derangement.

Michael Croley

Homer says, “That’s not our quarrel and never has been.”

“The hell it isn’t,” Hud says.

The camera zooms in on Homer and he says, “No, boy, I was sick of you a long time before that.”

This surprises Hud, who has been looking away but now looks his father in the eye. “Well, it’n life full of surprises? And all along I thought it was because of what I done to my little brother,” he says.

The line Homer speaks after this is the one that has stayed with me since that November night in 2016.

“Lonnie,” he says, “little by little, the look of the country changes because of the men we admire.”

My father was stoic to a fault. A trait my late brother also bore—though he was known to crack from time to time—and which I have more or less, with no small amount of shame, not been able to uphold.

“Little by little, the look of the country changes because of the men we admire.”

Siddhartha Deb

W. Ralph Eubanks

Despite all the hurdles she confronted, Mrs. Hamer never gave up her struggle toward equality. Whether it’s renewed attacks on voting rights or forces that seek to dismantle education, Americans, like Mrs. Hamer, must not give up on a vision of racial equality.

Working against the forces that seek to pull America back into the past will be difficult. As I teach the civil rights movement in the years to come, I will remind students of Mrs. Hamer’s belief: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”

Caleb Gayle

And so, unlike in 2016, when resistance felt like an imperative, in 2024, the question loomed larger: What now? Not in the frantic, urgent sense of a world newly shaken, but in the quiet, unsettling way that lingers when one realizes that, perhaps, the shaking would never stop.

Donovan Hohn

It begins prosaically, like a lineated diary entry:

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon poisons the air like fallout I come again to see the serene, great picture that I love.

The seen, the knowndissolve in iridescence, become illusive flesh of lightthat was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.

Here is the aura of that worldeach of us has lost.Here is the shadow of its joy.

Esther Honig

It was January 14, 2025, six days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration.

Stories from war remind me how far some are willing to go in defense of our country. It’s a sacrifice I admit I’ve never understood or felt compelled to make and yet no one’s ever questioned my patriotism, or my place in America.

Now, just as they settled back into their former lives, Trump has threatened to pull that rug out yet again.

As his life dangles in this painful yo-yo, who will ultimately have the last say on how he’s remembered by history—a hero we’ve brought home or a criminal we’ve banished, again?

C.J. Janovy

We have to solve America’s bathroom problem.

Let’s go back to the spring of 2016. Historians might one day call it America’s Bathroom Spring. That year, North Carolina passed a bill banning transgender people from using bathrooms that matched their gender.

Can I get a payout for psychological and emotional harm every time I see a dude peeing in public?

Trans people in bathrooms were not a danger.

Gender fluidity is as old as humanity, but positive attention for trans people was new. Caitlin Jenner had been on the cover of Vanity Fair. Laverne Cox had been on the cover of Time. Critics were raving about Amazon Prime’s Transparent.

Growing acceptance—celebration, even—of trans people wasn’t the real problem, though. The problem in 2016 was that the U.S. Supreme Court had recently legalized same-sex marriage, neutering a cause that had rallied Republicans for a decade. Politicians needed a new target.

Transgender folks are a minority so minuscule that not many people actually know someone who is trans, so they’ve had no opportunity to hear trans stories or even try to understand trans lives. The past decade has shown how easily they could become prey.

Demonizing this tiny group of people proved so potent that it’s getting credit for helping Republicans take the House, the Senate and the presidency.

What’s so infuriating is that we’ve heard this all before.

Fear and bathrooms weaponized against Black people during Jim Crow.

Fear and bathrooms weaponized against gay people in the ’60s and ’70s.

Fear and bathrooms weaponized against trans people now.

What’s worse is that most people probably know bathrooms aren’t that dangerous, so the bathroom scare is just another lie to validate America’s fetish for cruelty.

Bathroom rhetoric doesn’t just distract the public while politicians cause greater damage elsewhere, which hurts everybody. In a just world, trans people should be the ones who get cash payouts for psychological, emotional, and physical damage.

To create that just world, the rest of us must teach our fellow Americans to quit buying into it.

Everybody poops. Everybody pees. Everybody needs to fix their hair. Next time a politician starts talking about bathrooms, ask them what their real problem is.

Joe Kloc

A final example: Once, about five years ago, an anchor-out told me how she was harassed by some of the men in their community. She wished she could call the police for help.

Why couldn’t she? I asked.

Quraysh Ali Lansana

Christopher Leonard

Those who write and report the news for a living need to figure out what this means for the business of truth. They face an audience that has been fractured, re-fractured, and then splintered again into countless silos of narrative. So what does this mean for the future of reporting and fact?

So every reported story matters. This is another, deeper lesson of the wildfires. One spark can carry far.

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.

The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.

Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.