The bartender introduced himself to me as Junior while he prepared my candy-colored, non-alcoholic drink. “And you?” he asked. He stood at a medium height, wore tan skin beneath a cocktail shirt that was ill-suited to the Peruvian desert climate, and had a kindly face that bordered on effeminate.

“I’m Ben,” I replied before he sh…

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I often find it difficult to address politics when my stance on a given topic is little more than, “Well, this is bad.” And the past year has been a steady stream of dismal developments. Trump’s cabinet members are bad, and his policy is bad, and the public statements he makes serve as napalm on a r…

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There are any number of reasons that people cite in the discussion about why Democrats lost the 2024 election. Harris didn’t campaign hard enough. She didn’t strategize well enough. The strategies she did employ were too little too late. She wasn’t centrist enough. She wasn’t progressive enough.

If only Joe Biden had dropped o…

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Watching injustices unfold across the nation, I’ve seen more and more voters on my side of the aisle fall into a similar line of thinking. “All Trump supporters are bad people. They voted for everything that our country is going through now.” It’s not difficult to see why this dour perception has taken hold.

It’s becom…

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Venturing outside of the reaches of Philadelphia to meet my friend at a bar, perhaps I shouldn’t have been terribly surprised to learn that the venue would be populated largely by Trump supporters. The magnetism that it holds for my friend, though, has far more to do with the pool table centerpiece and the accompanyin…

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Thanks so much to everyone who could tune in!

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on the Middle East. In it, I made the case that most of us simply don’t have the knowledge or background to weigh in on the tension between Israel and Palestine. The least qualified voices tend to dominate the conversation.

I received a comment on the piece that caught my attention …

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One of the ways that I try to approach political writing is by sharing perspectives that I haven’t already seen explored. When new stories and controversies break out, it’s easy to fall in line with the million other journalists and commentators going over the same set of facts. I could talk about the specifics of Trump’s …

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I stumbled onto a comment a few days ago on Substack about artificial intelligence.

It read, “I block people who use AI. I block people who tell other people it’s ok to use AI. I block people who use AI for editing, too. For ideas. For anything related to creative writing.

Sometimes I think I’m overreacting. But no, I’m not. I…

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For the past few months, I’ve had a hard time addressing politics. A lot of the reason for this is probably relatable. As chaos has swept the country, creators are struggling to create. There’s a sense of despondency that many of us are feeling right now. It’s hard to muster the strength to say anything at all.

But a lo…

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As a Jew who’s been to Israel, it might be expected that I have a lot of thoughts about what’s going on right now in the Middle East. But the truth is, it’s because of the time I spent there that I only feel qualified to wade into this controversy on rare occasions. I have a better understanding now of just how much…

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This is an article that I wrote a few months ago. But as the relationship between Trump and Elon has (predictably) begun to disintegrate, I feel that the take is a relevant one to reshare today.

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This is another piece I wrote leading up to the election, but the point is every bit as relevant today.

To listen to a voice over of this article, click here.

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In happier times, there never used to be a feeling of guilt that went along with writing what I wanted to write. It would be an end in itself regardless of the topic. But as I’ve watched democracy erode around me, there’s been a growing sense that the only subject worth talking about is politics.

I think a lot about t…

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There’s a question I’ve found that’s useful to ask each time the country gets embroiled in a new political drama. You’ve probably heard it before.

“What if the tables were turned?”

It’s a simple enough hypothetical, but part of what makes it so valuable is that it can’t be universally applied. There are plenty of situations that are so outlandish that imagining a partisan reversal simply doesn’t work. There are political offenses so exaggerated, so transparently corrupt, that they only make sense coming from one side of the aisle in the country we know today.

The question, “What if it were Biden accepting the private jet from Qatar, and promising to hoard it for himself when/if he leaves office?” simply holds no weight. It’s a non-starter. The scenario could never feasibly come to pass, and even the most devoted Trump supporters would have trouble building a case that our former leader would ever do something so flagrantly corrupt.

It’s equal measures difficult to envision the alternate timeline where Biden would have stoked a riot over Twitter and then encouraged that same mob to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.” He never called the free press “the enemy of the people.” He’s never threatened to revoke credentials from news outlets for covering him critically. And for all his flaws, most would be hard-pressed to imagine him outright refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power or threatening an illegal third term in office.

But there are still those situations that arise where it’s not so hard to envision if things had only gone a slightly different way. Even in our polarized country, there are significant developments that fall into an ambiguous gray zone. The tribal lines blur often enough that the “what if the tables were turned?” question holds more merit than many stop to consider.

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