“We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”
—Jonathan Gottschall

In October 2020, my family and I moved to a new house at the fringes of the suburbs, but it would be many more months before I would meet my neighbor’s wife. I met him once or twice, only briefly, but I never got so much as a passing glance at her.

It didn’t take long, though, for my brain to begin creating all kinds of explanations as to why.

At dinner, I’d see the lights from their house through the tree line and wonder where she was — or what happened to her. Like any true crime lover, my mind naturally narrowed in on the husband. Bill must have murdered her and buried her in the backyard, I thought. (Morbid, I know.) How else could you explain us never having seen or heard her – not even so much as a glimpse or a whisper?

Of course I hoped this wasn’t the case. My mind, however, in the absence of information, created an explanation – albeit an irrational one – to fill the void. Unable to deal with uncertainty, my mind began telling itself stories.

Thankfully, my neighbor – Judy is her name – is very much alive (we met a few months later), and she makes some of the best sourdough biscuits you’ll ever eat.

Joan Didion once said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

She was right in more ways than I think even she realized.

Storytelling, of course, is a survival skill — filling in critical gaps in information that might prevent us from becoming some bear’s next meal or a serial killer’s next victim. But it’s also a useful tool for making sense of the world and our place in it.

Stories help us understand how certain actions produce certain outcomes and can thus influence future events. It’s no secret that, as humans, we’re not the best at handling uncertainty; a lack of information fuels a sense of disorder and chaos that’s too much for our hungry minds to manage. Whereas stories – even made-up ones – allow us to retain a sense of control, as well as meaning, over our lives.

In ancient Egypt, it was believed that Ra, the sun god, sailed across the sky every day, from east to west, from morning till night. At night, he descended into the perilous underworld, where he fought enemies of creation. One of these, his greatest foe, was the giant serpent Apophis (or Apep). The Egyptian deity of darkness, chaos and destruction, Apophis sought to destroy Ra and bring darkness to the Earth.

Of course, what was really happening was the rising and setting of the sun — something we today accept as a basic and essential celestial phenomenon. In 2300 BCE, however, science was, in a word, rudimentary.

The ancient Egyptians thus filled their gap in knowledge with a story — an explanation for why this bright ball rose in the heavens every morning and disappeared every night. It was their way of making sense of, and finding meaning in, what we today know to be a natural rhythm. Every rising of the sun represented Ra’s triumph and rebirth.

But it wasn’t just the ancient Egyptians who did this.

Ancient Greeks believed in Helios, the Titan god of the sun, who drove his chariot across the heavens every day and returned by night by sailing underground via a golden cup or boat. In Norse mythology, Sól symbolized the sun, racing her chariot across the sky with the wolf Hati in hot pursuit.

The details varied, but the idea was the same — some godly being was responsible for the daily comings and goings of the large, light-giving object in the heavens. These stories were ancient peoples’ sensible attempts at answering looming questions using what little information they had.

The stories we tell ourselves can be good or bad, benign or dangerous, thoughtful or reckless, built on false assumptions or correct ones (sorry, Bill!). But they’re almost always based on something we’ve experienced in our own lives. Something that comes up short, that lacks an explanation, that seems unusual or illogical. That our mind demands an answer to.

Stories are thus similar to scientific inquiry in that they arise from the same human impulse – a desire to understand what we do not know. But unlike with science, these explanations go no further than the initial question of “why?” or “how?”

Thus it isn’t enough to be aware of our mind’s penchant for creating stories.

Combine this proclivity with another, such as tribalism or desperation, and the result can often be more reprehensible than an allegory of the battle between good (i.e., the sun) and evil (i.e., darkness and destruction). This can lead to phenomena the likes of Nazi Germany, snake oil salesmen, the Salem Witch Trials, Dust Bowl “rainmakers” and McCarthyism.

Though incorrect, the sun origin stories of ancient cultures were harmless. But for the person who remains loyal to one group at any cost or the person all out of options and feeling hopeless, the stories created in the absence of facts can be hurtful and destructive.

The solution, however, is simple.

And it requires a story of its own, the story we tell about ourselves – one in which we remain curious and inquisitive in the absence of facts.

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“Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.”
—Adlai Stevenson

Reaching speeds of upwards of 40 mph, coyotes excel at pursuing and catching prey that attempt to elude it through speed alone. Thus an animal’s best defense against the predator isn’t to try to outpace it, but to escape it – by going underground, for instance.

Badgers on the other hand are adept diggers, able to rapidly excavate burrows and chase prey below ground.

The two animals’ varying but complementary skills are what make them quite the powerful, yet unlikely, pair.

In this symbiotic relationship, the coyote works above ground, while the badger leads efforts below. If a coyote chases a rabbit into a burrow, the badger will pursue it, while the coyote waits patiently above. Should the rabbit emerge, the coyote is ready.

This mutually beneficial relationship (albeit not for the rabbit) increases the chances of either party satiating its hunger. And although coyotes and badgers don’t typically share their prey — whichever animal is lucky enough to snag it is the one who gets to enjoy it — their unlikely partnership means both animals improve their chances of survival.

And isn’t that the point?

Despite competing for the same resources, they often instinctively work together. They don’t concern themselves with who got the last rabbit or prairie dog, or who exerted the most effort in the chase, or whose stomach is empty. They simply do what nature demands of them.

I suppose that’s the beauty of being a wild animal.

Living unburdened by the emotional baggage that often hinders objective decision making. In fact there’s no decision making to speak of. The coyote and the badger are directed by biology, evolution and the will to survive.

Much like pistol shrimps and gobies.

In this underwater partnership, the shrimp digs a burrow, which it often shares with the goby fish. The goby then acts as the eyes for the nearly blind crustacean, keeping watch for predators and using “chemical cues” to alert the shrimp when it’s unsafe to venture out.

I could cite even more examples of the sort from the animal kingdom.

But these collaborations are not unlike those of humans and our ancestors … once upon a time. Take early members of the hominini species, for example.

Facing constant threats to their survival, these contemporary primates banded together much like these disparate animal species. Hunting large game together meant increased safety and success, sharing food reduced starvation, living together made child rearing easier and life safer. These advantages were the remedy to both real, physical threats and the emotions they invoked: fear, shame, anger, disgust.

Their collaboration didn’t occur because of a lack of competition. In fact, these early beings sought all the same things: natural resources, status, mates, influence. But cooperation often produced advantages that no individual could realize alone. Their success emerged not from the absence of rivalry, but from an unusual ability to balance competition with collaboration.

These tribes were proof that trust was an essential ingredient for survival. Those who lacked a sense of social cohesion fared far worse.

Today’s society looks much different even if our emotions remain the same. Survival isn’t a cloud hanging over us; it doesn’t infuse every decision we make or interaction we have. Yet we haven’t learned how to redirect these feelings in ways that make sense in our modern world. Thus today, the emotions and tribalism that once worked to our advantage often work against us, fueling polarization, hostility and conflict.

Cooperation — one might conclude from listening to politicians and watching the news and scrolling on social media — is no longer a requisite for our survival. Perhaps that’s a sign we have it too good nowadays.

Despite all of our disagreement and tribalism and infighting and undermining, we may be able to survive, but will we thrive?

Unlike coyotes and badgers or pistol shrimps and gobies, we humans are all part of the same species: homo sapiens — a Latin phrase meaning “wise man.”

Only time will tell, however, if we live up to the name.

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“You say that we’ve got nothing in common
No common ground to start from
And we’re falling apart.”
—“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Deep Blue Something

In 2020, Libby Stegger was living in Minnesota’s Twin Cities when the nation caught fire.

With the pandemic still in its early days, the region experienced a more tragic and personal blow – the death of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis. The resulting public outcry gave way to a wave of violent protests that would define that summer, while a divisive election loomed.

It was in this context that Stegger caught herself doing something uncharacteristic.

“I realized I was making assumptions about a lot of people who I didn’t know that weren’t true,” she says. “I had become a victim of polarization, and I realized there was some cognitive dissonance. I saw myself as a bridger – as someone who respected people from different experiences and walks of life – yet somehow I was led to believe an entire group of people were fundamentally opposed to my worldview.”

So Stegger did what any curious, humble person would do … she began making an effort to build relationships with people with different perspectives. In the process, she discovered something surprising: “We often shared a lot of core values,” Stegger says, “but maybe we disagreed on how to achieve them.”

With this understanding, Stegger founded Civic Bridgers, a nonprofit whose mission is to prepare emerging leaders to bridge divides. By focusing on the population that’s feeling the greatest lack of agency – that is the “belief that their actions can make a difference in the world,” Stegger says – Civic Bridgers strives to build a sense of community among these young people.

“Bridging is about reconnecting people with civic life and with each other,” says Stegger. “It’s about leveraging our connective tissue and our belief and trust in each other to solve big challenges and find common ground where it does exist.”

As polarizing as politics is currently, that common ground — the way to bring people together to engage in and foster a more robust civic life — often exists elsewhere. Stegger believes it starts at a more basic, human level.

“A lot of what we learn in school is that civics is politics — it’s voting, and then you’re done — but we think about civic life as public life,” she says. “It starts with building connections regardless of our politics, regardless of our identities and backgrounds, so we don’t start by flattening.”

By flattening she’s referring to the radical notion of seeing people as more than a Democrat or Republican, or even Independent.

By embracing the complexity of each individual — yes, their political ideology, but also their background, personal values, ideas, et cetera — Stegger believes we may just find some common ground.

“We often say, ‘That person’s values don’t align with mine, so we can’t work together,’ when actually it’s about identifying how someone else might value something,” says Stegger. “I might prioritize a value differently than you do. It doesn’t mean you don’t have values. It doesn’t mean there aren’t places where we can work together.”

This concept is one called pluralism – the idea “that multiple perspectives have value, that they’re necessary in this world,” Stegger says. “That is a central organizing principle that doesn’t cut people off, but rather invites people in.”

Working toward a common cause

With programs for people in their early teens through young adulthood, Civic Bridgers is helping people build “the skill and will to engage in public life and bridge divides,” Stegger says, with groups working together toward a common cause. This can include engaging in a school community, local gardening or park cleanups, or working directly with civic organizations.

Politics is not the point.

A Civic Bridger is someone who engages in public life and does so with the core values of humanity, humility and accountability, Stegger says.

“Humanity means recognizing everyone’s inherent worth, acknowledging that we’re all imperfect – we make mistakes, and we’re accountable to each other,” she says. “Accountability means we take responsibility when we make mistakes, but we also take responsibility to say, ‘How can I help? How do I show up in my community to better these spaces?’

“Humility means genuinely seeking to understand different ways of knowing, being uncomfortable sometimes, being comfortable with uncertainty, being comfortable saying, ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Help me see it differently.’ It’s not about compromising our core beliefs, rather recognizing that in a plural nation, we can exist with different belief systems.”

Civic Bridgers — the individuals — thus reflect America’s rich diversity of faiths, races and ethnicities, languages, nationalities and perspectives, Stegger says. Together they’re learning how to overcome polarization by focusing on the public good over politics.

There’s the America’s Future Summit, a two-day “high-energy” gathering, where high school students learn how to engage in their communities in ways that bridge divides. It culminates with teams pitching an idea and competing for prize money to bring their idea to fruition. Then there’s the 10-week high school program Beyond Civics in which students design a community action initiative to solve a problem in their area. For one group in Pelican Rapids, this included hosting various social activities for young people to get to know each other throughout the summer – color wars, bike rides, et cetera.

“That is absolutely civic engagement, it’s civic leadership, it’s bridging. It’s not political,” Stegger says. “All of it is good, and all of it is necessary for us to build strong, resilient communities.”

There’s also the early career fellowship component, with a year-long immersion program for emerging professionals, and the ambassador program for mid-career leaders.

Yet across all of Civic Bridgers’ programs, the goal remains the same: to help young people build the skills “to engage a group of people toward a common cause,” Stegger says.

This is what “bridging” looks like in real life. And it’s a skill Stegger believes is necessary if America is to not just flourish, but to exist in its current form.

“For the American experiment to continue for the next 250 years, we have to adapt to the current moment,” she says. “We have to understand that this is our shared future, that no one’s going anywhere. And if we want to live in a space that values that diversity, that values those different perspectives, we actually have to live that. That’s our civic duty.

“Our civic duty is to participate in ways that we can, in ways that value our own strengths, and to have the humility to recognize that we don’t always have all the answers and that there’s value in the perspectives other people bring.”

The risks of ceding our power

Contrary to traditional ideas of “civic duty,” Civic Bridgers’ philosophy emphasizes contributing in ways that marry what a person’s good at with what they care about for the betterment of their community. This approach not only helps individuals retain a sense of personal agency, but it’s a much more welcoming and empowering place to start.

“We believe the power of community and engagement and people bringing their strengths to bear is what fuels participation — not me telling them, ‘You must go do this because it’s your duty,’” says Stegger. “Start from what you love, what you’re good at and what you care about. This is a way of inviting people back in, telling them there’s a space for them – that whether or not they want to be involved in big ‘P’ politics, their voice still matters and their participation in their local community matters.”

This level of engagement in public life isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s imperative to ensuring harmony, civility and autonomy.

“When we give into division, when we give into despair and withdraw from each other and from civic life, we are ceding our inherent power,” Stegger says. “Divide and conquer is a real strategy, and when we’re all infighting, there are a lot of other forces that will step into that power vacuum and direct us the way they want to — or who will distract us from the core work of building community and solving the problems that need solving.”

“The work is laid out before us,” she adds. “It’s not small, but it’s also very possible.”

How do you make an intentional effort to connect with people beyond politics? How have you seen people of different political ideologies come together to solve problems in your community?

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On May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls commandeered a Confederate military cargo ship, sailing it out of Beaufort, South Carolina, and delivering it to the Union Navy. An enslaved man, Smalls’ act, along with the intelligence he shared, helped the Union capture Cole Island and directly influenced Lincoln’s decision to enlist black soldiers in the Union Army.

Smalls himself was appointed Navy pilot of the USS Crusader and eventually became the first black man to be promoted to captain.

“He fought heroically in the war and afterwards became a wealthy landowner and purchased the plantation on which he had been a slave,” says Robert “Bob” Woodson, a civil rights activist and founder of the Woodson Center, known for empowering leaders in low-income communities to confront crime, addiction, and family breakdown.

But as Woodson points out, Smalls’ exploits are largely unknown, often passed over for stories that highlight the victimization of black Americans while failing to also honor the sustained hope, courage, and humanity that led to real change.

“We should talk about the abuse and how horrible the system was, but we should also talk about the renewal,” he says. “We believe America should never be defined by the worst of what it used to be, but as a country of second chances — a story of redemption.”

Following the release of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project — which posits that the country’s real founding occurred in 1619, when the first slaves arrived on America’s shores — the Woodson Center launched its own project. 1776 Unites exists to inspire black Americans “to become agents of their own uplift and transformation, by embracing the true founding values of our country,” per the project’s website.

1776 Unites brought together a group of writers, thinkers and activists to author their own series of essays offering a more honest retrospective of black history in America.

Titled Red, White and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers, the book tells the stories of black Americans who “were able to achieve in the face of oppression,” Woodson notes. For him, it’s about giving black Americans a sense of agency.

The idea of agency is something that’s come up in Daniel Yudkin’s research as well.

Yudkin is founding director of the Beacon Project, an initiative of More in Common, an organization focused on developing evidence-based solutions to bring Americans together. He’s found that, for the most part, people fall into one of two categories: You either think people’s lives are shaped primarily by forces outside their control, or you think people’s lives are shaped by the decisions they make. These contrasting views ultimately translate to different styles of civic engagement. But, despite that major difference, Yudkin says there’s one notable commonality.

“People don’t want to just be passive recipients of experiences; they want to actually be involved, they want to contribute, they want to feel a sense of meaning and value and purpose,” says Yudkin. “And the way that people get a sense of meaning and value and purpose is by feeling as though they have something to offer, to engage in.”

As polarized as we are, as powerless as we may feel, we still want to contribute in some way. The popularity of Woodson’s book seems to support this idea.

Selling out in its first three weeks, Red, White and Black appeared to resonate with people. It did so well that the Woodson Foundation developed a curriculum from the essays, which are available to public schools; these have since been downloaded over 300,000 times. The organization also created an animated Youtube series and published a sequel.

“People are motivated to change and improve when you show them victories that are possible, not by always reminding them of injuries to be avoided,” Woodson says. “It’s healthy for us to receive information that reinforces the notion that we have the capacity to change ourselves, that we have agency.”

In our nation today, it’s not just black Americans who feel unheard, unrepresented and unempowered. In a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, more than 80% of respondents said they believe elected officials “don’t care what people like me think.” Findings were consistent across race/ethnicity, sex, age, education level and political party.

“This is the core problem,” Yudkin says. “If people don’t feel as though politicians reflect their concerns, they’re going to tune out from the political process.”

By going back to the “basic building blocks of a flourishing society,” The Beacon Project aims to build a new political philosophy, one that bridges personal and institutional responsibility.

“You need to ensure the government and civic institutions are providing people opportunities to flourish and thrive,” Yudkin says. “But you also need cultural reform to help people to see themselves as active participants in civic life.”

Yudkin refers to this idea as Potentialism.

“Potentialism starts with a basic assumption about human nature, which is that everybody has something to contribute,” says Yudkin.

He and his team are in the process of refining the prototype of a new civic vision via research and conversations with everyday Americans, as well as experts in academia and civil society. Once finalized, they plan to publish it and engage with who Yudkin believes will be early adopters: the exhausted majority (i.e., those “who don’t feel like their views are reflected in political discourse,” he says).

“Our ultimate aim is to create a new story for the country that can speak to the exhausted majority and address some of the major challenges we’re confronting as a country and as a society,” says Yudkin.

At present, disagreement and polarization are keeping us from doing just that. As Woodson notes, we have a choice to make: “America is at a turning point. It’s chaos or community.”

America’s story, after all, is one of not just redemption but of compassion for our fellow citizens.

When Smalls returned to Beaufort after the war and purchased the home of his former master, it was not just a symbol of his rectification but of his mercy. “He took in the destitute wife of his former owner who was suffering from dementia and allowed her to stay,” Woodson says.

“To me this is an act of radical grace that can only happen in the American context.”

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My kids are only two days into summer, and I’m already exhausted. With all of their end-of-the-school-year activities and now their living-room fort building and tattletaling and noises of some kind, I just can’t. Write that is.

I know I’m not the only one.

We’re all in varying but constant states of exhaustion, I feel like. Worn out by the news, the tattletaling, the reputation building and tearing down, the mindless barrage of content and information. The noise.

So, knowing that most people are rightfully about to head out for a long weekend, knowing that might involve long roadtrips or plane rides or time lounging by pools or in bed, I’ve curated a reading list for the exhausted majority and those thirsting for calm and connection. It includes what I’ve been reading as of late, some of my all-time favorite stories, and the latest from Spirit & Sword.

Who knows, maybe this will even become a monthly thing (unless the metrics tell me otherwise).

Let’s start with …

What I’ve been reading

On how stories teach us about human nature and offer a guide for how to live in the present:

The Library and the Pond
On borrowing lives and learning how to live one’s own.

Prohuman Pathways

The Library and the Pond

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of original essays by Prohuman Foundation advisor Dr. Michael Tobin. The truths he reveals in this piece about libraries—supplying refuge and reflection, connecting lives across time, sustaining the human story and shaping the moral imagination—speak vividly to the tenets that anchor our educational…

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a month ago · 40 likes · 2 comments · Michael Tobin

On how to find and enjoy those small, unhurried moments of connection with ourselves and others:

If You Want to Build Community, You Have to “Waste Time” with People
And a handful of ways to find “unproductive” time
By Dr. Vivek Murthy

Staying Human with Dr. Vivek Murthy

If You Want to Build Community, You Have to “Waste Time” with People

What would change in your life if you stopped trying to use every minute well…

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3 months ago · 1212 likes · 138 comments · Dr. Vivek Murthy

Some of my all-time favorites

The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy
Swissair Flight 111 crashed on September 2, 1998 with 229 souls aboard. No one would ever put it all back together again.
By Michael Paterniti

I discovered this gem in my graduate school course Creative Nonfiction (shoutout to Professor Miles Harvey). I still have the hardcopy version he handed out to us in class, with underlined passages and notes scribbled in the margins, which I pull out to reread from time to time. In it, Paterniti captures the epic and tragic tale of the crash of Swissair Flight 111 in breathtaking detail. (Don’t be surprised if you cry.)

Like lovers who haven’t yet met or one-day neighbors living now in different countries, tracing their route to one another, each of them moved toward the others without knowing it, in these cities and towns, grasping Airline tickets. Some, like the Swiss tennis pro, would miss the flight, and others, without tickets, would be bumped from other flights onto this one at the last minute, feeling lucky to have made it, feeling chosen.

Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse

I first read Siddhartha decades ago, and it remains one the most consequential books I’ve ever read. Set in India, the novel follows a young Brahmin who leaves his life of privilege to embark on a spiritual journey of self-discovery.

The sun and the moon had always shone; the rivers had always flowed and the bees had hummed, but in previous times all this had been nothing to Siddhartha but a fleeting and illusive veil before his eyes, regarded with distrust, condemned to be disregarded and ostracized from the thoughts because it was not reality, because reality lay on the other side of the visible. But now his eyes lingered on this side; he saw and recognized the visible and he sought his place in the world. He did not seek reality; his goal was not on any other side. The world was beautiful when looked at this way — without any seeking, so simple, so childlike. The moon and the stars were beautiful, the brook, the shore, the forest and rock, the goat and the golden beetle, the flower and butterfly were beautiful. It was beautiful and pleasant to go through the world like that, so childlike, so awakened, so concerned with the immediate, without any distrust.

… All this had always been and he had never seen it; he was never present. Now he was present and belonged to it. Through his eyes he saw light and shadows; through his mind he was aware of moon and stars.

The latest from Spirit & Sword

Most of us can agree on the beauty of the natural world. A mountainous landscape, a sunset, the ocean.

But our tendency to assign purpose to everything is causing a shift in the world of art and architecture. A trend of not creating beauty for beauty’s sake but for whatever utility it might serve.

But as late philosopher and writer Sir Roger Scruton said:

“Beauty is an ultimate value — something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.”

When we can no longer agree on what’s beautiful, let alone take time to notice and appreciate it, how else then will we experience awe and the pull to something greater?

I explore this enigma and how natural beauty may be the link to the unity we lack in my latest story:

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“Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.”
— Sir Roger Scruton

Long before cherry blossoms became a staple of Japanese culture, there were plum blossoms.

In late February, snow still blanketing the landscape, Japanese elites — nobles, government officials, scholars, Buddhist clergy and members of the imperial family — would gather together to admire and celebrate the blooming of the prunus mume, or plum blossom trees.

This practice, known as umemi, got its start in the 7th century following the import of these trees from China, where they were a symbol of resilience and refinement. But these late winter blooms took on even greater significance in Japanese culture.

To the Japanese, plum blossoms represented endurance, renewal and quiet strength. Elites would come together to not just observe the ume, or plum blossom, but to write and recite poetry and music about it. Poems from the 8th century describe its fragrance as well as the symbolism of its late winter bloom – the shift from hardship to hope.

From the umemi came the Japanese concept of mono no aware. Rooted in Buddhist principles, this aesthetic philosophy emphasizes the impermanence of beauty. Rather than seeing this as a sorrowful thing, the Japanese’s awareness that beauty is fleeting led to greater appreciation for it.

Cherry blossoms, which drop within days of blooming, came to encapsulate this philosophy even more and expanded the practice to the masses. People of all backgrounds and classes would come together once a year to admire and contemplate the beauty and transience of the cherry blossom.

Shared aesthetic experiences

For as long as humans and nature have coexisted people have been structuring their lives around the natural world, with rituals and practices focused on its beauty and rhythms. These shared aesthetic experiences provided stability and connection in an otherwise volatile world.

Natural beauty is one of the few things — particularly in today’s divided world — that enjoys such consensus.

“I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t think a sunset is beautiful or a mountain range is beautiful. Humans have a lot of agreement on beauty in nature,” says Dr. Margarita Mooney Clayton, founder of the Scala Foundation, an organization committed to transforming culture through beauty, creativity and joy.

The evidence for this unanimity is not just anecdotal.

Dr. Oshin Vartanian is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto studying neuroaesthetics (i.e., how the brain processes and develops preferences for objects). He says experiences with beauty of all kinds — as well as flavors — have been shown to activate a common set of regions in the brain associated with reward.

“The underlying idea is that as humans have evolved and generated preferences for all sorts of things … the underlying system in the brain involved in forming those preferences has remained the same,” says Vartanian. This, he adds, points to a shared taste for “natural aesthetic domains” over man-made objects.

“There is a lot more consistency in what people tend to [prefer] when they’re looking at things from nature versus things that are human made. When people look at faces and natural scenes, there are more likely to be similarities in what they like. When you look at things that are human made – for example, architecture or artworks – you see a lot more individual differences in comparison.”

Our response to beauty, then, is much like that of fear or any other emotion we experience for that matter. When we feel fearful or threatened, our innate response is to flee or fight. So, what about when we see something beautiful – an alpine landscape, for instance?

According to Clayton, our natural response is awe — what she describes as “the beginning of curiosity.”

“We’re meant to approach the world with open eyes and open hearts, to see all that is there, and awe and beauty remind us that as human beings we are limited,” she says. “When we find something awesome and beautiful, we know something for certain, but … we also see that it points to something beyond itself that’s greater.”

Clayton sees this as a higher power.

“I understand beauty as God’s goodness radiating throughout the world; it’s a material expression of goodness in the world,” she says. “How do we know there’s goodness? Because we have beauty. But at the same time, beauty never fully satisfies us.”

Beauty therefore sparks in us the need to explore, to seek understanding. The restlessness it creates begs the question, what’s it all for?

It’s a question that even science can’t discount.

“[My view is that] when you look at a particular object you find beautiful, it resonates with you because it’s providing some kind of a signal to your brain that what you’re looking at is important or relevant for a reason,” Vartanian says. “In this sense, it’s clearly related to meaning. The fact that you’ve had this experience that you define as beautiful typically means there’s something more there to consider and that, for me, has a connection to meaning.”

Agreement over natural beauty has translated to human creations as well. When we create art or buildings, we’ve historically done so with this shared understanding of what’s beautiful.

“If we can agree that an open sky and a sunset are beautiful, wouldn’t we be able to subtract meaning from that — look at the patterns of nature and create objects in the world which replicate or imitate those in new ways?” Clayton says. That historically has been what was understood as creating something beautiful – observing nature and replicating its patterns.”

But that begs the question: What are we to make of modern art — which seems at times in direct opposition to the principles and patterns of nature?

Beauty as an ultimate value

On a recent Tuesday, I made a pilgrimage to my local art museum – the St. Louis Art Museum – a place I’ve been tens if not hundreds of times. Feeling uninspired, I was seeking a connection to something real.

There’s one painting I always gravitate toward that I knew would meet my need: Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting of a moonlit river. In it, a lone manned vessel sits at the river’s bend, illuminated by the moon and dwarfed by pines and a crumbling manmade structure that are silhouetted against the moonlit landscape. The serenity of the scene, the juxtaposition of the light and dark, the man-made world and the natural world, captivates me every time.

Eventually I walked on, turning left into a large room, vacant but for one piece on a round white platform in its center. My instant reaction was one of confusion. The artwork, if one can call it that, was made up of shiny metal rods angled in different directions, compressed cardboard shapes that have the look of having melted – like something out of Alice’s Wonderland – and bone-shaped fragments from which fabric fingers protrude.

It seemed less like something copied from nature and more like the product of a bad acid trip. My confusion was replaced by a feeling not of awe, but disgust.

Turns out, there’s a reason for it.

“Too often when people go from the natural order, the environment, to what humans create, there’s almost a sense that instead of just creating something we can all agree is beautiful, we have to make sure we create things that are so unique that they’re transgressive or edgy,” says Clayton, noting that the same is often true of modern architecture.

This focus on creating unconventional and subversive works may have something to do with our obsession with utility.

In the modern industrialized world, we have a habit of believing everything must have some practical function. Every human creation serves some need, therefore art must have some utility, too, right? Whether that purpose is to shed light on the injustices of the world, offer commentary on our capitalistic tendencies or represent the chaos of our modern lives is up to each independent creator.

Late British philosopher and writer Roger Scruton, however, argued against this idea. He believed beauty serves no purpose but its own.

“Beauty is an ultimate value — something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given,” he said. “Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.”

Perhaps it’s because of this focus on function that we appear to be losing our connection to beauty. As Clayton explains it, we are increasingly becoming a society that favors ideology over mystery.

“Human beings are drawn to certainty, but whatever certainty we have always points to something beyond itself — that’s what I call mystery,” she says. “Ideology is when we break that process of questioning and settle for just one frame or one perspective; that closes down the questioning and ends the quest.”

Unlike the Japanese, who continue to live by mono no aware, much of the western world no longer shares a common understanding of what is worthy of reverence in the first place.

Still, I find hope in knowing that somewhere, someone else is watching the same sunset and feeling the same quiet ache — the combination of sorrow, gratitude and awe that comes from the awareness of the transience of it all.

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“Try to grasp the essence of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces, and you will again find God in them. One man has written or said it in a book, another in a painting.”
—Vincent van Gogh

In December of 1878, a young Vincent van Gogh arrived on the streets of the Borinage region of Belgium. He wasn’t there to paint or sketch, nor was he there to study.

He had come to preach the gospel to coal miners.

By the age of 25, Vincent had tried a few professions, including teacher, art dealer and bookseller; he thirsted for purpose and meaning, yet none of these paths had provided. While he enjoyed art, he seemed to view it merely as a pastime, not a serious vocation.

The son and grandson of Protestant ministers, Vincent was deeply religious, with a deep desire to serve humanity. But his attempt to become an ordained minister was also unsuccessful. He failed his entrance exams at the Flemish Training School in Brussels – a school for aspiring missionaries – and, in November of 1878, the administration informed him he would not receive funding.

In a letter to his brother Theo, dated November 15, 1878, Vincent wrote:

“I spoke with the Rev, de Jong and Master Bokma, they tell me that I cannot attend the school on the same conditions as they allow to the native Flemish pupils; I can follow the lessons free of charge if necessary – but this is the only privilege – so in order to stay here longer I ought to have more financial means than I have at my disposal, for they are nil.”

Bringing light to those in darkness

Reading Vincent’s many letters to Theo, a picture emerges of a young man adrift in the world, desperately searching for purpose and a way to help those in need.

His affinity for the working class and the downtrodden was clear. Vincent would often observe laborers as they went about their work, sympathizing with them but also feeling a deep sense of respect for the dignity with which they accepted their toil.

In a way, he seemed envious of their sense of duty and purpose. And as in everything, he saw God in their struggle. In his November letter to Theo, Vincent recalled observing the street cleaners and their carts one evening and, as was so often the case, how it called to mind some work of art:

“They seemed sunk and rooted still deeper in poverty than that long row, or rather group of paupers, that Master de Groux has drawn in his ‘Bench of the Poor.’ It always strikes me, and it is very peculiar, that when we see the image of indescribable and unutterable desolation – of loneliness, of poverty and misery, the end of all things, or their extreme, then rises in our mind the thought of God.”

His love of God is evidenced by his letters, as is his passion for art. The two were often interwoven in his mind. In one letter to Theo, he wrote: “I think that everything that is really good and beautiful, the inner, moral, spiritual and sublime beauty in men and their works, comes from God.”

But despite his obvious adoration for and inclination toward art, he continued to keep it at a distance.

That November, after being denied entry into missionary school – the latest in a long line of failures – and facing some undefined crossroad, Vincent took to the streets of Brussels. There among the working class, he was reminded of why and whom he wanted to serve.

“When we had taken leave I walked back, not along the shortest way but along the tow-path,” he wrote to Theo. “Here are workshops of all kinds that look picturesque, especially in the evening with the lights, and to us who are also labourers and workmen, each in his sphere and in the work to which he is called, they speak in their own way, if we only listen to them, for they say: Work while it is day, the night cometh when no man can work.”

Vincent couldn’t escape the feeling that there was greater work to which he was called. He decided that if he wasn’t suited for a conventional job or allowed to serve in an official religious capacity, he could contribute in another way — as a lay preacher to those whom he believed needed God the most.

“You know how one of the roots or foundations, not only of the Gospel, but of the whole Bible is, ‘Light that rises in the darkness,’ from darkness to light. Well, who will need this most, who will be open to it? Experience has taught that those who walk in the darkness, in the centre of the earth, like the miners in the black coal mines for instance, are very much impressed by the words of the Gospel, and believe it too.”

Thus in January of 1879, Vincent began preaching the gospel in the southern coal-mining region of Belgium called Borinage, having been granted a six-month position as a preacher for the Belgian Evangelization Committee.

He committed himself fully to his work, not only preaching about the life of Jesus but living it. Vincent regularly accompanied miners into the mines, visited and helped care for the sick and injured, and eventually gave up his clothes and possessions – even his bed – to live as the miners did.

Despite the desolate conditions in which he lived, he remained fascinated by and passionate about his work and the region and its people, who despite their struggles seemed content. In a letter to Theo, he wrote:

“The country and the inhabitants charm me more every day. One has a homelike feeling here, like on the heath or in the dunes; the people have something simple and good. Those who leave are homesick for their country; on the other hand, homesick foreigners lose their nostalgia for their own country and adapt easily.”

Vincent continued to see the beauty in the harsh reality of the world around him. His letters are full of passages about art, the “picturesque” landscape and the people who worked its depths, as well as his occasional attempts to capture through sketches the raw magnetism of the region and its inhabitants.

“The miners returning home in the evening towards dusk in the white snow were a singular sight. These people are quite black when they emerge into the daylight from the dark mines, looking just like chimney sweeps. Their dwellings are usually small and should really be called huts; they lie scattered along the sunken roads, in the woods and on the slopes of the hills. Here and there one can still see moss-covered roofs, and in the evening a friendly light shines through the small-paned windows.”

But Vincent’s contentment would not last.

At the end of the six months, the Belgian Evangelization Committee commended Vincent’s devotion to the sick and injured but criticized his extreme self-sacrifice for “undermining the dignity of the priesthood.” They would not be extending his service, they informed him, and gave him three months to move on.

By the next month, Vincent had left. For nearly a year he wandered, returning home to the Netherlands for some time, after which he traveled around staying with different people. During that time, he and Theo stopped writing.

A longing for action

Who has ever felt the pull to give something back to the world, both the desire and duty to contribute? The person who knows he has so much to give but doesn’t know how or what — the weight of this paradox rendering him paralyzed.

As it’s been for many others, this was Vincent’s condition.

In what was the first letter to his brother following his dismissal from his preaching position, Vincent wrote:

“For there is a great difference between one idler and another idler. There is someone who is an idler out of laziness and lack of character, owing to the baseness of his nature. If you like, you may take me for one of those. Then there is the other kind of idler, the idler despite himself, who is inwardly consumed by a great longing for action who does nothing because his hands are tied, because he is, so to speak, imprisoned somewhere, because he lacks what he needs to be productive, because disastrous circumstances have brought him forcibly to this end. Such a one does not always know what he can do, but he nevertheless instinctively feels, I am good for something! My existence is not without reason! I know that I could be quite a different person! How can I be of use, how can I be of service? There is something inside me, but what can it be? He is quite another idler. If you like, you may take me for one of those.”

Vincent made clear that he was the latter — that despite his defeats, he wasn’t giving up.

“Instead of giving in to despair I chose active melancholy, in so far as I was capable of activity. In other words I chose the kind of melancholy that hopes, that strives and that seeks, in preference to the melancholy that despairs numbly and in distress.”

Vincent’s letter conveys the sense that perhaps art was the last and only thing that could make his existence bearable and meaningful. And he alludes to his decision to finally commit himself to it.

His next letter, dated August 20, 1880, was filled almost entirely with talk of his art and accompanied by a sketch of some miners (see above).

Vincent continued to throw himself into his work, studying the great masters he spoke of and, over the next decade, producing over 2,000 works of art. But even his dedication and skill could not save him.

Vincent was focused on emotion and distortion in a world seeking technical precision. A post-impressionist in an era of realists. Also lacking the social and commercial savvy necessary to sell his art, Vincent continued to be plagued by self-doubt, which contributed to his mental struggles and, many believe, his death.

“Can you tell what goes on within by looking at what happens without? There may be a great fire in our soul, but no one ever comes to warm himself by it, all that passers-by can see is a little smoke coming out of the chimney, and they walk on,” Vincent wrote to Theo in July of 1880. “All right, then, what is to be done, should one tend that inward fire, turn to oneself for strength, wait patiently – yet with how much impatience! – wait, I say, for the moment when someone who wants to come and sits down beside one’s fire and perhaps stays on? Let him who believes in God await the moment that will sooner or later arrive.”

For Vincent, this moment arrived too late.

He didn’t live to see his own success. But today there is not a person who doesn’t know his name or who hasn’t seen his work. Yet not everyone knows his full story – one defined by passion and conflict, beauty and pain, a commitment to God and humanity.

Vincent’s life is proof that we can find meaning not in spite of but sometimes because of our suffering. He may have never overcame his own struggles, but what he did do was more impressive: He chose to act — to create — in the face of it.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe, comment and share with others. If you believe in the importance of thoughtful, nuanced writing and independent journalism, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber to help support the time and energy that goes into producing these stories.

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Raised in the Missouri Ozarks, Stephen Eidson grew up fishing its many rivers and streams and hunting its forests. And while, nowadays, he spends most of his hours pursuing his other passion — art — nature and wildlife still occupy much of his time.

Now retired, Eidson spends much of his time in his studio, Wayside Art Gallery & Studio in Macks Creek, Mo. There, he can be found working on up to four pieces at a time, creating paintings or drawings, often from photographs he’s taken of nature scenes or wildlife.

In the stark hills and hollows of the Ozarks, Eidson says he doesn’t have to go far to find inspiration.

“What I’ll usually do is take a camera and go driving around. Usually rivers and creeks are the best place — not always, but almost always,” he says. “Around here, in the Ozarks, we have a lot of atmosphere. That makes this a good area to do art in.”

As a child, Eidson was riddled with illness, beginning with measles, which he says took its toll on his immune system. Often stuck at home, sick and in bed, limited in his ability to go or even see outside, he began to develop an interest in art.

“From the bedroom and back, we had kind of a lazy curtain that I would look out,” Eidson recalls. “I taught my eyes to become more critical of what I’d see because I was very limited in what I could see and what I could do.”

Eventually, in 2000, he was diagnosed with Common Variable Immune Deficiency.

Perhaps a reaction to the battles he’s faced in his own life, with illness, Eidson says that what he is drawn to most in nature is the “struggle of life,” which he strives to capture in his work.

“Sometimes, it’s the struggle of nature’s curves, where you see the actual struggle of a tree to live — how the limbs curve, how gravity pulls them down and how they reach toward the light,” he says. “That’s what we admire. We don’t realize it, but that’s the reason we like it. It’s the same way with humans.”

Eidson often seeks out water — mostly creeks and rivers — as the subject of his artwork as he finds it both calming and intriguing. But no matter his focus, he always tries to view it with a discerning eye.

“Something catches my eye and then I analyze it: What part of that caught my eye and made me like it?” Eidson says. “Most of the time, people are just too busy [to notice those things.] When you can kick it out of gear and just be one with nature, then … you can see those things.”

Eidson admits that he also could be better about paying greater attention to his natural surroundings. Yet he thinks his ability to detect the small, magnificent details in nature is in large part due to his training as an artist.

But the same qualities that enable him to notice certain details are also important in other pastimes — which is why Eidson believes it’s something anyone can learn.

“You train your eyes to see something — certain colors, certain shapes,” says Eidson. “You train your eyes the same way you do with hunting.”

"To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence."
— Mark Twain

You don’t have to know much about something to do it, or to even do it well. In fact, sometimes the less you know the better.

After years of my dad talking about “getting me out there,” I picked up a rifle at the age of 37 and headed for the woods. I had always been around hunters — first my dad and grandpa, and later my husband — but I never had much interest in it. Perhaps it was the thought of cold mornings hunched in a blind or some treetop perch, waiting and watching for something that may never come when there was perfectly good meat sitting in my freezer.

It wasn’t that it seemed hard. What was there to know? Camouflage yourself, wear an orange hat or vest, be quiet, aim and shoot at your target.

With little knowledge of hunting or marksmanship, I shot a deer at the first opportunity.

It turns out there’s only one way to kill a deer, but many ways to fuck it up.

We humans often have a tendency to want to learn all there is to know about a subject or task before undertaking it. This is natural — a desire to not waste our time, to control the output of our efforts, to build confidence.

But what if this is counterintuitive? What if it can actually cause us to overthink and perform worse?

Trapped in the confines of how things are usually done, we plough ahead with what our training and teaching tells us is the most obvious and proven path. But instead of being freed by our knowledge, we end up being tied down by it.

This can apply to any person and to many different professions and hobbies.

For me, this is writing.

On each of my wrists are tattooed four words — on the left, I live to write, on the right, I write to live.

But this constant reminder and my years of education, training and experience don’t help me when it comes time to sit down and write. It’s not that I don’t know enough about or haven’t read enough good writing or writers. It’s not that I don’t know all the writing rules – the grammar and punctuation and stylistic canon, if you will.

It’s perhaps that I know too much, including the fact that there’s an endless number of ways in which any piece of writing can be configured, along with an endless array of preferences.

Is this any good? Will my audience like this? What will they like and respond to? Should I have used that word? These are just some of the thoughts — the gatekeepers — to my being able to sit down and spit out something that feels worth anything at all.

Writing, like any endeavor, can be exhausting … and defeating.

That’s why sometimes it feels good to put down the pen and pick up something else, something new. Something I won’t overthink. That might build my confidence just a little.

Like a rifle.

When I pulled the trigger that fired the bullet that killed my first deer — and my second — I could have waited hoping a larger deer would follow, I could have taken the time to ensure a more stable resting spot for my barrel, I could have let the rapidly approaching darkness or my fear of a bad shot stop me from taking it. I could have thought about the wind or the long distance or how difficult it may be to find her in the dark. But I didn’t.

Afterall, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Having little knowledge of hunting, I, upon spotting the deer, pulled the gun to my shoulder, rested the barrel on the precarious intersection of two rods on the window of my hunting blind and the sight on the kill zone, took a deep breath and slowly pulled the trigger.

I didn’t think. I did what felt right, let my body take over, and hoped for the best.

If only writing were that easy.

The commoditization of the news media

The politicization of the news media

Despite all the challenges and shortcomings of traditional news media, it continues to serve a vital purpose. Just as signal fires were critical to the survival of our distant ancestors, the news is essential to the survival of our democracy.

“If there’s not a free press,” says Johanna Dunaway, research director at the Syracuse Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship in Washington, D.C., “then all the information we get is coming directly from campaigns or office holders or candidates or interest groups. [All of them] have an interest, so they don’t have an incentive to tell the whole truth.”

For the roughly 63% of U.S. adults who follow the news only some of the time, now and then, or hardly ever, Dunaway emphasizes the need to instill the importance of keeping up with public affairs – even if the reporting is skewed. “All too often I think people are super unhappy with what’s happening in government, and they don’t know how we got here,” she says.

Instilling the significance of staying informed, however, mandates a return to the bread and butter of news reporting — that is audiences. As Picard points out, the first thing any news media outlet needs to know is who its readers, viewers or listeners are. This task, however, has been a challenge for journalists, who have traditionally cared little for their audience.

“Quite frankly, journalists historically didn’t pay very much attention to their audiences,” says Robert Picard, a specialist on media and communications economics and policy, and a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute. “Newspapers used to do lots of audience research, but it all went to the advertising department. They didn’t really like their listeners or their readers or viewers because all they ever did was call to complain and write nasty letters.”

But through all the industry’s turbulence, there’s one medium that’s continued to maintain a close relationship with its audience. Literally.

“What we hear over and over again when we look at readership studies is people want local news,” Picard says. “They want local information. They want to know what’s going on in their schools. They want to know what’s going on in their town halls.”

At its best, local news fosters not only trust between and among reporters and the public, but transparency and engagement as well. “One of the hallmarks is you have a sense of dialogue and connection between the news organization and the people in that community,” says Zachary Metzger, director of the State of Local News Project at Northwestern University. “There’s a lot of trust, there’s a lot of dialogue, there’s a lot of openness – and you get coverage that speaks to the issues that people care about. You get coverage that’s helping people make decisions about how to go about their lives.”

The State of Local News Project is part of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism — an initiative focused on helping local news survive and thrive in today’s media landscape. “We’re interested in conducting research on local news, including what’s successful within the local news world and how the industry is changing,” Metzger says, “and then trying to apply that research to help different outlets pursue sustainability and innovation.”

In his role, Metzger tracks the history and evolution of the local news industry to understand the ramifications of different levels of access to local news — i.e., what varying levels of access means for communities and for us as a nation more broadly.

Despite maintaining a high level of trust – unlike most national media outlets – local news has faced its fair share of challenges over the years that have affected access to and the quality of the news it provides.

Because local newspapers’ readership is smaller by nature, some of the problems that have plagued the industry overall have hit local newspapers hardest. The Internet’s impact on ad sales – classifieds in particular – being one.

“There’s been an effective collapse of that revenue stream over the past 20 years,” Metzger says. “So most news outlets have had to try to pivot to a subscriber-based revenue model. The problem is that a subscriber-based model can’t hope to account for what you would have been able to charge for advertisements. This has been one of the driving factors behind why we’ve seen so many news outlets disappear over the last 20 years.”

In addition to closures, Dunaway – who wrote her dissertation on local news, with a specific focus on media ownership – points to mass acquisitions and consolidation as an outgrowth of these cash-flow issues.

“The bad boys on the block are the Alden Capitals of the world (i.e., venture capital firms) that buy these outlets, strip them for their parts and sell them — and they don’t even pretend to care about news,” she says. “They’re unapologetic that the only reason they’re buying the outlets is for whatever profit it can bring them.”

All of this has led to a reality in which “something like 70% of all dailies are owned by just 10 companies,” Metzger says, and in which there are significantly fewer outlets — “thousands in the last, say, 10 years,” Dunaway notes.

She’s largely correct.

Over the last 20 years, the number of local U.S. newspapers dropped from 7,325 in 2005 to 4,490 in 2025 — a net loss of more than 3,200 papers over two decades, per the State of Local News 2025 report. “Where previously you might’ve had 15 outlets in a given place,” says Metzger, “now you’re down to three because they’ve all been combined.” Some towns have it worse, with not a single local news source to speak of.

Coinciding with the decrease in outlets is the reduction in staff. Since 2005, there’s been a 75% decrease in newspaper jobs, according to the report. “This leaves a lot of local papers in particular really understaffed, where they might only have one or two reporters on staff who are now responsible for covering an entire county’s worth of news by themselves,” Metzger says.

At the same time, more and more people are going to news aggregators like Google or Apple News for their information. This draws readers away from local news sites where they might have seen advertisements or paid for a subscription.

“Instead they’re just seeing headlines, they’re seeing AI-generated summaries, and they’re not engaged in the same way,” says Metzger. “The ability for news outlets to attract new readers and turn them into reliable subscribers goes down when you have these walls of technology that create a level of separation between the readers and the product.”

This barrier coupled with the lack of resources for reporting the news means that the quality of local news is constantly at risk. As local newspapers continue to bleed subscribers and revenue, much of the content in suburban and rural newspapers becomes either fluff or recirculated content from the nearest city newspaper, Metzger notes. Thus these vital community resources end up losing the unique, local angle that attracted readers in the first place.

This, Metzger says, has ramifications for civic life.

“Part of the challenge when you lose local news is that local politics become national politics,” he says. “Everything starts being viewed through the lens of our national political discourse. But local news helps to cut through that; it helps to say, ‘This is the partisan discussion that’s happening around these national issues, but this is what the impacts would be for our community.’

“That level of nuance and that level of localized analysis is one of the things that local news does so well. In the absence of that, you’re only getting partisan political discourse, you’re losing that nuance, which is dangerous for credible information.”

As Metzger and Dunaway note, the decline of local news has larger behavioral and societal implications.

“When local news outlets disappear from an area, the voting behavior in that area becomes more polarized,” Dunaway says. “You get more straight-ticket voting, partly because people don’t get the information they need about down-ballot elections. So even if someone wanted to vote for a different party for mayor or the House, they don’t because they know nothing about the candidates.”

“Voter participation can go down, civic engagement can go down, incumbents tend to be re-elected more often,” Metzger adds. “Corruption can increase, police misconduct can increase, taxes can increase. So there are very real, measurable impacts.”

What people are looking for in their local news, he says, is pretty basic. “Candidly, what a lot of people want is a source of information about their community, what’s happening in their community — restaurant openings, events,” says Metzger. “They want to be able to see their kid’s name in Little League results. And I think there’s a lot of attention on the role of local news in holding people in power accountable — that’s an incredibly important function.”

Local news also serves an important function in reducing polarization, Dunaway notes, as the issues it focuses on help humanize the community and its members.

“It focuses on the issues that remind us what we all have in common,” she says. “A lot of local politics is more about schools and your garbage collection. Everything is less about these big ideological, conflictual issues that the two parties fight about all the time.”

For all the problems plaguing local news, however, a willingness to pay has not traditionally been one.

“People really value their local news source,” Metzger says. “The problem, and where we see some of the willingness to pay for local news start to disappear, is when their local news becomes extremely diluted – the quality and diversity and breadth of reporting is extremely diluted. That’s when we start to see the desire to pay for what has become a lackluster product really start to go down.”

Thus local news finds itself in a quandary: “We’re kind of in that challenging middle ground where there’s actually quite a bit of demand for strong, vibrant local news, but there’s not a whole lot of supply to meet that demand,” says Metzger.

The bright-ish side? Metzger says that some news organizations, acknowledging that the old model is no longer working, are making changes. He points to a “reorientation” back toward audiences – outlets actually engaging with and asking readers what they want, and the curtailment of national news reporting by local outlets.

Some, however, are taking a completely different approach, including re-organizing as nonprofits — a move that, as Metzger says, “provides some insulation from some of the market factors.” At the same time, however, “Nonprofit is a tax code,” he says. “It’s not a business plan. So a lot of these places still need to have some sort of revenue model. But, we are seeing some really successful nonprofit newsrooms emerge in cities around the country.”

While Metzger emphasizes there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges faced by local news, one overarching change he’s seeing is a shift back toward hyperlocal. This includes building connections and trust between reporters and members of the community — effectively acting as the “glue” that holds a community together. The smoke signals of the modern age.

At a time when trust in leaders and institutions — including national news media — is at record lows, local news still has an integral role to play in democracy’s survival.

“Local media are still more trusted than national media,” Dunaway says, “so if we think news should matter at all, if we have the one level of news that’s still trusted going away, that’s a problem.”

“Whether people are listening to the radio, whether they’re reading stories or watching videos on a website or on TV, regardless, the model is to keep people engaged,” says Syracuse University professor Johanna Dunaway.

Research Director at the Syracuse Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship in Washington, D.C., Dunaway studies the intersection of news media and politics. Her research has focused on the impact of changing communication technologies on public opinion, political behavior, polarization and civic engagement. And what she’s learned about the news media’s revenue model has implications for each of those areas.

“For-profit news media, especially those in a super competitive environment, are going to default toward covering politics in a more sensational way,” says Dunaway. “In the world of politics, especially in the U.S. right now, the way to do that is to cover the controversies between the two parties and between politicians.”

The news media’s current obsession with politics is rooted in both psychology and history — calling to mind the “if it bleeds, it leads” mantra of the yellow journalism era of the late 19th century. Characterized by newspaper magnets William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer’s prioritization of violent or tragic stories to boost readership, this sensational style of reporting was popularized by television news in the 1980s.

Today, however, politics has usurped violence and tragedy.

“The more vitriolic someone is, the more extreme they are, maybe even the edgier they are, the more coverage they’re going to get,” says Dunaway. The most obvious example she points to is President Donald Trump. “One reason he got so much attention from the media early on, even before the 2016 primaries, was because he’s great [for] the media because he says exactly what he thinks,” Dunaway adds. “He speaks in quotables and frequently says outrageous things, and that’s all really appealing fodder for media outlets that are dependent on attracting as many eyeballs as possible.”

In the competitive world of journalism, Trump is a microcosm of the conundrum that news outlets find themselves in. Through interviews with journalists, Dunaway has repeatedly heard the same thing: “Even when we, journalistically, don’t think we should necessarily cover something because we know he’s trying to manipulate us,” she recalls, “we can’t not [cover it] because we’ll lose those audiences.”

When journalism becomes a race to see who can report the most garish political remarks of the day the fastest, the potential for error and manipulation is high. The natural outgrowth of such sensationalistic reporting is tribalism and division, which brings its own set of problems.

“The more polarized everyone becomes, the more they are willing to believe anything the politicians on their side say,” Dunaway says. “That’s a real problem because if the people who are leading your party are not being honest or not representing all the facts, and you won’t even listen to anyone on the other side, you can really get led astray.”

But it’s not just politicians who are prone to misrepresenting or distorting the facts, it’s the news media itself. A little pressure from advertisers can go a long way.

“Because media companies are so dependent on money from advertisers, if [an advertiser] happens to represent a particular tribe, they can bring a lot of pressure to bear on the owners or operators of media companies to try to reign them in or to try to get more of the views they support into the media,” says Robert Picard, a specialist on media and communications economics and policy, and a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute.

The way in which we consume news has implications for our politics and civic life as well.

Despite the fact that the news is consumed by politics, we rarely engage deeply with it. The medium may be at least partly to blame.

According to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey, 56% of American adults often get their news from a mobile device. Additionally, 21% often get their news from social media, while about half (53%) say they at least sometimes get news from social media. These seemingly innocuous insights have major ramifications for not just how we engage with the news, but how we view and engage with the world and people in it.

Cellphones and social media, it turns out, are terrible for attention.

“It’s a cognitive bias problem where it’s harder to focus for longer periods of time when you’re on a tiny screen compared to a larger screen,” says Dunaway. “Social media also increases the tendency to jump around and look at stuff but not engage with it deeply. That’s probably even more true if you’re on your mobile device.”

Much like the root problems faced by traditional media, however, the greatest issue with social media is the way in which “the algorithms prioritize vitriol, hostility and sensationalism,” Dunaway says, noting that most people aren’t aware of the economic model behind that. “They don’t understand that the reason that stuff is getting preference in their feed is because it’s hostile and negative and sensational. They assume it’s naturally generated.”

The reason for this is the same as with all media – this type of content is head-turning. Not to mention, cheap to produce, Picard notes.

And although there’s no easy solution — some outlets have tried paywalls, others fundraising campaigns — both Picard and Dunaway agree that media literacy is at least part of the problem and, thus, the solution.

“I think media history is more important now than ever as we get more kinds of media,” Picard says. “People need to understand how to analyze the content they’re getting, where it’s from, how to use it and how to look for good information. This is becoming more and more important as we become tribalized. But also, as we’re diving into AI – which is making it much worse – [media literacy] should probably start by middle school and continue on from there.”

Dunaway, however, believes there’s something bigger at play that needs to be addressed if we’re to solve the issue of the warped news media.

“I think it’s broader than [media literacy] in the sense that there are plenty of people out there who are media literate, but who just can’t be bothered or are uninterested or turn away from politics for whatever reason. It’s almost like civic literacy is the issue. We need to be able to train and educate people to be more equipped to make these hard decisions about what’s truthful, or credible, and what isn’t.”

But there may be a silver lining to this dilemma. Independent journalists, as well as self-made ones, have been turning en masse to online platforms, such as YouTube, Substack, Patreon and Rumble, to share news and information – via articles, videos and podcasts – with audiences fleeing mainstream media.

“We’re seeing an awful lot of journalists, many of whom have been laid off from various media [outlets], who are doing exactly that,” says Picard. “They’re moving to where they can cover niche stories and do things that they want. So we’re getting a lot of specialties out there that are meeting the needs of smaller groups of people or people who are interested enough to pay for it — and I think that is a very healthy thing. … Those are replacing some of [what’s] been lost in legacy media.”

That’s not to say these new forms of media don’t also face challenges or pitfalls. They, too, can fall prey to the sensationalism, tribalism and conflicts of interest faced by more traditional news outlets.

When trust is low and polarization high, opinions and conspiracy theories run rampant. And these online platforms offer an ideal breeding ground.

“The bad side of it is … you’ve got people who don’t know as much about news or public affairs, who can’t tell the difference between an opinion-based podcast versus one that’s trying to retain some of the values of journalism – where they’re trying to be objective or look at things from all sides,” Dunaway says. “And your average citizen doesn’t have a very refined ability to distinguish between opinion and news, and that extends to these formats as well.”

The emergence of these outlets, however, points to the public’s desire for a return to more human-centered news.

Beyond their core content, many of these independent journalists, writers and creators offer robust online subscriber communities, which often include chats, livestreams and roundtables, but also in-person events. This type of connection, Dunaway points out, harkens back to the defining era of television news characterized by trusted reporters like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. And it may be one way to regain public confidence in this modern, monolithic media age.

“It’s almost like we’re cycling back to a model that looks more like [when] people used to follow the evening news,” Dunaway says. “If you always read this Substack or you always listen to this podcast, then you’re getting to where you trust the person doing the podcast or the person writing the Substack – and that’s [where you get] that brand loyalty.”

Check back next week for the third and final installment in this series about the demise of local news and the implications for communities.

Long before modern technology enabled us to know the results of an election in France or of an invasion in Ukraine or of a new policy out of Washington — before streaming platforms, cellphones, TV, radio, newspapers and even couriers — humans used smoke signals to share critical information long distances. Useful for conveying important one-word messages — danger!, help!, victory! — the medium had its limitations.

Beyond its inability for nuance, smoke signals depended on factors like weather, visibility, timing and vigilance for effective delivery. Thus messages were easily muddled, mistaken or missed altogether. A tribe or village’s proximity to the sender affected its receipt of a message; the closer you were to its creator, the more you could accurately decipher its meaning – so long as there was a shared understanding of the signal code.

Over time, as signal fires became the telegraph became newspapers became TV, the information delivered by these media moved beyond that which is critical for our immediate survival. No longer limited by carbon communiques, we can now know what’s happening around the nation and world instantaneously, using not fire and smoke, but light and waves. Every presidential tweet, the latest celebrity gossip, every conspiracy theory, the latest outrage.

Yet while our communication has advanced, what of our ability to decipher the meaning and motives behind it?

The result of the proliferation of the news media has been an amalgam of outlets and information — and fierce competition for our attention and dollars.

But when news becomes commoditized, what gets lost in the smoke?

In the 1970s — a decade defined by the Watergate scandal, the end of the Vietnam war, Roe v. Wade, high inflation and unemployment — the news media in the U.S. was more trusted than the government. Public confidence in mass media hovered between 68% and 72% during the decade, according to Gallup’s first measurement of trust in the media.

Since that time, that trust has dropped markedly. In a 2025 Gallup poll, just 28% of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in news media to report the news fully, fairly and accurately.

Somewhere in the decades that gave rise to talk radio, cable news, the 24-hour news cycle, the Internet, cellphones and social media, Americans lost their faith in the news media. At the same time, trust in government and our willingness to vote across party lines has declined, while our negative views of the opposing political party have risen. Politics have become increasingly tied to a person’s personal identity, and bipartisan cooperation is nearly nonexistent.

So, is this the chicken or the egg? Did news media help create the problem or does it simply report it? How well do news media companies serve the needs of the public and our republic? And are all mediums and outlets created equal?

To begin to answer these questions, we have to go back.

“The real issue has always been who’s going to pay, because somebody has to pay,” says Robert Picard, a specialist on media and communications economics and policy, and a senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute. For nearly 50 years, Picard has been studying the economics and management of media companies – specifically, how well they serve public needs and the needs of democracy. “We started out with newspapers where there was very little advertising,” Picard notes, “so people had to pay.”

That was in the late 1700s, when a paper cost about $5 for one to two pages of content. Limited readership, however, meant newspapers weren’t big moneymakers.

“The average people couldn’t afford a newspaper,” Picard says. “Newspapers were intended for the elites, for the emerging merchant classes, but they really weren’t for the public. Most of the public couldn’t even read at the time.”

As literacy improved and Westward Expansion spawned new towns, newspapers exploded in number. “Chambers of commerce would essentially subsidize a printer to come and run a newspaper,” Picard notes.

Yet through most of the 1800s, readers remained the primary funders of news media. But with automation came a new financier.

“What happened in the late 1800s was industrialization – the rise of machinery that made printing faster and cheaper, particularly in big cities,” says Picard. “So, we began seeing the rise of newspapers that were aimed at the masses.”

Industrialization also enabled the manufacture of consumer goods – and with that came advertising. Coupled with reductions in printing costs, advertising transformed the news media’s methodology.

An industry once narrowly focused on news began to cast a much wider net.

“Suddenly you had lots of sports, you had lots of society news, you had women’s pages, cooking pages,” Picard notes. “They began sprouting dramatically to try to appeal to everybody in the population. This was a time before there were any other media, so the newspaper was basically something for everybody and … everybody would get it.”

With the boom in U.S. consumer goods products, advertising went from making up roughly 25% of newspapers’ overall revenue in the early 1900s to 80% by the end of the century.

“You had all of these branded products and stores starting to advertise heavily,” says Picard, “with consumers basically only paying the distribution costs.”

But as is always the case when a new medium comes along, newspapers took a hit when radio emerged in the 1920s. After that came television — which “nearly killed radio,” Picard says. Despite the prevalence and convenience of television news, newspapers continued to hold their own until around the turn of the century.

Around 2005, advertising and circulation growth peaked, even as many newspapers migrated to the Internet. “At that point you had essentially 40% of U.S. households getting a newspaper,” says Picard.

As they lost advertisers to television and eventually streaming news, newspapers attempted to hand more of the cost back to readers who, by this time, had grown accustomed to getting their news for free or cheap. The Internet, however, all but ensured the failure of this reversal as “there was so much advertising on the Internet,” Picard says, “that the prices of advertising plummeted.”

The loss of classified ads to the world wide web all but sealed newspapers’ fate. As they struggled to turn a profit — a challenged amplified by the 2008 recession — newspapers began reducing their special sections, followed by their news departments. Mergers, mass consolidations and closures followed, hitting small, local newspapers hardest.

The result has been fewer journalists writing more stories using fewer resources, at a time when attention is declining.

“If you go back 50 years or so, [newspapers] had lots of dedicated writers doing the news, and they might only write one or two stories a week,” Picard says. “What that meant is they were doing a lot of research, talking to a lot of people, digging into a lot of things in the community.

“Today, the average journalist is writing anywhere from eight to 15 stories a day, which means they’re not able to do a lot of research — they’re just knocking stuff out.”

While more pronounced in the newspaper industry, the problem isn’t confined to it. All media – even the now dominant streaming news platforms – are struggling to remain relevant and profitable.

“The quality has diminished simply because they don’t have the time, money or effort to [go that deep],” Picard says, “and that’s a real problem for all communities across the U.S.”

But when news outlets are so reliant on advertisers for their survival, it’s not just the quality of the news that suffers, but the integrity of the entire news media apparatus. “We’ve seen lots of conflicts of interest – particularly with advertising – where stories get killed or buried simply because the advertisers don’t want them [reported],” Picard says.

The outcome is a media landscape in which the needs of the audience, and thus those of democracy, are superseded by those of the people writing the checks. But advertisers and news outlets need eyeballs to both make and justify spending money. So, in the race to attract audiences, competition is often cutthroat and the tactics questionable.

As Syracuse University professor and Research Director at the Syracuse Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship Johanna Dunaway points out, “Whether people are listening to the radio, whether they’re reading stories or watching videos on a website or on TV, regardless, the model is to keep people engaged.”

Check back next week for the next installment in this series about the politicization of the news media and the implications for American civic life.

But that belief was solidified on Sunday when the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team defeated Canada 2-1 in sudden-death overtime.

At a time when I’ve been having trouble separating the people in power in this country (from those in the spotlight to those operating in the shadows — or, in Jeffrey Epstein’s shadow, that is) from the country itself, 25 men have reminded me what the USA is and means.

In watching the U.S. men’s hockey team defeat the undefeated favorite, Canada, and witnessing their patriotic revelry, I realized America is more than a single person or group, and more than the party or person in power — or operating in the shadows. It’s greater than our transgressions and more powerful than what divides us.

It’s an ethos unto itself.

And it’s something that even the most anti- or un-American among us can’t damage or destroy. Those who don’t get it don’t get it.

When asked about his thoughts on representing the U.S. in the 2026 Winter Olympics, freestyle skier Hunter Hess said he had “mixed emotions” given “everything that’s going on in the U.S.” In the days that followed, perhaps rattled by the media attention his remark garnered and Trump’s Trump-y response (he called him “a real loser”), Hess’ performance suffered.

His remark was one that, at best, demonstrated his lack of understanding of what America is — a nation not defined by a single president or his actions or one group’s reaction to those, but one built on values like liberty, self-reliance, determination and integrity. A nation that despite mistakes and setbacks continues to defy the odds, that keeps on keeping on even when everything seems stacked against her.

The contrast between Hess’ America — one built on angst and resentment — and the America of the U.S. men’s hockey team — one defined by grit and determination and collective optimism — couldn’t be more stark. And Sunday’s win couldn’t make that clearer.

In a sport where losing a few teeth and a pint of blood are all in a day’s work, where rivalries run as deep as comradery, the U.S. men’s hockey team showed what it means to prevail and to do so honorably. Forty-six years since its last Olympic gold, the team of 25 showed a nation of over 342 million what it means to be American.

Representing the best that the USA has to offer, 24-year-old Jack Hughes, bloodied and breathless, said to reporters following his game-winning goal, “That’s American hockey right there. We’re USA. We’re so proud to be Americans. Tonight was all for the country. We’re so proud to win for our country.”

There will always be those who are American in name only, who misrepresent what she is all about, who would use her to further their own interests and ideals. But we can take heart in knowing there are still people — at least 25 young men — who still believe in and embody the true spirit of America. The idea that won’t die and can’t be killed.

But I’ll let you be the judge of who the better team was and is.

“Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.”
— Eric Hoffer

On July 14, 1918, William McCormick Blair addressed a crowd of moviegoers at one of Chicago’s many picture houses. He spoke passionately of the United States’ and France’s devotion to freedom and the reciprocity between the two “unconquered and unconquerable” nations.

A concerned citizen, Blair felt the weight of the moment.

Until the year prior, the United States had maintained its isolationist policy as Russia and France battled invading German troops. The 1915 sinking of British luxury ocean liner the Lusitania, which killed over 120 Americans, and the surfacing of the Zimmerman telegram, revealing an attempt by Germany to ally with Mexico, however, led President Woodrow Wilson to reconsider his position.

In April 1917, the U.S. joined the Allied Powers — which also included Great Britain, Italy and Japan — in their fight for sovereignty.

As Blair stood before the throngs of people, the war was still fresh on Americans’ minds, the date relevant.

“Liberty has two birthdays,” Blair declared, “one in the new world and one in the old. One is marked by the anniversary of our Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776; it is the birthday of a nation in the new western world, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created free and equal; its cradle was Independence Hall in Philadelphia. …”

“The second cradle of Liberty was amid the ruins of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789,” he continued. “The people of Paris destroyed this great Mediaeval prison, the emblem to them of tyranny and oppression and autocratic government. They lighted the torch of liberty at its smoldering ruins and sent their armies forth from the first great European republic …”

“These two great republics are children of the same spirit,” Blair added.

In the four minutes it took the projectionist to change the reels, Blair had delivered to a captive audience of Chicagoans an impassioned and impromptu speech.

Or, at least that’s how it appeared.

In 1916, President Wilson won re-election largely for his commitment to keeping the U.S. out of World War I — diverging from his opponents Roosevelt and Taft in a campaign characterized by the slogan “He kept us out of war.” Even as late as January 1917, Wilson continued to advocate for neutrality — despite pleas from France and its allies — delivering his now famous “Peace without Victory” speech to the U.S. Senate.

Thus when Wilson reversed course two months later, in April 1917, to declare war on Germany – most Americans opposed the move.

Anti-war sentiment remained pervasive, impeding Wilson’s ability to fund the U.S.’s war effort. Thus the administration needed a way to bring the public onboard. The way to do it, Wilson thought, was to create a unified public narrative as to why the war mattered.

Within a week of Congress declaring war, Wilson signed an executive order creating the Committee on Public Information (CPI), a temporary independent federal agency focused on increasing public support for the war. To lead it, Wilson enlisted American investigative journalist George Creel.

But if the CPI’s efforts were to be effective, they had to appear organic.

Standing before the crowd of moviegoers on July 14, 1918 – France’s Fête Nationale, commemorating the storming of the Bastille – Blair wasn’t simply a patriotic American stirred by the occasion. The prominent Chicago banker and civic leader was also the National Director of the CPI-led initiative the Four-Minute Men (named for the length of time it took to change a film reel), and he was there to rally the cause.

On this day of remembrance for France — which, more than a century prior, had helped the U.S. secure its independence — Blair’s goal was simple: to convince people of the need to support our long-time ally. His ulterior motive was to increase the sale of Liberty bonds.

Blair was one of approximately 75,000 Americans who served as Four-Minute Men – considered one of the CPI’s greatest tools for swaying public sentiment about the war. These orators delivered speeches to audiences not just at movie theaters but at churches, union halls, parks, school assemblies and other public spaces and events across the country throughout WWI. These individuals were often business owners and clergy, lawyers and civic leaders, neighbors and friends, and were trusted in their communities.

Neither the CPI nor its Four-Minute Men were clandestine; the press often referred to the CPI as “the war information service.”

But while Americans were aware of the agency and its programs, they weren’t aware of its playbook.

Speeches were uniform and scripted, as well as nationally coordinated, and their timing strategic. The appearance of spontaneity was engineered and was central to the CPI’s effectiveness. From 1917 through the end of WWI, an estimated 400 million people heard speeches from the Four-Minute Men.

But the CPI’s efforts weren’t limited to impassioned sermons.

In its movement to “make the world safe for democracy,” the agency employed a small cadre of writers, advertisers, artists and filmmakers who all shared Wilson’s and Creel’s sense that democracy was under threat. Lending an air of legitimacy to the project were familiar national figures like journalists Ida Tarbell and S.S. McClure, and illustrators Charles Dana Gibson and James Montgomery Flagg (famous for the “I Want You” U.S. Army poster).

At a time when most Americans got their news from newspapers, the CPI engaged in a vast campaign to shape public perception by controlling coverage of the war. This included efforts to overwhelm, confuse, suppress and cajole journalists and the newspapers where they worked.

The CPI issued daily press releases (approximately 6,000 total during its two-year existence), provided ready-made stories (along with photos and cartoons) and offered “voluntary” guidelines on how to cover the war.

Reinforcing the CPI’s efforts was the Espionage Act, which made it a federal crime, during wartime, to interfere with military operations or the draft or to speak, publish or distribute material deemed disloyal, obstructive or harmful to the U.S. war effort. Effectively the propaganda arm of the Espionage Act, the CPI made the cost of dissent appear high.

With relentless amounts of information and doubt cast on non-CPI-approved articles, wartime editors often published the agency’s pre-packaged stories as is.

The CPI’s soft edge coupled with the hard edge of the Espionage Act led both citizens and journalists to self-censor, fearing prosecution. As Creel later admitted, the CPI’s task was to “create an atmosphere in which the law would rarely need to be invoked.”

The tactic was simple: persuasion through saturation.

And while the medium varied, the messaging was always the same — calculated and visceral.

Posters, pamphlets, films, ads and newspapers — including the CPI’s own daily, the Official Bulletin — framed the war as moral rather than political, depicting the Germans as barbaric and inhuman, and the Allies as righteous and heroic. WWI wasn’t simply a war between adversaries; according to the CPI, it was a battle between good and evil.

In this moral context, there was no need for enforcement. Peer pressure did the work — anyone who dissented was branded disloyal, or worse.

At a time when propaganda was not yet considered taboo and carried a neutral or even positive connotation, the CPI’s campaign worked. Americans didn’t just comply — they participated enthusiastically.

Not only did the CPI foster consensus around U.S. involvement in WWI, it’s also credited with helping bring in over $21 billion in Liberty Loans — an enormous sum at the time — as well as driving Red Cross enrollment, draft compliance and volunteerism. The CPI and its team of citizens, writers, filmmakers and artists had shown that public opinion can be engineered.

While many Americans later reported being shocked by how quickly support for the war grew, the CPI’s efforts show how easily a small, coordinated group can sway public opinion — for good or for bad. Influence, it was discovered, is most powerful when it’s visible enough to feel legitimate but subtle enough to feel natural.

The CPI proved that you don’t need to convince people of facts so long as you can shape the moral and emotional context in which they’re received.

This level of psychological sophistication is one we continue to see today.

As CPI volunteer Edward L. Bernays (nephew to Sigmund Freud) wrote in his book Propaganda in 1928, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”

The lessons of the CPI, however, aren’t confined to government or politics.

Following WWI, many of the agency’s tactics became commonplace in the advertising and public relations industries. Today they’re the weapons of activist movements, corporations, media companies and terrorists, as well as governments and political parties. The subtlety of their messaging as well as its placement and repetition — enforced by algorithms, tribalism and pressure to conform — make CPI tactics some of today’s most powerful weapons for exploiting the masses through emotional and social manipulation.

As Creel later wrote in his book How We Advertised America, “Public opinion is not based upon reasoning alone, but upon feeling and impulse.”

Sources:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-woodrow-wilsons-propaganda-machine-changed-american-journalism-180963082/

https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2011/04/04/the-wilsonian-path-to-war/

https://woodrowwilsonhouse.org/election-1916/

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/when-wilson-asked-war/

https://online.norwich.edu/online/about/resource-library/isolationism-and-us-foreign-policy-after-world-war-i

https://doughboy.org/committee-on-public-information-when-the-u-s-used-fake-news-to-sell-americans-on-world-war-i/

https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/world-war-i-american-experiences/about-this-exhibition/over-here/surveillance-and-censorship/four-minute-men/

https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/articles/the-4-minute-men/

https://historicmissourians.shsmo.org/george-creel/

https://www.jackmillercenter.org/our-work/resources/espionage-sedition-acts

“For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.”
— Margaret Heffernan

President John F. Kennedy once said, “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.”

Kennedy should know afterall — his own ability to cope with conflict was informed by personal experience with volatile situations.

In October 1962, the U.S. completed its placement of intermediate ballistic missiles in Turkey as part of an agreement with the allied nation. Within a year, U.S. spy planes discovered nuclear missiles in Cuba — having been placed there by the Soviet Union in response to the U.S.’s own defensive military manuevering. Just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, these projectiles were capable of striking American cities within minutes.

The subsequent 13-day standoff between the U.S. and the USSR remains the closest the world ever came to nuclear war. Yet this disastrous outcome was avoided due to the willingness of both sides to engage in discussion.

Recognizing that addressing the problem militarily would risk igniting a larger war, Kennedy and Prime Minister of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev communicated via both public and private letters, as well as through secret backchannels — an approach that allowed them to save face publicly while compromising privately to avoid nuclear war.

By attempting to see the situation from Khrushchev’s perspective – understanding how the U.S. might respond if a foreign nation placed missiles in Mexico or Canada, for example – Kennedy was able to find common ground with Khrushchev.

The ability of two world powers to resolve their conflict via communication (at the height of the Cold War no less) is remarkable. To this day, the Cuban Missile Crisis is considered one of the most successful examples of crisis diplomacy and conflict avoidance.

It’s especially notable when considered in relation to the attitudes and inclinations of Americans today — many of whom, rather than engaging in dialogue in hopes of resolving conflict avoid it altogether, unable to sympathize or even converse with people with whom they disagree.

A 2025 YouGov study revealed that most Americans (65%) said they don’t engage in in-person or online political discussions with people who have different political opinions. Specifically, 33% said this happens to them not very often, while 32% said it happens not at all often.

It’s no wonder considering how people view these conversations.

In a 2023 Pew Research Center study, 61% of U.S. adults said that having political conversations with people they disagree with is “stressful and frustrating.” (Conversely, 36% said such conversations are “interesting and informative.”)

In that same survey, 81% of Republicans and 75% of Democrats (including those who simply lean one way or the other) said that too little attention is paid to important issues facing the country.

This seems to point to the fact that we may have more in common than we’d like to admit and that our unwillingness to communicate because of political differences may be stymieing the very progress we desire.

This is the premise of much of Michael Kardas’ work.

An assistant professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Kardas studies the differences between the expectations and realities of social interaction. In a study he conducted with colleagues Kristina A. Wald and Nicholas Epley — published in Psychological Science in 2024 — Kardas discovered that people often walk away from political conversations feeling more optimistic than they anticipated. He believes this is due, in part, to the realization that they have more in common with people they disagree with than they expected.

Titled “Misplaced Divides? Discussing Political Disagreement With Strangers Can Be Unexpectedly Positive,” the study included 198 people across the political spectrum, including those of different races and ethnicities. Kardas and his colleagues divided participants into groups of two and assigned each pair a topic to discuss — ranging from immigration to abortion — with some agreeing and some disagreeing about the issue.

Participants then filled out surveys predicting how they thought the conversation would go. After discussing their topics alone with their partner for 10 minutes, participants reflected on how their conversations went.

What Kardas found was that there was a significant discrepancy between the expectations of those engaging with people with whom they disagreed about an issue and how their conversations actually played out in real life. Even more informative were the videos of the conversations, in which participants tended to stay on topic and rarely showed hostility.

“Seeing the data reveals that the conversations are positive, but seeing the conversations reveals it all the more vividly,” Kardas said in a statement. “These are cooperative conversations between people that don’t know each other but, at least once the conversation has begun, are surprisingly interested in understanding each other’s perspectives, even when the issues themselves seem contentious.”

No sane person willingly seeks out conflict — in fact, many people avoid it at all costs — but what Kardas’ research seems to suggest is that facing conflict may be the path to overcoming it … and that doing so is usually not as bad as it seems. Engaging with people with whom we disagree can not only be a positive experience, but also the means for avoiding greater conflict, like nuclear war, in the future.

We recently spoke with Kardas to learn more about the study and its broader implications, why Americans often shy away from these conversations and the harm that does to us, and how social media is contributing. To read the full interview, become a Spirit & Sword paying subscriber today.

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“Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

It’s no secret that Americans are finding it harder and harder to engage with people we disagree with politically.

This polarization is borne out by research. In a 2025 YouGov study, 65% of Americans said they don’t engage in in-person or online political discussions with people who have different political opinions. Additionally, 61% of U.S. adults said that having political conversations with people they disagree with is “stressful and frustrating,” per a 2023 Pew Research Center study.

But why is that?

Perhaps we assume the conversation will be unpleasant, that it will make us angry, that it will be fruitless, pointless even.

But what if we’re wrong?

That’s exactly what Michael Kardas, an assistant professor of management and human resources at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, set out to discover.

During his time as a postdoc at Northwestern University, and then as an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University’s Spears School of Business, Kardas and colleagues Kristina A. Wald and Nicholas Epley conducted a study to see if people’s expectations involving political disagreement around contentious issues aligned with reality.

“Misplaced Divides? Discussing Political Disagreement With Strangers Can Be Unexpectedly Positive” showed, per its title, that people often walk away from political conversations with strangers feeling more optimistic than they anticipated. Published in Psychological Science in 2024, the study included 198 people of varying races, ethnicities, religions and political ideologies.

We spoke with Kardas to learn more about the study, its broader implications and where Americans might go from here.

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“If you lose money, you lose much; if you lose friends, you lose more; if you lose faith, you lose all.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt

Early in 2025, when government cuts resulted in the loss of funding for refugee resettlement, a group of faith leaders in Northwest Arkansas worked together to raise money for a local refugee resettlement organization. By hosting a benefit concert, they were able to raise more than $10,000 to help the organization stay open.

Composed of people from various faith traditions and political ideologies, this group is a testament to the good that can come when we stop fixating on our differences and, instead, focus on what we have in common — and it’s part of a larger movement: the One America Movement.

An organization committed to reducing toxic polarization by working with faith leaders and faith communities, One America Movement is using the “wisdom of the faith traditions” to achieve its mission, says Chandra Whetstine, the organization’s chief operating officer (COO).

“We’re building a network of people of faith who speak and act against toxic polarization in accordance with their own faith traditions,” she says. “Our approach is that if we can support those Americans, to help them have healthy group dynamics inside and between their groups, then that becomes kind of a stabilizing force for the broader society.”

One America’s vision is “a resilient, strong and united country working together to solve our common challenges.” With nearly 110 million Americans (almost one-third of the country) who attend worship services regularly, the organization sees a tremendous opportunity to have greater impact — as its partnership in Northwest Arkansas illustrates.

“That’s an example of something that individually they would not have been able to do,” Whetstine says, “but because they were working together and crossing divides, they were able to have a bigger impact in their community than they otherwise would have.”

The movement’s approach – and the best tool against fear, anger and division, Whetstine says – is decidedly simple: building relationships. “There’s an old saying that it’s hard to hate up close,” she says, “so the more we can get people into real relationships with people who are different from them, the better off we’re going to be.”

Fortunately, despite all the differences between faith communities, there’s a core conviction that unites them: a belief in something greater than themselves, Whetstine notes.

But in a world that increasingly venerates Earthly power over a higher power, politics has displaced religion in the modern zeitgeist. As Whetstine says, “Our religious identity has been co-opted.”

“One thing we hear again and again from the faith leaders we work with is things like, ‘I have my congregation for an hour a week, and they are being’ — to use a Christian term — ‘discipled by cable news the rest of the time,’” she adds. “Politics is trying to make itself the highest good, but in faith traditions, we recognize that politics is not the highest good. That releases some of the pressure for us to be perfect and, instead, really lean on the highest good, which is God.”

As One America sees it, toxic polarization runs deeper than blue or red, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. Rather it’s a spiritual dilemma — and one that can be solved by seeing religion not as part of the problem, but as the answer to it.

“We’re thinking about it as a spiritual crisis because it’s not just a question of what kind of society we’re going to have or what kind of government we’re going to have, but what kind of people we’re going to be,” Whetstine says. “Toxic polarization is convincing us that the people across our divides are evil, that they’re hateful, that we have to stop them at all costs — and that has an impact on who we are inside.”

Through its work, One America is building a network of faith leaders who can speak and work against polarization in alignment with their faith traditions. In no small part, the organization is helping faith communities “put their identity as a person of faith above their political identity,” Whetstine says, while respecting each faith.

“We leave a lot of room for the uniqueness of each faith tradition, and we recognize that those values are often at the heart of this,” she says. “For us, faith is the answer to the spiritual crisis of toxic polarization.”

More than politics or religion

In addition to being COO of the One America Movement, Whetstine is a mother of three, a trained doula, a Peace Corps volunteer, a seminarian at Wesley Theological Seminary and a member in discernment in the United Church of Christ. And while each of these are integral components of her identity, these personal dynamics are often what’s left out of conversations around religion or politics.

“In a healthy society, we all have many different identities, and depending on who we’re with, different aspects of who we are surface in the way we’re relating to [those people],” says Whetstine. “But right now, our political identity is kind of subsuming everything else.”

Thus, she believes the first step toward building relationships is acknowledging and appreciating nuance — even among people in one’s own faith community. That’s why One America focuses both on in-faith and cross-divides work.

The organization’s in-faith work — that is, efforts among people of the same faith — considers the question, “How do we shape the dynamics inside of our own faith tradition when toxic polarization is putting our congregations into a pressure cooker?” Whetstine says.

With evangelical pastors, an imam and a rabbi on staff, One America conducts outreach to and works with faith leaders across the country to gain insight into what they’re seeing in their own congregations. Then, working with experts in the social science of polarization, One America staff build workshops for these leaders “that apply the wisdom of their faith to those dynamics,” Whetstine says.

Workshops include How to Talk to Your Neighbor, the Science of Polarization, the Science of Listening, and Peacemaking and Polarization — all focused on teaching faith leaders how to have difficult conversations across divides. Faith leaders then take what they learn in those workshops and share it with their congregations via sermons, homilies and Sunday School lessons, for example, with topics ranging from what it means to love your neighbor to misperceptions about people across divides.

The latter, Whetstine says, is one of the greatest obstacles One America faces in combating toxic polarization — which is why building trust is crucial.

“So often we think people across our divides hate us, we think people across our divides are extreme in their views,” she says. “The thing we have to do is build trust enough so that people are willing to come into the room and get to know each other just as human beings.”

To help people do this, the movement partners with More in Common, a research organization whose mission is to address the underlying drivers of polarization, and Beyond Conflict, a nonprofit focused on conflict resolution. Using both organizations’ research on the perception gap and negative meta-perceptions, One America Movement facilitates both in-faith and cross-divides workshops that bring the language of faith traditions to bear on the issues of the day.

By challenging assumptions and addressing misperceptions, Whetstine says people often realize the other side isn’t as extreme as they thought. “We see a lot more overlap in views,” she notes — a fact that enables more progress.

With staff members embedded in different faith communities across the country, One America advocates for and leads both cross-divides collaboration that not only helps bridge divides, but also makes it possible to resolve real issues affecting those communities.

“[We’re helping bring] people together across divides to take action on things that matter to them in their communities,” says Whetstine. “What that looks like is bringing together an evangelical church, a synagogue and a mosque to do service projects together.”

The group in Northwest Arkansas, for example, worked with One America to plan and host a regional summit focused on bringing understanding of polarization — including the social science behind it — to more people in their community. Additionally, a group in another region came together to paint a domestic violence shelter.

“It’s really hard to have negative meta-perceptions, to have false assumptions, to hate someone when you’ve been a part of that kind of personal moment,” Whetstine says. “When you get people together up close and give them an opportunity to start to build those relationships, that’s really how we can address antisemitism, racism, all of the big bads; it really stems from fostering those relationships first.”

One America’s cross-divides work also helps build understanding across racial and religious groups, with ongoing efforts focused on combating these -isms and heading off toxic polarization. In Chicago, for example, the organization has been bringing together faith leaders from black churches and the Jewish community to foster understanding between both groups.

“They’ve spent the last 18 months together building relationships, learning about the history of each other’s communities, talking about antisemitism and how it shows up in the community, talking about racism and what different people in [the black community] have experienced, and sharing Sabbath meals together,” says Whetstine. “Nothing specifically has happened – there hasn’t been an incident among their communities – but they’re trying to build those relationships so that if something did happen, they would stay together.”

“The idea is how do we bring people together across divides so they can build those relationships and create an identity for themselves that transcends what divides them,” she adds.

Restoring our faith in each other

Preemptive and preventive efforts guide much of One America’s work, but in a country that has become increasingly more polarized, the organization has seen the need for restorative work as well.

Two years ago, the movement created a Rapid Response Toolkit in collaboration with its social science partners to support faith leaders when people in their community have been attacked. Designed with cross-divides initiatives in mind, the toolkit is meant to keep people from withdrawing from depolarization work “even in the face of traumatic events,” Whetstine says.

Yet, as One American learned in the face of events like October 7 and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, coming together across religious or political divides can take time.

“People in those times of stress often retreat to their corners,” says Whetstine. “One thing that we found after October 7th was that people are not necessarily ready in those moments to work across divides. People don’t always want to come together in the [direct] aftermath, but that doesn’t mean that the work stops; it just means the work looks different.”

Success, in One America’s book, is based on action — but as with any movement, that can take time. Ultimately, though, when it comes to toxic polarization, Whetstine says the best way to gauge success is through behavioral change: “Will you build relationships across divides? Will you speak up when people in your own group are moving toward extremes — and will you do that publicly and independently of One America’s prompting?” she says.

“When we’re seeing people who are giving sermons about polarization, for example, when we see people doing things like the cross-divides work to raise money for the refugee resettlement program,” she says, “those are the kinds of actions that we’re using to measure success.”

Practically speaking, for people feeling overwhelmed by our current polarization, Whetstine recommends two things. “It sounds very trite, perhaps, but start with prayer in your own faith tradition,” she says. “It puts us into a relationship with God that is on a different level than our politics and … helps us to recognize that there is something bigger than what’s happening with our elected officials.”

The second is to be hospitable. “Even if it simply means calling your uncle before Thanksgiving — the one you’re going to disagree with — to build the relational muscle outside of the conversation about politics,” Whetstine notes.

Ultimately, she acknowledges that coming together will take more than just our personal faith; it will require restoring our faith in each other.

“No program, no piece of paper, no five-step solution is going to be better than a deeply rooted relationship when something terrible happens in the world,” she says.

How has your faith informed your willingness and ability to listen to and learn from others across divides?

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept and celebrate those differences.”
—Audre Lorde

American college campuses were once the centerpoint for intellectual debate and civic dialogue.

Today, they’re more often flashpoints in the culture wars. Places where openness is discouraged and opposition stifled.

But BridgeUSA is working to change that. It’s mission is to empower young people to engage in constructive dialogue and disagreement. With BridgeUSA’s help, a new movement is growing on college campuses across the nation — one focused not just on civil disagreement, but on friendship.

We recently spoke with CEO and Founder of BridgeUSA Manu Meel and President of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville BridgeUSA chapter Nicholas Huber. You can read the full story at the link below:

To read more from my interview with Meel and Huber — in which we discuss the connection between the loneliness crisis and polarization, what Meel believes the true divides are between Americans (hint: it’s not between the Right and Left) and the role that colleges should be playing with regard to dialogue and disagreement — become a Spirit & Sword paying subscriber today.

Read more

“For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate.”
— Margaret Heffernan

If we, as Americans, can’t disagree civilly or engage in respectful dialogue, how do we expect to overcome our greatest challenges or innovate as a nation?

We have to stop turning what is a positive — that we have differing opinions and ideas — into a negative. As Braver Angels’ Gabbi Kearns says, we have to get out of our own way.

We recently interviewed Kearns, who is director of communications & marketing for Braver Angels, an organization focused on bridging partisan divides. In the first article in our “Bridging Divides” series, we share how Braver Angels is using marriage and family therapy principles to bring us back together again. You can read the full story at the link below:

To read more from my interview with Kearns — in which we discuss the national security implications of polarization, what’s at risk if we can’t engage across the aisle and the role of people on the fringes of both parties — become a Spirit & Sword paying subscriber today.

Read more

“If free speech is not protected on campus, you can’t expect it to last
all that long off-campus.”
— Greg Lukianoff, FIRE president

When Nicholas Huber entered the University of Tennessee at Knoxville as a freshman, he found himself engaging in deep conversations about religion and politics with a student, whose name was Jack, who lived across the hall from him.

“This happened pretty consistently — I’d say maybe once a week,” recalls Huber, who is currently a junior finance major at UT-Knoxville.

A seemingly unremarkable occurrence, discussions like this have long been a defining characteristic of college campuses. Considered bastions of free speech, American colleges and universities have been the centerpoint of dialogue, debate and protest since even before the 1960s — the first reported protest, known as the “Butter Rebellion,” taking place at Harvard University in 1766 (when students protested the poor food quality).

The Free Speech Movement as we know it, however, began in 1964 on the University of California, Berkeley’s campus. Student activists staged sit-ins that resulted in the administration overturning restrictions on political free speech and advocacy on campus. This and the many demonstrations that followed effectively earned UC Berkeley its title as “home of the Free Speech Movement.”

The campuses of today, however, bear little resemblance to those of the 1960s — including Huber’s own.

His experience is notable not just because he’s having these discussions, but because he and Jack agree on very little. “I came from D.C. where it’s very liberal. [Jack] came from Memphis and grew up deeply religious, as a Christian, and ended up converting to Catholicism. I grew up not at all religious,” Huber says. “Even though we came from vastly different backgrounds and we have very differing opinions, we really enjoyed the conversations — to the point that we kept coming back.”

Huber and Jack’s interactions, however, are the exception — not the norm.

No longer the centerpoint for discussion and debate, colleges are instead often flashpoints in today’s culture wars — the atmosphere one that no longer fosters openness, but rather stifles opposition.

Just ask the students.

Every year, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) surveys college students to assess the state of free speech on U.S. campuses. FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, which polled 68,000 students at 250-plus colleges, found that 28% of respondents self-censor in the classroom (up 2 points over last year), while 24% self-censor among fellow students.

Consider also a 2024 BestColleges survey in which 44% of the 1,000 students polled said they feel comfortable expressing their opinions on campus without fear of punishment (that’s 56% who don’t feel comfortable). Disaggregated by political party, 54% of Democrats and 39% of Republicans feel comfortable sharing their views on campus.

Huber, however, like a growing cohort of young people, is committed to changing this.

After receiving an Instagram DM from someone at BridgeUSA, an organization whose mission is to empower young people to engage in constructive dialogue and disagreement, Huber started a chapter at UT-Knoxville and now serves as its president. With 108 chapters on college campuses across 41 states, BridgeUSA engages nearly 22,000 students each year. Founded in 2017, the organization is growing in spite of – or perhaps because of – political polarization.

“That’s basically what [Jack and I] were already doing — we were just chatting about politics in a respectful manner; we weren’t getting angry,” says Huber. “We were doing it between the two of us anyway, and we decided to spread the love, so to speak, to other students.”

Imagine — instead of an emotionally charged, hyperpolarized, regressive national climate — a thriving U.S. democracy where leaders and citizens engage in respectful, productive dialogue. That’s not a pipe dream; it’s BridgeUSA’s vision. And it only seems natural to start on college campuses.

“The leaders of tomorrow are on today’s college campuses,” says Manu Meel, founder and CEO of BridgeUSA. “If you can’t settle the most complicated issues of our time on a college campus, then where will you settle them? Campuses need to be homes of intellectual inquiry — not just free speech, but free speech that enables us to really serve and understand each other.”

Learning to respectfully disagree

In 2017, following the contentious 2016 election, Meel was a pre-med student at UC Berkeley, when violent protests erupted ahead of right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos’ planned appearance.

Approximately 1,500 protestors, including 150 masked agitators – some not affiliated with the university – came together to protest the then editor of Breitbart. According to reports, they threw commercial-grade fireworks and rocks at police, hurled Molotov cocktails, smashed windows and attacked two Berkeley College Republicans. By the time university officials made the decision to cancel the event “out of concern for public safety,” protestors had caused $100,000 worth of property damage and injured six people.

Meel recalls the moment vividly.

“I was walking past a cafe and the window was shattered. There was a TV screen that said, ‘UC Berkeley students protest Breitbart speaker’s speech,’ and the television crew that was filming that was standing right next to me,” he says. “That sort of shattered the fourth wall for me — you suddenly feel like you’re not a spectator, but that you’re actually someone who has some responsibility to do something because you’re a member of this community.”

Born in New Jersey and having moved around every two years as a kid, including to India, Meel says he was already someone who was naturally a “bridger” — a term he uses to refer to people who believe their views can be “strengthened, improved or refined” by speaking with people with differing views. In response to the events of that day, he, along with a few friends, launched BridgeUSA to address what they saw as the downward spiral of campus politics and free speech.

“The goal was very simple,” says Meel. “It wasn’t to create compromise, nor was it to try and get people to find common ground. It was to help people understand why the people they disagree with believe what they do.”

Thus, on the campus that was once the paragon for civil debate and disagreement, Meel and his peers spearheaded a new movement — one focused on cultivating respect for differences of opinion.

“The goal is very simple: It’s [to] enable the next generation to adopt and champion pluralism in one of the most divided times in American history,” he says. “The work is driven by a very simple proposition — that the United States is the most diverse democracy in the history of democracies, so we believe that ‘bridging’ and dialogue are going to be 21st century skills if this democracy is going to succeed. Our goal is to enable that.”

BridgeUSA does this by building up its chapters; Meel hopes to get to 800 over the next five years. The bread and butter of the organization, chapters are focused on driving a sense of civic community on campus through events large and small, professional and social.

These include intimate bimonthly dialogues where students engage in conversations about modern challenges and issues. Although these are led by a moderator who creates questions to spark discussion, Huber says participants can talk about any topic or a personal experience, if they’d like. “Ultimately, people stay more engaged if they can talk about personal experiences,” he says. “I think it makes it feel less like a classroom if the students have more autonomy and more control over the conversation.”

“The goal,” Meel notes, “is to create a constant space where students can show up because they know that’s the place where they can talk about contentious issues affecting the community.”

BridgeUSA’s more formal workshops are experience-based and are designed to provide students the tools and skills for effective dialogue and leadership, with a focus on critical thinking, empathy and inclusive communication. But perhaps more than building these critical skills, BridgeUSA hopes to make these conversations welcoming.

“How do you make pluralism and bridging not some kumbaya, esoteric, abstract activity, but a way for people to find genuine friendships and connections?” says Meel.

He believes loneliness is fueling much of the current polarization and hopes to address both issues by bringing students together to form friendships across differences.

“What we try to do is create an environment where talking about politics is fun and it’s not taken so seriously,” Huber says. “We try to remove the stigma from it. A lot of times when people hear the word ‘politics,’ they’re like, ‘Oh, this is going to lead to an argument. Let’s not talk about this.’ We try to make it so it’s like, ‘Hey, just come talk, just come have some fun. There’s no harm if you don’t want to talk. You can just come and listen. It’s free food and a good time.’”

The organization surveys participants both before and after each event to gauge how their feelings about discomfort around dialogue and disagreement may have shifted. Called the Bridging Polarization Index, it assesses attitudinal changes along four vectors: listening, curiosity, pluralism and the ability to disagree. “We look at that measure over time to see whether or not students are actually experiencing statistically significant changes in how much more tolerant they are through their participation in BridgeUSA, or how much more likely they are to listen to the other side,” says Meel.

And while Huber doesn’t think anyone’s ever changed their political party because of these events, that’s not really the point.

“As far as success goes, we mainly look at attendance and, this is going to sound really lame, but the vibes in the room,” Huber says. “If people are laughing, having a good time, staying after and talking to one another, then we consider it a success. If people are eager to leave, then that’s indicative of a problem on our end.”

Having the courage to disagree

For young people used to self-censoring, coming together to speak frankly about their political views with others, particularly those across the proverbial aisle, can feel unnatural and unnerving.

The problem isn’t necessarily that students don’t want to share their views; it’s that they don’t want to discuss or debate them with someone they disagree with. “I don’t necessarily see a hunger to listen — it’s more to be heard — and I think that speaks to human nature,” Huber says. “I think everybody inherently wants their voice to be heard, which is fine, but I think students especially need to overcome that feeling.”

“When students protest on campus, ultimately they end up seeing many students walk right by them with their earbuds in,” he adds. BridgeUSA events, however, offer an opportunity for these students: “the promise of a group of 30 to 40 students who are here to talk, but also here to listen to what you have to say,” Huber says.

But, in an era of increasing political violence, BridgeUSA has its work cut out for it.

In FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings poll, 34% of students said that using violence to stop someone from speaking on campus is acceptable, while 72% said shouting down a speaker on campus is acceptable — at least in rare cases for both. A study by the Skeptic Research Center revealed a similar sentiment, with nearly 1 in 3 Gen Zers and millennials expressing support for political violence, with support highest among those identifying as “very liberal” — particularly Gen Z women.

But for those students who still believe in the value of free speech and tolerance, BridgeUSA offers a much-needed refuge.

In the hours following Charlie Kirk’s assasination, students at BridgeUSA chapters across the country began coming together to engage in conversations. “What was fascinating was the amount of ideological diversity we saw in those rooms that night because it was, frankly, the only place where students could go,” says Meel. “There’s a grassroots populous energy that I think motivates a lot of these students to trust BridgeUSA chapters just because that’s where their peers are.”

Although Meel disagreed with Kirk on more than just objectives, he says he “deeply respected” him for his willingness to engage. “He was one of the only people on the Right who would show up for any conversation,” he says.

Beyond the quiet halls and the held tongues, however, a quiet energy appears to be building on college campuses — Huber’s experience and BridgeUSA’s growth a testament to this. More and more students are finding not just the courage to speak, but to listen.

“There’s a real counterculture brewing on college campuses,” says Meel. “The norm in 2017 was not violence. The norm today is violence, which means that young people who are standing up and saying, ‘We’re going to have a conversation [in] the face of conflict,’ they’re actually the courageous ones.”

The simplicity of the goal — “adopting pluralism as the norm,” Meel says — doesn’t make it any easier to achieve, but he intuitively believes in the ability of young people to make a difference.

“College students have tremendous cultural power. I think historically of Vietnam War protests or the apartheid movement or the Civil Rights Movement,” says Meel. “College campuses can really drive the national conversation.”

Where do you see progress toward pluralism on college campuses?

What role should these institutions play in fostering in students the skills to disagree respectfully?

To read more from my interviews with Meel and Huber — in which we discuss the connection between the loneliness crisis and polarization, what Meel believes the true divides are between Americans (hint: it’s not between the Right and Left) and the role that colleges should be playing with regard to dialogue and disagreement — become a Spirit & Sword paying subscriber today.

Up Next:

One America Movement is preparing faith leaders and their communities to confront toxic polarization.

See also:

Braver Angels is using marriage and family therapy principles to bring us back together again. Read the story.