I've been interested in American politics since I was eight. That was in 1968. It was an interesting year. I was a huge Eugene McCarthy supporter, so I guess he was the first senator I really knew about and cared about.
The Senate was an odd compromise between the founders and the early leaders of the republic who wanted a single house which was based on popular sovereignty representing the people and those founders who wanted two houses, the upper house, the Senate, being the more aristocratic.
It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.
It might not be wise for a sometime political journalist to admit this, but the 2016 campaign doesn't seem like fun to me.
As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen's ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.
Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to fund education, housing, and health care.
America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach.
How a candidate runs shapes how a president governs.
I am never going to be able to rest easy in having established a posthumous connection to my father. I'll always be groping for what I can't have.
If you've ever left a bag of clothes outside the Salvation Army or given to a local church drive, chances are that you've dressed an African.
All over Africa, people are wearing what Americans once wore and no longer want. Visit the continent, and you'll find faded remnants of secondhand clothing in the strangest of places.
What I found in Silicon Valley is an industry that's sort of been kept a very far remove from Washington and had an attitude of 'Just let us do our thing and make the miracles that people love around the world and leave us alone.'
Mark Zuckerberg has started an advocacy group for immigration reform.
The next great technology revolution might be around the corner, but it won't automatically improve most people's lives. That will depend on politics, which is indeed ugly but also inescapable.
The information age has made Thiel rich, but it has also been a disappointment to him. It hasn't created enough jobs, and it hasn't produced revolutionary improvements in manufacturing and productivity. The creation of virtual worlds turns out to be no substitute for advances in the physical world.
What can one man do even if he is the president?
Even while writing about foreign places, I have been in a way writing about America, because that's the subject that interests me the most. I'm attached to it, critical, but it's definitely my country, and maybe even more so when I'm overseas.
I have my sympathies and also my critical views, and they aren't much of a secret, but my first job is to see and hear and think about what I've seen and heard.
I think the mix of narrative and analysis that the 'New Yorker' requires is a perfect expression of what my parents each gave me.
So many writers grew up in tortured isolation, in revolt against their families. I and my sister were in a house where writing was considered the worthiest thing you could try to do.
