“Sumawka Caller”

There is a Pink Floyd song from 1987 called “On The Turning Away.” On The Turning Away – Pink Floyd (Lyrics) It sits on an album called A Momentary Lapse of Reason. If you have never heard it, go find it after you read this. Put it on some evening when the house is quiet….

There is an edge running through this country right now. It is not a party’s edge. It is the edge people have been pushed to, on every side of every fence. For a long time, most of us could not see it. I read a long story this week about the middle of the country….

There is a word I want to hand back to you today. You have heard it a thousand times. You have probably stopped hearing it at all. The word is “authentic.“ Look around and you will find it everywhere. Authentic Italian food. Authentic leather. An authentic brand experience. It gets stamped on menus and price…

Here’s a story out of a Connecticut courtroom. It’s small on its face, but it tells you something about the world we’re walking into. A man had a case going against a medical group. It was about getting his own health records. He was representing himself, with no lawyer, just him and the paperwork. That…

The Other Side of the Sign Arlo Guthrie, Willie Nelson, Neil Young & More – This Land Is Your Land (Live at Farm Aid 1987) Most of us learned this song as children. We sang it in school with our hands clapping and our voices loud. It felt like a postcard, all forests and deserts…

Somebody’s Taking Notes There used to be a simple rule in any room where people talked. You looked around and you knew who was listening. If someone had a notepad, you saw it. If someone had a recorder, it sat on the table where everyone could see it. That rule is fading. The listening has…

Proverty is not in any dictionary. I didn’t make it up at a desk, either. It came to me in a dream. What follows is one man’s reading of that dream, and it is not a claim of fact. Take it as a suggestion and nothing more. The dream was short. I was driving up…

This week, down in Tennessee, voters started posting about the machines. They’d touch one name on the screen, and the machine would light up a different one. Some had to go back two and three times before it took. One woman said she corrected her vote three times before the screen got it right. I’m…

You’ve seen the red hat. Everybody has. For ten years it’s been the loudest piece of clothing in America. You could spot it across a parking lot. You knew what it meant before the man wearing it said a word. Lately I’m seeing fewer of them. Not because anybody tore them off. Because people are…

Turn on the news this week and you’d think the country was coming apart. Coups. Armed agents. Lawsuits stacked to the ceiling. Every headline seems built to make your stomach drop. I wrote about some of it myself just this morning. So let me say something different today. There’s no doom and gloom here. Not…