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Caitie Whelan

Caitie Whelan

For When You Think Policy Change Can’t Happen

Hello Wonderful Reader! I’m on a family holiday today, so here’s a little essay near and dear to my heart from the archives. Wishing you all good things ahead, Caitie There were ashtrays in our desks! a woman once told me of her 1960s college days. The professors

The Unsung Power of Ordering Off the Menu

It amazes me how one comment is enough to change you, even enlarge you. It came over lunch in Providence, which seems a fitting name for a place to be transformed in. Getting useful advice is hard, my friend said as we waited for sandwiches. It’s easy to get

How We Reply to Violence

There is an old line the internet attributes to Albert Einstein that goes something like this: "Problems can never be solved by the way of thinking that first created them." If not Einstein, maybe it was Mark Twain, ancient Greek poet Sappho, or a World History teacher in

Believing in a World We Haven’t Yet Seen

Some years ago, I went to a farm in rural Virginia. To get there, you drove past dilapidated barns, land for sale, abandoned property. Then, you arrive at this beauty of a farm with miles of Ireland-green grass and blissed out cows. I was with a small group and

For When You Think Policy Change Can’t Happen

Hello Wonderful Reader! I’m off this holiday weekend, so pulled this favorite from the archives. Grateful, as ever, to share some of the week with you. Big cool (since we’ve got enough warmth) from up north, Caitie There were ashtrays in our desks! a woman once told me

One Common Advocacy Tactic Not Worth Your Time (and What To Do Instead!)

I’d bet the moon and most of its cheese that an email like this has shown up in your inbox. It comes from an organization telling you about the famine in Haiti or the water quality near data centers or how billionaires are making hay while the rest of

For When Hope is in Shorter Supply

I spent the weekend painting the living room window seat a cooked-salmon-pinky-orange. I’d come across an article in a magazine - those wonderful specimens that can be tricky to find these days - that you could punch up a room by filling a nook with confident, unapologetic colors.

Three Things We Can Do for Democracy Beyond Voting

This democracy of ours has some pretty special features, chief among them that we get a say in how we’re governed. It’s baked into the very word democracy itself: demos means common people and kratos means power. But nobody really teaches us how we can utilize our democracy

A Bit of Sweetness to End Your Week

On a delayed flight into D.C., the flight attendant got on the loud speaker as we began our descent. “Raise your hand if you’re headed on to Raleigh? Miami? Houston?” Hands went up around the cabin. We passed the U.S. Capitol building, its female Statue of Freedom

A Common Policy Deceit - and What We Can Do About It

“I’ve got a bill to do just that!” the politician says from behind the podium. The crowd goes wild! Signs wave, fists pump, the politician basks in the adoration like a cat in the sun. There is a problem and our hero has penned a bill to solve it!