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Policy Change We Can Start Today!

A collection of 23 issues

For When You Think Policy Change Can’t Happen

There were ashtrays in our desks! a woman once told me of her 1960s college days. The professors usually taught in a cloud of smoke. Totally inconceivable now, I shook my head. Well, the woman said, now - she gestured to the smoke-free office we were in, which was next

One Note We Can Send for a Healthier Democracy

The whole experience was so smooth, it’d be easy to forget. The mind has a way of remembering the bumpy and rough stuff. I went to the town clerk’s office to vote early. The woman behind the desk explained how it worked to me like I was the

Strengthening Democracy Over Coffee: A Powerful Way to Build a Better Future

One cold autumn evening, I was in bed reading a book by Bishop Michael Curry when I came across a saying so useful, I got up in my PJs to jot it down in a journal. “What are you going to do with your dash?” the old saying goes. The

A Few Quick Actions for a Better Country

One morning, a friend and I were walking our dogs in the park. On the path up ahead, there was a woman holding a tangle of something in her hands. As she got closer, I saw it was a bunch of bittersweet, a super invasive that strangles trees to death

Why August is a Great Time to Reach Out to Your Member of Congress

"A golden afternoon of August: every breath from the hills so full of life that it seemed whoever respired it, though dying, might revive." Safe to say Emily Brontë wasn't writing about August in Washington, D.C. However full of life the Hill might be, the

Three Things We Can Do for America Right Now

Years ago, I helped a friend move. After we'd gotten all the boxes, crates, bins, and coat hangers into his new place, he stood immobile at the door, paralyzed by where to begin. It was impossible to imagine this chaos ever becoming a comfortable little corner of the

The Secret Sauce for When We're Bummed

At the hardware store, I got a trash picker, the technical name for that long-handled thingamajig with little claws at the end that you use to grab soda cans, cigarette butts, shopping bags off the ground. When I am bummed about what's happening in the world, I grab

What To Do Now

A common scene: Between work meetings, an unassuming chap takes a quick scan of the headlines. His brow furrows. His shoulders slump. His heart is now sinking like the Titanic. And this mere mortal, so dismayed that today's headlines are in fact worse than yesterday's, does

What's As Contagious As Fear

On a quiet spring morning, the man in well-worn flannel eases himself down to sit on his front stoop. At his feet, there is a large cat. The news today is all tectonic plates shifting, shattering. But here is this gentle pair in a shaft of April light. The man

Two Things We Can Do to Strengthen Democracy Today

A few insights to set the mood: "The only recognizable feature of hope is action." Grace Paley, short story writer. "What if the mightiest word is love?" Elizabeth Alexander, a poet who once taught at the University of Chicago, where she met a community organizer who