More than any other candidate, Mr. Trump embodies the evolving norms of communication that are being enabled and encouraged by technology and the matrix of connectivity that defines modern life: authenticity over authority, surprise over consistency, celebrity over experience.Collection: Communication
The burden of citizenship is accepting that what is neither your fault nor your responsibility may be your problem.
My hairstyle is not common in India, where my parents come from.
Birthright citizenship in America is part of something larger: The American longing to sever from history, to be a place of new beginnings.
Our societies have experienced the magic that occurs when pluralism flourishes and the marginalized assume their proper powers. But loss stalks those victories, as millions revolt against change and supremacies resurface.
Mr. Trump is an entertainer, bringing a rawness and wildness to the presidential race that no other candidate can come close to matching.
Our technology promises the magic of constant connectedness. Yet we feel loss in being atomized on separate screens, trapped in filter bubbles of belief, bobbing in a sharing economy in which the technologists seem to own all the shares.
Our globalized, automated economy is full of magic - Everyday Low Prices and next-day delivery on that single Gatorade you one-clicked. But it is also full of loss - of jobs, of the dignity of steady work, of chances to rise.
In my reporting, I've found that real change escapes many change-makers because powerful illusions guide their projects.
To spend time in Silicon Valley in a year of political upheaval is, on one level, soothing. It is pleasant to hear talk of wearables, walled gardens, and disruptive beverages in between updates about mass deportation.
I'm a son of immigrants. I'm not going to reduce my commitment to immigration. But can I empathize with the fact that if your town was 95 percent all white and now it's down to 60, that that can scare you? Can I empathize with that? Yeah.
I'm a Cleveland Indian by birth.
Taking offense is, in fact, one of the few things that brings us together.
If you think America is great, remember that every person telling you otherwise may carry a clue to making it greater.
We know that enlightened capital didn't get rid of the slave trade.
Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that.
I live in places where, although I don't take public stands, I'm surrounded by liberals, and I've spent a lot of time in this country talking to people who have very different views than the people I live around and trying to see kind of what's in common beneath those conversations.
It requires some intelligent reframing to make people see commonalities that they don't otherwise see. To me, the Tea Party and the Occupy movement are, in many ways, saying the same thing, but it requires a bit of imagination to get people to see that.
When rooted, you observe how systems actually affect people.
One of my clearest impressions about India as a child was that my parents' stories would have been impossible had they stayed. Of course, such a vision was self-serving, for it made a virtue of our displacement.
In America, where no one judged or supervised her, where my father was too busy eating her cooking to notice whether she was eating it, too, my mother found herself newly enchanted by the taste of food.
My mother grew up strong. She was a charismatic leader among her peers, staging plays, organizing projects, raising money for charity; she was fiercely protective of her younger brother, with whom she shared a passion for jazz and rock and roll.
For our family, learning was everything. Homework came first; books, being sacred, were never to be left on the floor.
I will not concede for a moment that old privileges should not dwindle. They cannot dwindle fast enough.
Language is one of the only things that we truly share, and I sometimes used this joint inheritance to obfuscate and deflect and justify myself: to re-brand what was good for me as something appearing good for us both, when I threw around terms like 'the sharing economy' and 'disruption' and 'global resourcing.'
I have a weakness for treating people's economic interests as their only interest, ignoring things like belonging and pride and the desire to send a message to those who ignore you.
I worry when each of us is seduced by visions of the future that have no place for the other.
I am very happy to be an American. I realize what a valuable inheritance that is.
America has deep, fundamental institutions that take a long time to replicate.
Americans don't realize how difficult it is to create a Harvard.
IT put India on the map of the world and told Indians that they are somebody in the world. There is something about technology that is very empowering: 'We are designing software for the best companies in the world.'
When you first arrive in India, you think, 'God, these Indians treat their servants so badly! How awful!' It's something in the air, and something about the way people are, that very few people hold out. I wasn't able to. Everybody goes local. You stop saying 'thank you' and things like that.
Of the many ways in which Donald J. Trump is disrupting American politics, one of the most compelling is his disregard for the established rules of communicating with voters.
To those portions of the electorate fed up with politics as usual, Mr. Trump's willingness to say just about anything and to improvise as he goes seems more refreshing and trustworthy than disqualifying.
As a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Washington, I ritually watched the Sunday-morning political talk shows with my family. We parsed and argued and jeered at the screen as national figures delivered careful, poll-tested talking points.
There is always a gap between what candidates say in the heat of the campaign, when they are not constrained by the realities of governance, and how they act after being sworn into office.
To have come of age during and after the global financial crisis of 2008 is to belong to a generation often unable to do what an American could once expect, and to do what was once expected: Get a job, pay off student loans, and find a place of your own.
America, thankfully, is not an easy nation to commandeer.
Most of us are too enmeshed in communities to live our ideals. Outsiders have less to lose.
Wealth plays out in the political sphere in all kinds of ways, often personally. Can Hillary Clinton represent the interests of working people when she and her husband have taken so much money from Wall Street? Was Mitt Romney's private-equity business too ruthless with workers?
The American television punditocracy - the pollsters, political consultants and other talking heads who become as ubiquitous as air every election cycle - can be incestuous and herdlike.
When it comes to granting unconditional birthright citizenship, the United States and Canada are alone in the industrialized world: North American exceptionalism, you can call it.
I have always found it jarring to encounter people born and raised in, say, Switzerland, who are denied its citizenship and still considered Algerians or Turks.
In Europe, more than in the United States, worldly people, faced with my Indian skin, reflexively laud my 'ancient,' 'beautiful' origins, which is heartier praise than Cleveland usually gets from Europeans.
Though it is perhaps expected for the bishop of Rome to warn against the idolatry of money, what is striking is how Francis suggests that not only God but also secular politics must outrank economic imperatives.
Crowdsourcing aid is a cunning way to work around the do-nothing corridors of official Washington. But it also raises complicated questions about the nature of humanitarianism and what it means for a 'nation' to help.
In an economy increasingly dominated by network effects, peer-to-peer transactions, self-regulation, and contract labor, the old frameworks are woefully irrelevant.
America has two clear tiers of workers: contractors and employees. The former have few regulatory protections; the latter have many.
Democracy doesn't automatically safeguard women and minorities.
Election time is when you start to hear about 'average people,' 'working families,' 'patriotic Americans' and such.