Kurt Andersen
The mistrust of government that blossomed in the late '60s has become a chronic and in some ways pathological condition.
I think we tend to be kind of ahistorical, and think that life as we are living it in the moment is all we know.
I often set two alarm clocks because I'm afraid the first one won't actually make me get up.
Once a decade, once every eight years, Donald Trump finds some pretext to say I suck and that I'm bad.
Anything remotely resembling news media is going to continue to migrate online until very little or none of it is produced on dead trees.
If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it's good for our ideological investment.Collection: Honesty
TED was simply wonderful, an intellectual spa, a 21st-century Chataqua, superb and singular.Collection: Intellectual
Maybe the reality-based fractions of red and blue America are reaching a sort of consensus: Just as Republicans are beginning to get why George Bush makes so many Americans want to rip their hair out, a lot of Democrats have finally, viscerally come to understand Clinton-loathing. Mutual, symmetrical disillusionment; it's a start.Collection: Rip
Because we don't know that much about what has happened before, it's useful. But either we will recover and progress, or the alternative is that it's all downhill from here. So I would just as soon believe, in my optimistic Midwestern American way, that we will recover and maybe even make lemonade out of the lemons that we are faced with.Collection: Believe
I'm comparing Americans to international peers in terms of GDP, educational system - the sort of benchmarks we used to designate a so-called developed society. In that sense, we are outliers. Are we suckers? Yes, but it's not just that. That puts too fine a point on what I am saying. We're not idiots and victims. It's about us as a people, compared with, say, Canadians, believing whatever we believe because, well, we're Americans, we feel this way without regard for what scholars and scientists say.Collection: Educational
I am proud to be American. We wouldn't have our big dreams without this quality, but if we can't agree on the shape of reality, when a White House, on the second day of a new administration, is arguing for alternative facts, that's problematic.Collection: Dream