Joel Mathis

I'm edging my way back into social media. But it's kind of like edging your way back into the path of a fire hydrant: You can't get just a little wet — you're going to get soaked on contact. Anyway, here's the mantra I'm trying to live by right now: You don't have to express your opinion about everything. You don't have to express your opinion about everything. You don't have to express your opinion about everything. It's possible, in fact, that the more opinion I put into the world, the less valuable any one opinion might be. So. Trying to control myself. (Pauses.) If I were to have an opinion about shit that doesn't matter much, though, it would be this : Gov. Pence shouted to his wife, Karen, his closest adviser, at the other end of the table. "Mother, Mother, who prepared our meal this evening?" The legislators looked at one another, speaking with their eyes: He just called his wife "Moth

I've been making some life changes lately — trying to use the time I have, now that I'm back in Kansas, to improve my health and lifestyle. Among the changes: More exercise. 30 minutes a day on the treadmill. Doesn't sound like a lot, but some is more than none, and I know from experience that getting overambitious early leads to failure. So. Thirty minutes a day. One other thing: Yoga, a couple of times a week. It's nothing huge — a 15-minute flexibility routine downloaded from an iPhone app. But I've noticed that I'm increasingly limber. Tonight, friends, I noticed a piece of trash on the floor. I bent over at the waist and picked it up, and threw it away. Then I wept. I literally could not remember the last time I'd tried to pick something off the floor without grunting and bracing myself. I just did it. Small victories, people. Small victories.

David Brooks this morning: But now progressives seem intent on doubling down on exactly what has doomed them so often. Lilla pointed out that identity politics isolates progressives from the wider country: “The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.” There's a contradiction in the Lilla-via-Brooks complaint. How diverse is the press? Not very.   It's pretty white. So. Diversifying the press is one way of producing people more aware of the conditions of "Americans in every walk of life." I'd hanker to say the same thing is true in the education arena, too. Somehow, though, I don't think that's what Brooks or Douthat mean.

New Yorker “I was born in 1933,” he continued, “the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I’ve been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”

I'm two days into a break from Twitter and Facebook. I'm not doing anything so foolish as to say I'm "quitting" this time — I know myself too well, so I only intend to be gone a week. (Basically, this seems like a good time to slow my roll a bit.) There's been a little bit of withdrawal: The Trump Administration's penchant for " alternative facts " seems to require a response. But it's getting one without me. Probably telling. Other than that, it's been a fantastic weekend for reading and thinking without the need to spread word of my thoughts immediately. Some highlights: • The New Yorker's article about El Salvadorans who've been deported back to their home country is infuriating, increasingly so at every new revelation along the way. Basically: Young people who are Americans for all intents and purposes — having come here too young to remember their home country — are deported back, where they end up serving as the cheap work

It was my good fortune that, after a lifetime in Kansas, I found myself living in Philadelphia during the summer of 2008 — as it happens, working in an office one floor down from Barack Obama's campaign headquarters in the city. And one day late in the election, I rode the press bus as it joined the then-Senator on a whirlwind four-stop campaign swing through the city — culminating with a final rally in fabled West Philadelphia . Obama himself wasn't too memorable. He gave the same speech, told the same jokes at every stop, the message modified slightly for each audience. ("Don't let them give you the okey doke ," he warned the largely black audiences.) What I remember about the West Philadelphia stop: It was the most black people I'd ever seen in one place at one time — probably the most I'll ever see again. And the mood, it bordered on religious. Not that these folks worshipped Obama, no. It's just at this point in the campaign, so much hope was

At noon Friday, Donald Trump becomes the president of the United States. It’s a prospect that I can barely wrap my head around. At times, it enrages me. Many of my liberal friends have spent the last couple of months giving voice to that rage, breaking off relationships with Trump-voting family and friends. I’ve sought to resist that path, which at times has seemed to incur further rage from my liberal friends. But I understand the temptation to offer a hearty “fuck you” to some people that, in all other cases, I have cared dearly about for years or even decades. So far, I’ve been able to resist the temptation. I’ve had to remind myself of a truth that I’ve discovered as I’ve gotten older: Almost everybody I’ve ever thought of as my “enemy” – and there have been exceptions — has, over time, also showed me grace I never expected from them. The people I disagree with are not devils. They have their own sets of fears and hopes. They are human, with all the complexity that involves.