Egge is a songwriter affiliated with the Inclusive Democracy Culture Lab. Her 12 th album, “Between Us,” was released last year.
At the end of February 2020, I was scheduled to fly from my home in Brooklyn to play three concerts in the Pacific Northwest. I was glued to news reports of a new type of virus rapidly spreading in Seattle. I read about the outbreak in an assisted living home and watched scary videos of emergency rooms in China. I quickly decided that I would not be flying into the eye of the storm in Seattle, so I canceled flights and shows and let my fans know that their tickets would be refunded.
I repeated these steps for my shows in Texas the following month — and on and on again. The pandemic has been quite a tough time for me. I’ve been on the road touring since I was 21 when my debut album came out in 1997, and now I found myself without work. The last two years have been extremely challenging, as they have been for so many people.
In June 2020, I got a call from Eric Ward, senior advisor at Western States Center, an organization that works to strengthen inclusive democracy across the country. He invited me to join the group’s new Culture Lab, a program supporting singer/songwriters to build authentic community connections that combat the political and social divisions of our era. Ward is not only an experienced civil rights leader but a diehard music fan and musician himself — so I was very excited to join the group. The Culture Lab was a great opportunity to learn and to extend my community, an antidote to the isolation I felt at the time and a chance to learn more about what I could do to counter hate while sowing love, acceptance and understanding in a world in crisis.
The program mixed political education with relationship-building sessions held virtually over Zoom. We learned and practiced some basic skills to connect with people through shared values. I made friends and connections. Mostly, I began to comprehend the potential power that I have through my music to foster inclusion and belonging and that musicians can serve as trusted messengers to their fans to foster positive change. My mind was blown. My heart was opened.
A few months after the sessions wrapped up, I was invited to lead a new New York-based group – a smaller, more concentrated version that we named The Neighbor Project. I was joined by fellow musicians J. Hoard, Mali Obomsawin, Rench (of the bluegrass/hip-hop group Gangstagrass), Diana Jones and Lucy Wainwright Roche for virtual sessions seeking to promote the ideals of belonging and inclusion through collaboration with a neighbor.
The musicians in the cohort are all different, but our goals are the same. We’re trying to combat hate by bringing more inclusive messages and practices to our listeners (especially listeners who don’t tend to spend much time around people of different backgrounds than their own).
In my two years working with this amazing group of songwriters, we’ve all learned a simple lesson: Stopping the bigotry that threatens our democratic society can start with getting to know your neighbors and appreciating them for who they are. Our experiences show that it doesn’t take a huge investment, either. It just takes a little time and attention.
In the spirit of this, I now volunteer weekly through Mutual Aid South Brooklyn and my local Chinese-American Planning Council delivering meals to eight homes of mostly elderly Chinese Americans in my neighborhood. I realized this would be a good opportunity to work with some of the tools I was learning from the Neighbor Project.
My first few deliveries were more than a little awkward. Most of the people on my route seemed to live alone. I needed to put them at ease, so they wouldn’t just withdraw and quickly close the door in the face of a masked stranger. I turned to Google Translate on my phone to communicate. I thumbed out a message on my phone, held it up and pressed play. Out came my message from the speaker in a language they could understand.
“Hello, my name is Ana,” it said. “I’m happy to see you today. I hope you are well.”
It worked — sort of. Many folks were intrigued and nodded or waved thankfully. A few were a little put off and hurried back into their apartments before my greeting could play all the way through. The next week I tapped out a new, slightly longer message about the nice spring weather. I watched as some of their eyes lit up — one man gestured proudly to his small garden showing me his flowers.
Eventually, my neighbors got more comfortable with me and my halting use of technology. and our interactions have become more and more relaxed and welcoming.
One day last spring, I was walking in my neighborhood with my daughter, who was 7 at the time. We stopped to take in the beauty of the cherry blossoms and she befriended another little girl. They introduced themselves, but didn’t get much further than that because my daughter speaks English and her new friend Mandarin.
They did, however, share many other interests — like climbing trees, playing with sticks, drawing in the dirt, and swirling their arms in the air as the wind blew the pink blossoms from the trees.
When I told my daughter it was time to go, she asked if we could get the girl’s telephone number so we could meet up and they could play together again soon. I tried to explain to her why I couldn’t do that — I didn’t speak Mandarin.
“So?” my daughter begged me. “Please?”
I paused, took out my phone, and walked up to the girl’s mother. As I awkwardly motioned to my device, we eventually successfully”‘spoke” to each other — once again with the help of Google Translate, much to our daughters’ delight.
A month or so later we ran into my daughter’s new friend, Rachel, and her mother again in the park. We reunited like old friends. Even though we don’t speak the same language, it didn’t take much more than a few taps to break the ice.
These interactions might seem small in the face of everything that’s happening in the world, but I believe that through these connections we can make a difference. It’s now early summer of 2022 and I finally find myself going out on the road again. I’m looking forward to taking everything with me that I’ve learned during this destabilizing time and sharing them with my audience and the people I meet along the way.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.