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Video: What’s your ‘red line’?

“The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease.” In this episode of the Braver Angels Podcast, NYU professor and best-selling author Jonathan Haidt considers some of the big, hairy questions that challenge political bridge building.

Can we ever really claw our way out of tribalism? What would it take to fix the structures that warp our thinking? And what does this leading scholar of morality make of the popular notion that you can’t engage some ideas across the political divide and still be good?


Listen as Haidt — author of The Righteous Mind, The Coddling of the American Mind, and the upcoming Life After Babel: Adapting To A World We Can No Longer Share — joins Braver Angels’ Mónica Guzmán for a conversation that explores everything from Haidt’s favorite bit of ancient wisdom to the problem with kids these days (especially girls on the Left) and what it might ultimately mean to be loyal to truth.


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How Red and Blue America Can Stay Together by Pulling Apart

United States Marine Corps Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II STOVL stealth multirole fighters belonging to the VMFA-121 "Green Knights" taxiing at the MCAS Iwakuni in Yamaguchi, Japan, on March 23, 2017.

(viper-zero / Getty Images)

How Red and Blue America Can Stay Together by Pulling Apart

In earlier essays, I argued that America’s political division has grown so deep that a peaceful “American Union” of two sovereign nations — one broadly red, one broadly blue — is worth considering. I also argued that relocation fears are overstated, that cooperation could increase economic prosperity, and that separation could help heal the lingering wounds of the Civil War.

But how would this all actually work? What happens to the national debt? Who gets the military bases, federal lands, and nuclear weapons? Will Social Security be protected? Could two nations share the dollar, defend themselves together, and resolve their disagreements?

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Elon Musk’s new ‘trillionaire’ status is a good thing, actually

SpaceX, Twitter and electric car maker Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends an event during the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris, on June 16, 2023.

(Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)

Elon Musk’s new ‘trillionaire’ status is a good thing, actually

I am not a huge fan of Elon Musk as a political activist or commentator. I think he’s made Twitter — sorry, X — worse. His support for the nationalist right in Europe has been ugly. His tenure leading the Department of Government Efficiency mostly amounted to a missed opportunity and often descended into little more than performative vandalism. His personal life is not exactly consonant with my preference for bourgeois family values. Though, one can hardly accuse him of being a deadbeat dad.

On the other hand, I am a huge fan of his accomplishments in business and engineering. He helped create the foundations of the digital economy with PayPal. At the helm of Tesla, he made the electric car into a viable industry (something climate activists once lionized him for). Starlink, his internet satellite business, has been transformative. And, finally, there’s SpaceX, which went public last week. It’s a testament to human ingenuity, immigrant success and American greatness, on a scale that is hard to describe.

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Youth Are More Stressed Than Ever:  “Well-Being Infrastructure” Can Help
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Photo by Matthew Ball on Unsplash

Youth Are More Stressed Than Ever: “Well-Being Infrastructure” Can Help

In May, the JAMA Network released a study showing that doctor visits for children’s anxiety rose by more than 250 percent over 10 years. If we only respond with more clinical visits and prescriptions, we miss the chance to invest in the everyday conditions that help prevent anxiety in the first place—unstructured social time, accessible extracurriculars, walkable neighborhoods, and teen-friendly public spaces—the “wellbeing infrastructure” we should fund in proportion to the benefits it provides.

Good health and well-being–both mental and physical–do not happen by accident. They do not happen only by stepping in when a young person is in a major mental health emergency (although such services are essential). For youth to truly flourish, we need to focus on conditions that lead to thriving mental health and a commitment to building youth wellbeing infrastructure: the physical environments, social systems, and policies that promote long-term physical, mental, and emotional health.

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