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Windows of a house

Low-angle view of two dormer windows protruding from townhouse roof

Grace Cary, Getty Images

Go Home

The distance from Washington, D.C., to my hometown of York, Pennsylvania, is 100 miles. When I worked as a Congressional staffer in D.C., I could get out of town and be back where I grew up in about an hour and a half, at least so long as I avoided rush hour traffic. Those last miles as I crossed the Pennsylvania-Maryland border brought a sense of gratitude for the relationships I would be keeping up. At my nephew’s soccer game, at an English-style pub with my long-time best friends, with my mother at the breakfast table having a local newspaper in her hands, life was ordinary.

I would return to work in D.C. feeling grounded. I felt better connected to

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U.S. Capitol with a flag waving in front of it.

As Washington stalls, young bipartisan lawmakers in Alaska, Mississippi, and beyond are proving that cross-partisan collaboration still wins.

Douglas Rissing/Getty Images

The Politicians Who Can Fix America's Polarization Problem Will Win

Political predictions are notoriously unreliable, but here is one I am willing to stand behind: the elected officials who figure out how to govern across difference will dominate the next decade of American politics. With dysfunction and paralysis having become the status quo in Washington, elected officials who work together to get things done will turn heads, offering desperate voters a much-needed alternative to a broken system.

Consider what happened in Alaska last year. The state’s lawmaking structure does not encourage political independence. Alaska has the nation's highest veto-override threshold: three-quarters. So when a popular education bill promising smaller class sizes, a cellphone ban, and vocational training funding cleared the legislature, only to be vetoed twice by the governor, it looked dead in the water.

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Two children playing baseball during the Little League World Series Consolation Game at Howard J. Lamade Stadium on August 25, 2024 in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

Jonathan Landaeta #9 of the Latin America Region team from Barquisimeto, Venezuela slides into third base past Dylan Burke #9 of the Southwest Region team from Boerne, Texas in the fifth inning during the Little League World Series Consolation Game at Howard J. Lamade Stadium on August 25, 2024 in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania

Dylan Buell/Getty Images

For Two Weeks in August, Sports Still Belong to the Kids

Late August in America has a certain sound and scene. For me, it is an ESPN broadcast and the persistent drone of a camera somewhere above a baseball diamond in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Beneath it: a collection of 11- and 12-year-olds doing something completely ordinary and, these days, increasingly extraordinary. They are playing baseball.

The Little League World Series, as I understood it as a kid, wasn't merely a sporting event. It was a fever dream. Kids from Seoul, Tokyo, Curaçao, and Texas suddenly occupied the same outfield. Different uniforms. Different languages. Same sweat. Same tears. Same inexplicable desire to chase a high fastball with two strikes.

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Our Conservative and Liberal Union
An american flag flying high in the sky
Photo by chris robert on Unsplash

Our Conservative and Liberal Union

How are Americans supposed to make a more perfect union when we can’t agree on whether we need to turn our cultural clocks forward or backward?

This question is among the more difficult that people can pose to their fellow countrymen. Not just because it has no obvious or easily agreed upon answer, but because it’s more likely to be asked during contentious times, like the one we are in today.

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