The Future in Context

Governing’s humanities scholar in residence, Clay Jenkinson, lays out four coping strategies for dealing with the troubled state of America. One of them demands something of us for the common good.

A new report from the federal government brings urgency to a veteran geologist’s longtime warnings about the crippling of the Colorado River.

Geochemist James Powell is a longtime observer of the complex interworking of Lake Powell, Lake Mead and the Upper Basin of the Colorado River. He has written 14 books on the subject – including, aptly enough, Dead Pool.

The country is long on problems but short on levers that might help lift it out of a quagmire of its own making.

Clay was recently invited to attend a retreat in the badlands to talk about the future. The organizer called to talk logistics yesterday. As the call was winding down, he said that he and the other organizers are really worried about “the situation.”

In the 1930s, the United States became adept at building world-leading infrastructure to support its national economic needs, competitive instincts and social aspirations. Almost a century later, the advantage has slipped in favor of China and other global players. It remains to be seen whether America can build back better.

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and witnessed the removal a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee in Richmond, VA. The events reflect on the country’s changing national identity, symbols and myths - and the cost that comes with them.

Our Editor-at-Large Clay Jenkinson finds insight in the national epic of Rome, Virgil’s Aeneid. He asks, can the classics help us forge a new national narrative?

The world changed on August 6. The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, triggering a hasty and desperate withdrawal of American nationals and others. After twenty years, it also changed the world’s perception of the United States and caused Americans to question the state of the national soul.  

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, an endowed chair named for Said, a professor, public intellectual, and a founder of the academic field of postcolonial studies. Khalidi has written a number of books on the history of Palestine and the Middle East. With his latest effort - The Hundred Years War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance: 1917-2017 - Khalidi heeded the advice of his son and sought a more personal approach in his work. The result is an approachable account of a Palestinian people that has long been defined in the American consciousness, the author contends, by a narrative it didn’t write. Inserting himself into the story, Khalidi uses archival accounts of generations of family members from the region – mayors, judges, diplomats and journalists, to insert a Palestinian perspective into his chronicle of the last century of conflict. Governing Editor-at-Large Clay Jenkinson recently spoke with Khalidi about the book and the need, the possibilities, and the probabilities for a new Palestinian narrative. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Are the postmodernists and critical race theorists correct when they say America and some of its founders should appear with an asterisk behind their names from now on? The legacy of the Enlightenment and the American Experiment is in the balance.

A new book makes a multi-generational examination of the origin stories of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin to understand how they were shaped and by whom – their mothers.

Anna Malaika Tubbs excavated the lives of these extraordinary women – Alberta King, Louise Little, and Berdis Baldwin – who, in raising and nourishing and shaping their sons, pushed them to greatness. Tubbs’s account, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation is a fascinating and nuanced celebration not only of these women and their contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, but to the Black mothers throughout American history who resiliently pushed back against abhorrent efforts at dehumanization that went so far as to legally declare their children as someone else’s property.