Anand Giridharadas

As a teenager growing up in the suburbs of Washington, I ritually watched the Sunday-morning political talk shows with my family. We parsed and argued and jeered at the screen as national figures delivered careful, poll-tested talking points. ”

Right after college, after growing up in the United States, I moved to India, broadly telling the story of how an old and stagnant country was suddenly waking up. And I came home, back to America, in 2009 after telling that story and writing a book about that. ”

For our family, learning was everything. Homework came first; books, being sacred, were never to be left on the floor. ”

To have come of age during and after the global financial crisis of 2008 is to belong to a generation often unable to do what an American could once expect, and to do what was once expected: Get a job, pay off student loans, and find a place of your own. ”

Birthright citizenship in America is part of something larger: The American longing to sever from history, to be a place of new beginnings. ”

Most of us are too enmeshed in communities to live our ideals. Outsiders have less to lose. ”

There is always a gap between what candidates say in the heat of the campaign, when they are not constrained by the realities of governance, and how they act after being sworn into office. ”

Democracy doesn't automatically safeguard women and minorities. ”

The American television punditocracy - the pollsters, political consultants and other talking heads who become as ubiquitous as air every election cycle - can be incestuous and herdlike. ”

I have a weakness for treating people's economic interests as their only interest, ignoring things like belonging and pride and the desire to send a message to those who ignore you. ”