I am a strange mix of excited, nervous, proud, terrified, and impatient to get MAN IN THE MIRROR into the world, on September 29. But I have much less complicated feelings about coming to meet all of you. About that, I am unreservedly thrilled.

Honestly, book tour is one of the best parts of my work. Not all writers like it. Some say they write to avoid such human contact! But for me, it’s the honor of this work.

I am ready to give the world this book and ready to meet you and talk with you and record funny videos with you for your spouse and sign your books and learn from you about the ways these ideas show up in your life. Something I’ve learned along the way is that every book acquires more ideas after it is published, because of the people you meet and what they share with you afterward.

So let’s meet! Here is what I dream of: Ink community members packing the rafters at every stop. Sure, we’re going to let in everyone. But for me, it all starts with you, because without you, the writing I do wouldn’t be possible. I mean that.

I will be in conversation with some truly remarkable people on this tour: Tina Brown! Terry Moran! Rebecca Solnit! Junot Díaz! And many others you will see below.

Before I share the dates and info below, a special note to my New York people. You may have seen my note the other day, in which I shared how Sarah McNally, one of America’s great booksellers, called MAN IN THE MIRROR “the best New York book since THE POWER BROKER.” Well, I want a loud and passionate Ink crowd on launch night in NYC — September 30. Get your tickets now before they sell out! (They also have virtual streaming tickets available if your city isn’t on the list below.)

Come to 92Y

Now on to the tour dates, with a bit of bonus content below them: some photos from old stops along the beautiful book tour trail.

NEW YORK
When: Wednesday, September 30 at 6 PM
Where: 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY
In conversation with Tina Brown
Tickets (for in-person and streaming)

WASHINGTON, DC
When: Thursday, October 1 at 7 PM
Where: Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008
In conversation with Terry Moran
Info

CHICAGO, IL
When: Sunday, October 4 at 7 PM
Where: Chicago Humanities Fall Festival at Northwestern University, McCormick Auditorium
In conversation with Alex Kotlowitz
Tickets

SEATTLE
When: Wednesday, October 7 at 7:30 PM
Where: Town Hall Seattle, The Great Hall, 1119 8th Ave, Seattle, WA
In conversation with Steve Scher
Tickets

SAN FRANCISCO, CA
When: Thursday, October 8 at 7:30 PM
Where: City Arts & Lectures, Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA 94102
In conversation with Rebecca Solnit
Tickets

BOSTON
When: Tuesday, October 13 at 6 PM
Where: Harvard Book Store at the Brattle Theater, 40 Brattle St, Cambridge, MA 02138
In conversation with Junot Díaz
Tickets

CALGARY, AB
When: Saturday, October 17 at 7:30 PM
Where: Calgary Wordfest
In conversation with Zain Velji
Tickets

When: Sunday, October 18 at 1 PM
Where: Calgary Wordfest
In Conversation with Kurt Andersen & Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Tickets

ST. LOUIS, MO
When: Tuesday, October 20 at 7 PM
Where: St. Louis Public Library, Clark Family Branch, 1640 S. Lindbergh Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63131
In conversation with Ryan Krull
Info

KATONAH, NY
When: Saturday, November 7 at 10 AM
Where: Westchester Book Festival at Katonah Village Library, 26 Bedford Rd, Katonah, NY 10536
In conversation with Priya Parker
Tickets

MIAMI, FL
When: Saturday, November 21-Sunday, November 22 (details to come)
Where: Miami Book Fair
Info

JAIPUR, INDIA
When: Thursday, January 14-Monday, January 18, 2027 (details to come)
Where: Jaipur Literature Festival, Hotel Clarks Amer
Info

I want to hear from you! What city will you be joining us in?

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And will you send this to 3-5 friends and family who might like to come meet me? Or maybe you want to bring your book club….

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And now, back to the archives for some of my favorite past book tour photos:

Sarah McNally is the founder of McNally Jackson, one of the great independent bookstores of New York City and of the United States. She is a reader to her bones. And when she said MAN IN THE MIRROR is the best New York book since THE POWER BROKER, I almost fainted. I hesitated before sending this short post today, but then I thought to myself: Book writing is so lonely and painful at the beginning, and these moments of elation should be enjoyed and shared.

I don’t know if the book I have written is indeed the best New York book since THE POWER BROKER, but I hope it is, and I want you to be part of all that is to come.

For those of you in New York, our September 30 evening together at the 92nd Street Y is going to be electric. If Sarah is right, all the more so! Be there on the night when this New York book takes flight.

Join me at 92Y

And I’m going to come see the rest of you all around the country, and even in a few other countries. Tour dates coming this week, so stay tuned for that!

And it would mean so much to me to have you in this community be my first readers and get in on the ground floor of this book. Hopefully we pick up many others along the way. But it is so reassuring to me to have you all here from the beginning.

Preorder MAN IN THE MIRROR

Thank you for everything, always.

Anand

Is Hanauer pulling up the ladder after securing prosperity for himself? Is he an ungrateful class traitor? Is he not enough of one, with his basic faith in the power of markets? Are socialists dangerous, as some suggest? What do even the ones Hanauer respects, like Zohran Mamdani, get wrong? We discussed all of this and more.

And check out his booklet on the subject, MARKETS BUILT FOR HUMANS, here. Unlike anything else these days, it’s free.

And if you value this work, don’t be a bystander. Subscribe to make it possible.

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And, ICYMI, pasting below yesterday’s post taking you behind the scenes of book making.

What you weren’t supposed to see

A book is a stone polished until every trace of roughness is gone. But it starts rough.

That roughness is something you generally want to hide from the world. In the kinds of books I write, I pride myself on dissolving the labor into the artistry of how I tell the story. I don’t need you to know how I finagled that phone number; I don’t need to spill my secrets of cultivating elusive sources. The work is often tedious and chaotic, full of stops and starts and frustrations. But you don’t want a book to read like that. Reading is, for most people, for pleasure, after all. The pain is my problem, not yours.

But the other day, I realized I wanted to break that rule with you.

Many of you have been here and supported me while this book was still taking shape — while I was disappearing into the reporting, getting stuck, changing my mind, finding things I never expected to find. And I thought: Why should the finished book be the only part you get to see?

Because there is so much that vanishes into the air when a book becomes a book. The notebooks and photographs. The strange little encounters. The music that gets stuck in your head because someone you’re writing about loves it — in this book, about the death of a Michael Jackson impersonator, there is a LOT of that. The scenes you fought to keep but had to cut. The people who helped you see what you were actually doing before you could see it yourself.

So I’ve been going back through three years of reporting for MAN IN THE MIRROR and gathering up some of those things — a little private archive from the making of the book — that I want to share with the readers who are joining me at the beginning.

Here’s what I’m putting together:

— A private Zoom conversation with my friend Sam Dolnick, a brilliant journalist and editor at The New York Times, who was the person who told me I needed to write this book — partly because he was worried about the direction my life was taking. The book is dedicated to Sam. On September 23 at 8 p.m. Eastern, we’re going to talk about what he saw in me then, what happened afterward, and what it took to make this book. I don’t usually arrange public occasions for my friends to air their concerns with me, so this should be…interesting.

— Photos, videos, notes, and scraps from three years of reporting — some revealing, some strange, some funny, most never intended for publication. There’s a very bare-bones preview in the collage above.

— The music of the book: a playlist drawn from the people, places, moods, and worlds I entered while reporting it. Music became such a major character in this story that it felt wrong not to give you the soundtrack.

— And, after an unreasonable amount of lawyerly negotiation, deleted scenes I still love but couldn’t keep in the finished book. They won’t appear anywhere else.

If you’ve already preordered the book, thank you — truly. It means a great deal to have people choosing to bring something I’ve spent years making into their lives before they’ve even had the chance to read it.

If you’d like to join us, preorder and submit your receipt by September 20 so we have time to send you the link for the September 23 Zoom with Sam, along with the rest of the behind-the-scenes material as publication approaches.

Get behind-the-scenes bonus content here

And there’s one other thing I especially want to invite you into.

On September 30, the night after the book comes out, I’ll be at the 92nd Street Y in New York, in conversation with the brilliant Tina Brown, a journalist’s journalist, an editor’s editor, and the least boring person in New York.

I’ve been imagining that evening for a long time — not simply as a book event, but as the moment when this very private three-year undertaking will become public. There are a lot of you in New York, and I would love for the room to be full of Ink people.

The 92Y is one of the great literary rooms in New York. So many remarkable conversations have happened there. I think this one could be electric — and I’d love for us to make it memorable together. (Virtual streaming tickets are also available.)

Come hear some of these behind-the-scenes stories come to life. Come celebrate the book being out in the world. And come say hello afterward at the signing.

Get tickets here

More national — and international! — tour dates very soon.

For now, I wanted to open the workshop door a little wider and let you in.

Thank you for being with me through it all — the thinking out loud, the reporting and the writing — and, soon, the bookbirth.

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A book is a stone polished until every trace of roughness is gone. But it starts rough.

That roughness is something you generally want to hide from the world. In the kinds of books I write, I pride myself on dissolving the labor into the artistry of how I tell the story. I don’t need you to know how I finagl…

Read more

This is the fifth and final part of my in-depth portrait of the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Find the first installment, and the series introduction, here. Find the second installment here. Find the third installment here. Find the fourth installment here.) Today’s chapter tells the story of how Ocasio-Cortez navigated among gatekeepers on the lef…

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This is part four of my in-depth portrait of the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Find the first installment, and the series introduction, here. Find the second installment here. Find the third installment here. Today’s chapter looks at how, during her first term in Congress, Ocasio-Cortez learned when to engage in combat — and when instead to play th…

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This is part three of my in-depth portrait of the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Find the first installment, and the series introduction, here. Find the second installment here.) Today’s chapter is about how Ocasio-Cortez was swept, as abruptly as anyone ever to live, into fame. And how she learned to think of it as a tool for “seizing and holding a…

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This is part two of my in-depth portrait of the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Find the first installment, and the series introduction, here.) Today’s chapter recounts what she calls her “crucible” — the period that gave rise to her highly particular theory of how power functions.

Special thanks to my publisher, Alfred Knopf, for permission to unlock…

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This week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, had the nation talking. And talking. And talking some more. Her intimate sharing of her egg-freezing journey was a reminder of how she, if not introduced, elevated and perfected a politics of personal vulnerability, built on direct, human connection to citizens. And her comment in…

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That’s how it was with my friend Sam. We had come up as journalists together, had met while we were foreign correspondents in India, had built parallel New York lives together, raising kids, writing, trying to make sense of the age.

…

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Talk a little bit about how you see the loneliness epidemic and where it stems from, or is that just something of our imagining?

Eggers said:

Well, I believe it. I believe the statistics. I do think it’s an existential crisis. I do…

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Don’t miss that and much more in our conversation with Eggers, above.

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As returns pour in in the Democratic primary contest for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, we revisit my reflections on a past conversation with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. What struck me most was El-Sayed’s idea of his political project as not simply to win the war against Trumpism, but to “win the peace” — which is to say, eliminate the conditions that made Trumpism possible. Let us know what you think.

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Here is a strange thing about politics. It’s a competitive arena in which people win by distinguishing themselves from others. And it’s an arena so lacking in originality. How often do you hear a political leader say something truly inspired, or even just slightly fresh? How often do you notice them actually thinking out loud, the mind still active, still with questions, not answers given to them on Post-It notes by an aide?

It is rare enough that, when it happens, it sometimes takes me a second to realize it. But that’s what happened when I interviewed Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. He is a doctor and public health professional in Michigan who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2018 and is now running for the U.S. Senate.

What took me time to register was that El-Sayed was doing something more interesting than explaining why he should win his primary. He was laying out a vision for how America can finally be done with Trumpism. Like, actually done.

I don’t think I’ve heard these ideas put together like this in a package before. Each one will have its share of critics. But I think the whole package is worth a look.

The bottom line is this. A lot of what Democrats have ended up offering is contempt for Trump voters and moderate policy ideas. Dr El-Sayed is suggesting a reversal on both counts: radical empathy for Trump voters (which will rankle progressives) and radical change to eradicate the social conditions that enabled Trump (which will rankle moderates). Let them be rankled.

1. The bully and the posse

Growing up with the name Abdul, the son of immigrants from Egypt, El-Sayed knew a thing or two about bullying.

What he sees in Trump is a bully par excellence. But bullies are often secretly weak, El-Sayed observed. What props them up is their posse. Trump’s posse is millions of voters. Without their allegiance, he is a childhood-scarred, semi-literate, narcissistic bully halfwit. With their allegiance, he has a path to making himself Caesar.

El-Sayed argues, therefore, that the pro-democracy movement must obsessively seek to separate the posse from the bully. Which means adopting a posture that some fellow Democrats may not like: showing what he calls “radical empathy” for Trump voters, and viewing the choice millions made as an expression of desperation in an unresponsive system, a shout into the void.

That means not lapsing into the condescension toward lay voters that feels so satisfying and, oftentimes, so justified. It means not calling them Magats and brainwashed and irredeemable racists all. It means strategically biting your tongue and opening your arms. For winning’s sake.

Confront the bully. But woo the posse.

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2. Don’t prove them wrong. Get them to right

Winning movements don’t humiliate potential followers. They fix them a drink.

Trump’s chaotic and economy-quaking opening months are already causing lots of pain for his own supporters, let alone all the other people in his policy crosshairs.

Open any social media site, and what do you see these days? Gleeful Democrats sharing stories of MAGA types now being hurt by the policies they voted for.

Understandable psychologically? Yes. Smart politically? No. Not even a little bit.

Dr. El-Sayed framed the approach he favors instead succinctly: “We’ve got to get folks to being right, not prove them wrong.”

What’s the difference? It’s about creating, he says, “a space within which you felt safe enough…to say, you know what?, I made a mistake.”

So next time you hear a veteran who voted for Trump complaining about benefit cuts, or a shopkeeper complaining about tariffs, or a CEO complaining about the stock market, resist the temptation to gloat. If you want to save your country from hell, invite these potential newcomers to the pro-democracy cause in. Pour them a drink.

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3. America is good, actually

In some of the progressive circles Dr. El-Sayed travels in, well-earned critiques of American policy and history can sometimes devolve into contempt for America.

Progressives have a patriotism problem, often conceding the flag to those who would break the country rather than share it. They become so consumed with what is wrong with the country that they forget to say whether there is anything they love about it, and they leave the impression, sometimes true, sometimes not, that they think it irredeemably flawed, rotten at the root.

This is fine for your academic seminar. But please keep this pose out of politics. Because it’s risking the republic itself and plays right into Donald Trump’s hands.

Dr. El-Sayed, as a child of Egyptian immigrants, has a way into this issue that is compelling and worth listening to. He knows all the critiques leveled at America; he levels many of them himself. But his dualness — being from here and being from there — gives him another way of seeing.

He spoke in our conversation about going back to Egypt in his youth. He would sit with his grandmother who, he said, half-jokingly (or maybe not?), would sit with him and tell him that this cousin of his was better looking than Abdul, and this one more athletic, and this one smarter. But you know what Abdul had, his greatest gift that would matter more than any of these others? He would soon be leaving Egypt.

It’s a bittersweet truth that many of us with similar experiences of dualness know from childhood. And many of us who, like El-Sayed, would grow up to have criticisms of how America functions would also, like El-Sayed, never forget that America has real and profound gifts, that it offers many, many people — not enough, but more than most places — life chances and an opportunity to flourish and create and speak and become the fullest version of yourself. That this is a great country, which is, sadly, language many progressives would find way too cringe. Enjoy autocracy, guys!

What El-Sayed reminds us is that to be a progressive who comes partly from somewhere else can be to hold two competing ideas in tension: that America is flawed, and is built on ideals and ways rare in history and worth defending.

“America sucks” is a lazy shrug too often heard in progressive organizing spaces, and it is weirdly provincial in its obliviousness to how life is in other places around the world, and what El-Sayed is pointing toward instead is a progressive patriotism.

“I love America because I know exactly what my life would have ended up as if I didn’t, but for the accident of history, get to grow up here,” he told me. And: “My critiques about America are about the difference between what she gave me…and what she has not given too many kids.”

His advice to Democrats and progressives: “Wrap yourself in the flag as you demand the flag represent the things that you believe are best about this country.”

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4. Fighting Trump isn’t enough. Win the peace

Since Inauguration Day, I, like so many of you and so many across the country, have argued that Democrats need to show fight.

Boneless and skinless is fine for chicken thighs. It’s not adequate for a party that purports to be interested in beating back an attempted authoritarian breakthrough.

But El-Sayed challenged my thinking on the fight point. A former team captain in school sports before he became a Rhodes Scholar and a medical doctor, he pointed to scars on his face and spoke obliquely about not being afraid to fight when needed.

But he argued Democrats need to be more interested in winning the peace than the war: “Nobody fights the war to just win the war. You fight the war to win the peace.”

What he means is remaining focused on healing the causes of the pain that made Trump possible, instead of over-fixating on Trump as the sum total of the ill.

The mantra to fight more and fight harder, which I have touted as much as anyone, risks fetishizing fight for its own sake. The real goal, El-Sayed says, must be creating conditions where the fighting is unnecessary.

And how do you win the peace?

5. The age of insecurity

There are a lot of ways to frame the times we live in. But El-Sayed offered one that stuck with me: this is an age of insecurity.

What’s powerful about insecurity as a grand unified theory is that it encompasses all manner of sentiments, from all sections of the political spectrum, some based in reality, others more in fantasy, but all with emotive, often explosive political effect.

Brutal hyper-capitalism creates insecurity. Not being able to afford things creates insecurity. Feeling vulnerable to crime creates insecurity. Feeling deluged across a poorly managed border creates insecurity. Racial and gender progress, when you are not well prepared for your own new role and standing, creates insecurity. New and unfamiliar ideas about history and the meaning of your country create insecurity. New technology and the threat of obsolescence create insecurity. The loss of control over one’s children and their vulnerability to outside influences creates insecurity.

You will no doubt identify with some forms of insecurity listed above, and not with others. El-Sayed’s point is that insecurity in general has been roiling our hearts and politics, and has achieved what he, a public health doctor, calls “epidemic” status.

“The thing about insecurity is that you may have what you need right now, but you’re constantly at risk of losing it.”

So part of winning the peace beyond Trumpism, rather than just making war with Trump, is addressing the roots of insecurity.

And how bold should Democrats be in doing that?

6. Abolish vanilla

Some of El-Sayed’s arguments above — the radical empathy part of his solution — might strike some Democrats as too solicitous of Trump voters, too eager to make accommodations. But El-Sayed is not a mushy moderate. Rather, I think of him as being in the mold of many of the organizers I wrote about in my book The Persuaders: advocating more flexibility on how you reach out to and court moderates and MAGA voters, but more stridency in policymaking.

A lot of what you see from Democrats right now is the opposite: Snideness and condescension toward MAGA types, but mushy moderate policies. El-Sayed wants to flip that script: Gentle, openhearted outreach and aggressive, even radical, policy.

“You can't beat something with nothing,” he told me. “And, love him or hate him, when it comes to Donald Trump, he's always saying something. And the problem that folks have with Democrats is that we say nothing, but we say it with a lot of enthusiasm. It’s like somebody screaming ‘Vanilla!’ at you. You're like, Well, I don't know, what if I like cookie dough? What if I like cookies and cream? What if I like Rocky Road? The folks are like, ‘Vanilla! vanilla!’”

El-Sayed has advocated aggressive policy responses to America’s overlapping crises — including Medicare for All, which he wrote an entire book about. Whatever you think about individual policy questions, the larger point is worth grappling with: that the proper place for moderation is in the stance one shows to potentially politically adrift Americans. The place for unbending passion is on substantive policy ideas that would drastically change the country, drain some of the insecurity, and therefore heal the conditions that enabled Trump, so that we don’t keep returning to square one.

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7. Reclaim common sense

Listening to El-Sayed, it struck me that he was pushing against both his fellow progressives and the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party, in distinct ways.

His message to progressives is to ditch the label. I am referring to him as a progressive, but he didn’t call himself that, although his policy vision lines up with any conventional definition. But he seemed determined to frame ideas like clean air and water, healthcare for all, ending wasteful wars, and such as basic common sense, not radical or out of the mainstream. (Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been making similar arguments on her “Fighting Oligarchy” tour stops.)

But he also has a bracing message for those moderates so singularly fixated on Trump that they think the goal of political struggle should be to return America to the day before the golden escalator ride in 2015. “That’s our own version of Make America Great Again. It just happens to be 2015 instead of 1930-something,” he told me.

America wasn’t working for most people in 2015. The way to move past Trumpism is to champion drastically, boldly upending what wasn’t working, and to do so with an openhearted posture toward converts who will have many reasons to seek a new political home in the days that are coming.

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Watch my full conversation with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed here:

We talked about the art and craft of telling big, socially important stories through the vessel of a single case, why narrative nonfiction matters now more than ever, and how Colloff thinks about the writer’s role in asking for your sustained time in an age of 30-second videos and algorithmic distraction.

It’s a great conversation.

And we want to hear from you: Are you a nonfiction reader? What do you love about nonfiction? What makes it hold your attention versus feel like a slog? What are some of your all-time favorites in the genre?

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Join the Ink Book Club Live later today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for our second and final conversation with Dave Eggers. Now that you’ve had a few weeks since our initial announcement of Contrapposto as our July pick, let’s dig further into how the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius conceived this portrait of aspiring artists and soulmates Cricket and Olympia, and their lifelong struggles to make sense of the world through their friendship, their activism, and their art.

While Contrapposto is a coming-of-age tale that is remarkably tech-free, Eggers has lately been in the news for his take on generative AI — which he terms “a catastrophic technology.” He brought that critique to Open AI staffers last year at the invitation of CEO Sam Altman, where he told those gathered that in facilitating the use of AI, they are perpetrating “a crime against yourself.” Addressing some 200 employees, Eggers pulled no punches, warning that “whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult.” Eggers says he came away from that meeting believing that while OpenAI engineers might be well-intentioned, they are too “compartmentalized” to comprehend “the collective harm” their innovation is wreaking. He charged that the use of AI tools by students risks “silencing an entire generation of young writers.” We’ll ask him to talk more about this, and how he proposes we prevent that prophesy from materializing. We’ll also discuss the prescience of his novels — 2013’s The Circle and its sequel, The Every —which satirized and anticipated the immense power, hypocrisy, and overreach of big tech companies.

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And then tomorrow, Thursday, July 30 at 12:30 p.m., we’ll speak with renowned White Mountain Apache chef Nephi Craig, whose searing memoir, Our Knives Will Save Us, elucidates how Craig found his way out of addiction and despair by returning to his indigenous roots in the kitchen. His book traces the links among food, colonialism, and community, and how he found his way back home. Join us!

Below, some thoughts to contemplate this morning in advance of our 12:30 meeting:

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Making an audiobook is, like making a book itself, a strange, solitary, demanding experience -- and, like making a book, it can be a moving, communal, leavening one.

I wanted to share some glimpses behind the scenes from my recording work this week, some of the tricks I’m learning from the brilliant director Paula Parker about how to communicate in an era of short attention spans, and a story about my son.

I am nervous to the point of terrified, but also excited to the point of antsy, to share this book with you, my Ink community. I have put everything I have to give in to this book, and I would love for you to preorder it now. What this does is send a signal to the publisher and bookstores and librarians and others that people want this book. And that’s how it reaches more people. That makes you early adopters — evangelists.

You can find your preferred retailer here. For those who like their books signed, there’s a special link I can share with you from the McNally Jackson bookstore: if you order from here, I will make sure you get a copy signed by me. Truly, thank you.

I sometimes fret that, in an age of algorithms, people are becoming more algorithmic. As Arundhati Roy warns, in addition to the danger of bots replacing us, there is the danger that we will “turn into Chatbots. Maybe then there will be a transfer of souls. Then Chatbots will appear to be Real Souls and Real Souls will be Chatbots pretending.” In politics, the chatbot is a figure whose entire set of views is calculable from knowing any one view. Some call this coherence; I call it boring.

El-Sayed is not like this. Every time we speak, I am surprised. He is a true-believing progressive, but he lands in places you wouldn’t expect. We once had a conversation about the importance of patriotism that I won’t ever forget, and that distinguishes him heavily from his fellow progressives who seem to struggle to praise America.

He can also surprise you when talking about Trump voters. Unlike so many resistance liberals who cannot repress their loathing of Trump voters, forgetting that the whole point of politics is to win some of the people you have lost back to your side, El-Sayed has spoken about radical empathy for those voters and his desire to “win the peace” in America, not the war of all against all.

A public health doctor by training, he brings a lens to diagnosing our body politic that often strikes me as fresh and worth grappling with, whatever your own perspective.

Now that El-Sayed is running in one of the most controversial and closely watched Senate races in the country, in the state of Michigan, a growing number of Americans are getting to know him and his thinking. He is also making influential enemies.

I spoke to him yesterday between campaign stops. We talked about what he believes his race is a referendum on, what it’s like running against not only Congresswoman Haley Stevens but the mega-donors backing her, why moderation is a doomed tactic in his view, and why Gaza resonates with voters a world away on the Great Lakes.

The full video of our conversation is below. Click “Transcript” above for the text.

In the public interest, we’re keeping this conversation open to all. If you value independent journalism, support The Ink’s work by becoming a paid subscriber.

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The truth is, I haven’t been speaking as much because I’m in a reflective moment, planning to bring a new book to this community and the world th…

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