There is so much relentless attention now to the perils in virtually every realm of our lives that it is a particular pleasure to highlight two national competitions that prove that talent, ambition, and commitment among the young are doing fine.
These take place annually at about this time of year and are expressions of unadulterated joy and amazing skill among those between ten and eighteen years old all across the country.
They are the Scripps National Spelling Bee, the finals of which took place on May 28 in Washington, D.C., and was broadcast and streamed live in prime time. The other one is the National High School Musical Theater Awards, with the finals taking place in New York on June 22 and streamed live on YouTube.
Known as the Jimmy Awards, they were started in 2009 by the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera and Nederlander Alliances, a division of the Nederlander Organization, and were named after the theater owner James “Jimmy” Nederlander. The idea was based on the Gene Kelly Awards at the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera, honoring the hometown star of stage, screen, and dance.
We spotted an ad in the New York Times in 2018, and as fans of musical theater we bought tickets. The performance is always on a Monday night at the Minskoff Theatre, where The Lion King is staged the rest of the week.
Every seat in the large theater was full, and we quickly realized that the rest of the audience consisted of family and friends who had traveled from around the country to root enthusiastically for someone. We were there rooting for everyone and enjoying the show, which we thoroughly did.
We went back several times (alas, the 2020 performance was cancelled because of Covid-19), and when we could no longer get tickets, we watched from home, which to be honest is less thrilling, but nonetheless impressive.
The competition draws about 180,000 boys and girls from sponsoring theater groups and high schools in regional competitions, and more than one hundred finalists are invited to New York for a week of intensive rehearsals with professional coaches, culminating in a fully staged show consisting of group and ensemble displays of singing and dancing drawn from established musical theater repertoires.
The judges choose about a dozen kids to perform solos, and one boy and one girl are chosen as the champions, with prizes also awarded for best dancer, best performance in an ensemble, and most improved in the week. The two champions each receive a $25,000 scholarship, with smaller awards given to the finalists and other category winners. And two teachers are also honored.
The host is a Broadway star, and previous winners who are currently performing on stages around the nation are guests.
What is amazing is that in the space of a week the show is polished to a spectacular shine. Film clips of the nominees rehearsing and visiting the Great White Way and environs reflect the intensity of the preparation and the fun of being together with other teenagers of consummate talent.
And lest there be any doubt, the high schoolers reflect the full spectrum of the country’s population, an inspiring mélange of sizes, shapes, and colors. This means that there are tens of thousands of kids for whom musical theater is a favored activity.
One thing no one does while performing is look at their phones or other screens.
The spelling bee has a different vibe. The contestants are younger, not yet out of the eighth grade or fifteen years old. In its one-hundred-year history, supported as a nonprofit by the E.W. Scripps Company, the rules have evolved in detail but are essentially the same, with regional bees in the course of the year leading to the finals, where successive rounds winnow the group until there is one champion hoisting a very large trophy and taking home a $50,000 prize.
After the 2019 competition, in which eight contestants tied for the title, a spell-off was designed to determine a single winner. In 2026, the two finalists correctly spelled, respectively, thirty-two and twenty-five words in ninety seconds. This was every bit as exciting as a last-minute three-pointer in a basketball championship or a last-second field goal in football.
Watching these kids handle the pressure in the prime-time two-hour telecast is, to use a term I suspect is familiar to all of them, awesome.
To get to these finals requires prodigious commitment by the contestants and their families. They are at Olympic-level proficiency, which doubtless requires as much training, discipline, and support as the greatest of quadrennial medal champions.
Because the record of winners includes so many South Asians, mainly with Indian backgrounds, there are assumptions about their being naturally gifted. I have no idea whether this is the case, but this year’s nine finalists included a twelve-year-old Irish-American from Texas, a Black speller from Maryland, and a mixture of others, with the spell-off between two boys of demonstrably Indian heritage.
So, my fellow Americans, let’s celebrate how many youths there are doing these astounding things.
And I should add that a favorite social media feature in late spring are those commencement pictures posted by families on Facebook and other sites.
Yes, let us rejoice where we can.
Early voting in Maryland’s state primaries begins on June 11. We live in Bethesda and this will be our first local election since moving here a year ago. In anticipation and for insight I asked a group of friends whom we know to be civic minded if they could name their member of Congress, state senator, state delegates, county executive, and County Council members.
Who, I wondered, might be their choices among those who were serving?
Representative Jamie Raskin, a formidable House Democrat whose opposition role in the Donald Trump years has been consistently important, was admired by most of those questioned. The other answers were fragmentary to nothing at all — clueless, really.
These are all taxpayers and homeowners; several have children in county schools. They are knowledgeable about national and international issues because of their careers and readership of major publications. Most of them have been voting for decades.
So what did I learn from the quiz?
If, as the late Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill used to say, “All politics is local,” then the reality is that too many of us are essentially disengaged from the politics of where we live. That is, if not a complete surprise, definitely a problem with consequences.
Let’s focus on one aspect of this finding: The lack and depth of meaningful media coverage of the election. The League of Women Voters distributes a Voter’s Guide by mail to people who are registered. We have received a small number of campaign circulars and endorsements. We don’t watch local television news and so are spared the advertising, much of which is meant to disparage candidates anyway.
The Banner is Maryland’s most important statewide news organization and has added coverage of Montgomery County. As the Baltimore Banner it was launched in 2022 by the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, a nonprofit established by Stewart W. Bainum Jr. In its first weeks it produced a state voter guide which got 70,000 page views and hundreds of new subscribers.
The CEO is Bob Cohn, whose impressive resume includes leadership of The Atlantic and The Economist. The editor in chief is Audrey Cooper, who had previously been editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and New York’s public radio station WNYC.
Coverage in the Banner has received a George Polk Award and a Pulitzer Prize. There are now one hundred journalists, with bureaus around the state. Cohn’s numbers for subscribers are 82,000, with revenue coming from philanthropy (primarily the Venetoulis Institute), subscriptions, and advertising, with a smaller amount coming from events.
By every measure, the Banner is off to a great, ambitious, and determined start, with an emphasis on start.
Based on my quiz alone, I can’t claim to know the extent of indifference or ignorance about state and county politics across the broader population. But the truth is that there is little coverage in the major media of anything about Montgomery County.
Missing are stories across the range of what constitutes life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in twenty-first-century America, including education, sports, crime, and culture. We live in a place about which we largely know less than we know about the shenanigans down Pennsylvania Avenue.
I have read what there is on the elections, and I’ll make decisions that will be more guesses than a sense of the candidates, aside from Raskin and the leader of the ticket, Governor Wes Moore, the charismatic Democrat on many lists for the presidential contest in 2028.
Here’s a capsule history of what journalism in Maryland used to be. The Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun were the major state newspapers, with an understanding that they would essentially divide circulation among the counties. In 1968 and 1969, when I was a Maryland reporter for the Post, the county bureaus were well staffed with energized young reporters and the statehouse team was respected and influential. The Washington Star was the afternoon competition.
A major Montgomery County weekly was one of a string of newspapers that surrounded the District of Columbia in Maryland and Virginia. (Bob Woodward scored his first scoops in the Montgomery paper.) Smaller cities and towns had newspapers as well. Peter A. Jay and his wife, Irna, for example, owned the paper in Havre de Grace after leaving the Post, and Peter wrote the Sun’s most admired column for years.
My solution is a notion called “Back to the Future.” I have written that the Washington Post can restore its diminished profile by reframing itself as a global and metro paper, serving the region of 6.5 million people who no longer have any comprehensive news source — this in the capital region of the nation!
Moreover, Maryland’s advertisers, subscribers, and philanthropies should not have to be badgered into supporting the Banner, which can expand only with more money. It is in their interest in every way.
There is more than enough money in this metropolitan area to support the Post, the Banner, and other worthy journalistic efforts that come along. Jeff Bezos sure knows how to make, spend, and lose money. (I wonder what that exploded Blue Origin rocket cost?)
Just for the record, the only full answer I got to my pop quiz came from a friend in my neighborhood. He put the issue of state senator, et al., into the AI program Claude.
Your address in Bethesda, MD places you in U.S. Congressional District 8, Maryland Legislative District 16, and Montgomery County Council District 1.
Federal Level
Congressional Representative: Jamie Raskin (D)
State Level (Maryland General Assembly)
State Senator: Sara Love (D)
State Delegates: Marc Korman (D), Sarah Wolek (D), and Teresa Woorman (D)
Local Level (Montgomery County)
County Executive: Marc Elrich (D)
District Council Member: Andrew Friedson (D) (District 1)
At-Large Council Members: You are concurrently represented by the four county-wide at-large members:
Gabe Albornoz (D)
Shebra Evans (D)
Evan Glass (D)
Will Jawando (D)
That is the right answer.
But it is useless data unless you know something worth knowing about these folks when you cast your vote.
What is happening at and to “60 Minutes” is a moment for journalism unlike any other. The greatest news program in broadcast history is being taken over by two people who have never worked in television news to reinvent CBS’s most honored and successful program in ratings, profit and quality, all the ways that count. My own engagement with Hewitt and his stellar team was very close. Aside from publishing Don’s memoir described below, I did Morely Safer’s Vietnam memoir, Andy Rooney’s World War II memoir and many of his later books. I had an epic shouting match with Don and Mike Wallace when they said they would not run the interview they had done with a Chinese man who had smuggled out secret transcripts of Politiburo meetns leading to the 1989 student massacre at Tiananmen Square which I was publishing as a book. The piece did run and Don and after it aired Sunday night called to tell me it was “the lowest rated piece in the history of the show.” We had a good laugh.
Reposting this piece is a tribute to all that the program represents and why the evisceration of it is so infuriating.
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The deaths of Don Hewitt, producer extraordinaire, and earlier this summer of Walter Cronkite highlight from both sides of the camera the passing of broadcasters who epitomized the best in television news: great storytelling that combined journalism with showmanship of the sort that television, from its earliest days, has always demanded. It is striking and sad that both men in their later years talked openly of their disappointment with how news on the airwaves had been degraded in favor of profit. In fact, these frustrations were nothing new. Their predecessors in the superstar pantheon of CBS, Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly, were already warning of the corrupting values of television news in the 1960s, when Hewitt and Cronkite’s brilliant careers were on the upswing.
News on television has always been caught in the vortex of the competing pressures of journalism, entertainment, and money. Cronkite’s currency was credibility and prestige from his role on the nightly news. But in 1981, when he was 65, CBS bumped him for Dan Rather and never used him in any significant way again, for all the fulsome tributes the network offered after his demise. Hewitt continued as executive producer of 60 Minutes into his eighties, but in the last few years of his tenure, in particular, he was considered a problem by CBS management because of his prideful, willful stubbornness when it came to accepting mandates for cuts in staff and expenses. Don once told me that he even offered to give up a portion of his salary if the money would be used to support the show. I never heard the outcome in that instance. But 60 Minutes, the most successful, probably the most honored, and certainly the most profitable program in the history of television news did endure several rounds of significant cutbacks (while it needs to be said, maintaining quality under Hewitt’s successor, Jeff Fager).
I came to know Don Hewitt in a variety of ways. His wife, Marilyn Berger, an accomplished journalist herself, was a friend of long-standing and a colleague at The Washington Post. As a book editor and publisher, I pitched stories to Don and his staff, about which more in a moment. And finally, in 2001, PublicAffairs, which I founded, published his memoir Tell Me a Story: Fifty Years and 60 Minutes in Television, a wonderful, bracing book that to Don’s chagrin only became a modest national bestseller. After all, his television program was consistently in the top tier of ratings by any and all measures.
And here is one of the reasons the show was so good, with an apology for the opaqueness of the anecdotal fine points: In the winter of 1998, 60 Minutes was preparing to broadcast an interview with a notable personality who was also a PublicAffairs author. I happened to overhear Don telling people at a cocktail party that the interview contained a revelation about the author’s past. When I gingerly reported to our author what Don had said, it was clear from his reaction that something might have happened in the way the interview was edited. I chased down Don on a Saturday morning and shared the author’s concern as contained in a letter faxed to me. Amazingly, although the program had already closed, ready for airing the next night, Don went to the studio, viewed the raw footage, and added 18 seconds, changing the tone of the revelation from a scandal to a youthful mishap. Over the decades, scores of subjects in 60 Minutes pieces have squirmed over the way they appeared on the show and my access to Don was highly unusual. Nonetheless, what that incident demonstrated to me was the incredible attention to detail that Don applied to every aspect of his program and why he should get the credit for making it so compelling
Don maintained that audiences tuned into 60 Minutes because they wanted to see what the correspondents–Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, et al–were up to each week. And that was certainly true. But Don’s unique gift was in shaping stories, honing them to maximize their impact. Frontline, PBS’s signature hour-long documentary series whose executive producer, David Fanning, is a creative force comparable in many respects to Hewitt, tends to use anonymous narrators to carry the story. Hewitt favored putting correspondents in the limelight and devised the magazine format. Like everything else about 60 Minutes, this choice reflected Don’s vision. Before the debut of the show in 1968, there was nothing really like it on television, and no producer has ever come close to matching it again, although many have tried.
In the mid-1980s, CBS went through an upheaval of ownership and management and ended up with Laurence Tisch, a billionaire investor whose family controlled the vast Loews Corporation, as CEO. It quickly became clear that Tisch was not the steward of journalism values that Hewitt and others had hoped he would be, and his tenure marked the beginning of the cost-cutting of CBS News’ admittedly well-funded operations, cutting that has continued ever since. In Tell Me a Story, Hewitt acknowledged a paradox: He and others wanted the networks “to push back the walls that separated news from entertainment, but (were) not above climbing over the rubble each week to take an entertainment sized paycheck for broadcasting news.”
Don had an idea, which his colleagues and friends could attest happened frequently. He proposed rounding up the capital to buy CBS News from the network and then selling back the programming, which would assure that decisions would be made by journalists and not remote network executives. The concept had much in common with Ted Turner’s plans for CNN, then in its early years. Time has shown that while CNN makes money from advertising and cable fees, its claims to be the world leader in news is under constant challenge from the polemics, hysterics, and ratings of other cable news outlets. Instead of pursuing that entrepreneurial urge, Don stayed with CBS–and in all the ways he could, preserved the integrity and dazzle of the great program that was his life’s work.
(Photo: Peter Kramer/Getty Images)
Donald Trump had lots of admiring things to say about Xi Jinping after their recent summit meeting in Beijing. Xi was much less effusive about his visitor. Trump had barely returned to the U.S. when Xi welcomed Vladimir Putin and extolled China’s closeness and friendship with Russia. As the host, Xi had decisively reached primus inter pares among global autocrats.
What is the meaning of these summits?
Let’s look back on the superpower summits between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, the Cold War years. Global tensions were great, especially over the status of Berlin, divided by a wall and considered the potential trigger for a nuclear confrontation. In time Berlin receded as a threat, but arms control remained the main focus of negotiations, with human rights a continuing issue for the U.S. side.
Never much discussed at these summits was trade or business. The fact is, there was barely any to consider: some grain sales, a Pepsi-Cola franchise, and Most Favored Nation status for the Soviets, which was predicated on the level of Jewish emigration.
Trump’s state visit to China in May, already a fading memory in our maelstrom of events, was mostly about business — or, more pointedly, about money. Tech moguls accompanied the president to Beijing. Whatever deals were agreed matter little in the great scheme of things, in which Trump and Xi parried over tariffs, chips, and rare earth materials, in search of advantage.
The United States, Russia, and increasingly China are fully armed with weapons that can demolish the globe in minutes. The consensus seems to be that the seemingly intractable wars in Ukraine and the Middle East can be essentially overlooked because it turns out that Xi, Putin, and Trump can’t figure out how or whether to resolve them.
So they default to other issues, rather than consider the possible annihilation of the human race.
In the 1970s, the U.S. and the Soviets achieved what was called détente, which meant that the depredations of the superpowers — the war in Vietnam and Soviet forays of various kinds around the world — could be tolerated. China was not competitive yet, and Washington and Moscow were content to let Beijing evolve in its own way, without interference of any consequential kind.
Now China is genuinely powerful. Russia is diminished in most respects but all the more dangerous because of Putin’s messianic aggression and those nuclear weapons he has, no longer being monitored by treaties.
There is also the matter of Donald Trump’s peculiar attitude toward Putin and Xi. He wants to be accepted in their realms of power, but the real dictators seem to doubt he will ever succeed. The result is Trump’s pirouettes, his challenges and flattery, and his threats and then backing down, which actually have little lasting impact on the great subjects of the day: technology, economic competition, and modern versions of war, especially in cyberspace.
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There was one significant development in Trump’s sojourn to China. In his confusing, contradictory, and ignorant way, he exacerbated the most contentious U.S.-China issue: the future of Taiwan.
Berlin was the potential flashpoint of the Cold War. Had the Soviets moved to take over West Berlin, conflagration would have definitely resulted. This did not happen because strategic and diplomatic decisions by successive leaders, on both sides, gradually reduced the likelihood.
When I visited Taiwan in 2023, my conclusion was that the issue was simmering but would not explode because of the clarity of the U.S. position in defense of the island — a laboriously devised message of support for Taiwan and signals to China that a takeover attempt would be more trouble for Xi than he needed to have at that time.
A New York Times headline in 2026 summarized the new reality:
“U.S. Support for Taiwan Now a ‘Negotiating Chip’ with Beijing.”
The gist is that Trump was evasive about Taiwan’s outstanding request for $14 billion worth of air defense systems, anti-drone equipment, and missiles critical to the island’s defense.
From his pinnacle of power, Xi has left no doubt how much he wants Taiwan to be reunited with China, sooner rather than later. How would he accomplish this? His record of triumph over Hong Kong — a combination of pressure, patience, and global acquiescence — could be his ultimate means.
But what if he decides that Donald Trump would bob-and-weave at Chinese aggression, as he has done with Russia in Ukraine and with Israel in Gaza and the West Bank. The twenty-first-century version of Mutual Assured Destruction in a nuclear war has become MAD from an economic collapse, the stabilizing factor in maintaining a superpower balance.
I have a friend who is an expert on Taiwan, with decades of experience in both Republican and Democratic administrations. To preserve what access is possible now, I’ll quote him without further identification:
Trump’s handling of Taiwan during his Beijing trip was a major setback for US Asia policy, worrisome not only for Taiwan but also for allies including Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines.
Xi spent hours feeding Trump his view on Taiwan. Now Trump has bought it and repeats it as doctrine: “China has controlled Taiwan for thousands of years; Lai Ching-te is actively moving toward declaring Taiwan independence; all cross-strait tension is the fault of the separatists in Taiwan.”
After being brainwashed Trump now says these things publicly as the facts about Taiwan. He says he is delaying a decision on the latest arms purchase as a very good bargaining chip. In reality it may not be true leverage since Beijing insists we agreed to phase out arms sales in the unfortunate 1982 joint policy communique.
Using Taiwan arms sales as a chip with Beijing is unprecedented and violates the commitments of the Taiwan Relations Act. This administration has been quietly asking our Asian allies to be clear on what they would do in the event of an attack or blockade on Taiwan. Now they will wonder if we are committed to Taiwan.
Xi has framed our new relationship as “constructive strategic stability.” Trump seems to have embraced that slogan. The classic Chinese negotiating strategy is to get your opponent to agree to a framework concept. The opponent soon realizes that he has stepped into quicksand. The Chinese use the framework to veto everything they dislike. In this case, Beijing will use it to veto arms sales and other interactions with Taiwan they dislike.
The only solace is the senior figures in the administration with any influence and most of the Congress will in many ways continue to operate as if nothing has changed. Even the arms package could (probably will) be cut up and notified to Congress piecemeal by the State Department. And everyone including Xi Jinping knows that Trump can change his mind tomorrow. But the damage has been done.
In 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich published her classic Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, in which she spent months working as a hotel maid, waitress, nursing home aide, and superstore clerk. The national minimum wage at the time was $5.15 an hour.
In 2026, the national minimum wage is just $7.25. The highest state or local minimum wage, in Washington, D.C., is $17.95, all the better to serve our elected officials.
More numbers to consider.
The median annual income for a full-time worker in the United States is about $60,000. And a year’s forty-hour work week at the Washington, D.C., minimum wage totals $37,336, which means a full-time worker with a family of four is barely above the official poverty level of $33,000.
Ehrenreich died in 2022, celebrated for her fierce understanding of American inequality. By every measure, the inequalities have gotten greater in recent years.
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One of these days, and probably in the not-too-distant future, one of the approximately one thousand individual billionaires in the United States will be worth a trillion dollars.
So, here’s my imaginary challenge, imaginary only because I no longer commission new books, as I did for so long as a publisher. But if I still did, this would be at the top of my list: Find a billionaire willing to spend a year living on the national median income of $60,000, without access to all the splendor and resources that money provides the very rich.
If there’s a literary agent involved, I’ll leave it to that person and the publisher to wrangle over the advance, to be paid at the successful conclusion of the year, plus, of course, full royalties on the books sold in print, ebook, and audio.
I wonder what daily life is like for the approximately 1.3 million American households in the top 1 percent of wealth. Different in most respects from everyone else, except that they still use have to use the bathroom for its traditional purposes.
The idea for the book challenge came to me recently, on a day when I was on the phone changing a flight reservation, using points for a hotel room in New York, and driving to the auto dealership for help with a check engine light on the dashboard and also a warning that my tires needed air.
My wife and I live on annual household budget significantly larger than any of the national or median income figures I’ve cited. But we are responsible for the management of what we do, when and how and what it all costs.
We have all the conveniences of a comfortable life, a car (with indoor parking), central air conditioning, enough property and health insurance for peace of mind, savings and retirement accounts that (so far) have not been upended by the swings in equity markets and are managed by a responsible financial adviser. We can vacation on Lake Michigan at a family home.
In short, we are far from having to make do within the national income averages.
But we are responsible for keeping track of our expenses, making all our own appointments, reservations, and plans.
And that is where the test becomes real for our imaginary billionaires. If they use a computer, an iPad, or a smartphone, they are at the mercy of the disciplines imposed by technology. There is rarely a week when I don’t have to untangle some glitch on a device. I pay annually for Best Buy’s Geek Squad and often resort to YouTube, a younger family member, or a tech support name I find on the internet.
What if suddenly you suddenly had to do all this yourself? What if you had to apply for a mortgage or a credit card, or had to pay an unexpected tax bill in the thousands of dollars. What about a new roof or sewer system that was not in your budget?
Billionaires delegate most things to someone else.
Every so often, an item appears about a billionaire or politician who can’t handle something like a self-checkout at a grocery store. The most famous of these was actually unfair: When President George H. W. Bush was running for reelection in 1992, he seemed to be baffled by a supermarket barcode. His team insisted he was not.
The principle remains. What characterizes life in the median is how to make the most and best of what you have, and proficiency in day-to-day life.
So step up, Ms. or Mr. Billionaire, and take the challenge. I’m predicting the book would be a money-making bestseller.
Viktor Orban, the former prime minister of Hungary, had many fans in MAGA, led by Donald Trump and including organizations like CPAC and influencers like Tucker Carlson, who broadcast encomiums from Budapest.
Orban was the avatar for authoritarian illiberalism, in twenty-first-century parlance.
And then, summarily, the voters of Hungary ousted him on April 12, with an overwhelming election victory for his opponent, Peter Magyar.
Exactly what this will mean for Hungary will take time to evolve. Orban’s tentacles in Hungarian society and politics remain deep. But he has accepted his departure, resigning from parliament. His supporters seem to know their movement is done, at least for now.
The demise of Orban is significant for a number of reasons:
(1) He and his regime had done everything possible to manipulate the results in their favor. And the majority against him was so large that denial of the results was impossible.
(2) George Soros was deemed Orban’s political enemy, with the prime minister joining revanchists and antisemites elsewhere in demonizing him. Soros shrugged off most of these personal attacks, but Hungary was his homeland. Now, at age ninety-five, Soros has outlasted Orban. Bravo!
(3) The election results in Hungary, placed in the context of developments elsewhere in what had been the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellites, reflect an important reality in the aftermath of the Cold War.
The fifteen republics of the USSR and the satellites have largely gone their own way since 1991. Many have reverted to their historical place in the world. Central Asia and the Caucasus nations, for instance, are truculent, varied in size, but no longer actually controlled by the Kremlin, although they are very aware of Russia’s regional dominance.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is in a different realm of consequences for the region, with Vladimir Putin capable, at any time, of unprovoked menace.
For many of the nations of Eastern Europe — Bulgaria, Romania, and the states that once made up Yugoslavia — it is challenging to keep up with their twists and turns. But their examples do not pose a threat to democracies elsewhere, as Hungary seemingly did.
My particular interest has been the most prominent of the former East bloc nations: Poland, what was Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. All have been wrangling with their identities.
Poland is an economic success and a major member of the European Union. It swings politically from liberalism to nationalism, with traditional splits among the church, urbanites, and (broadly defined) farmers and workers.
Czechoslovakia split in two in 1993. Prague seems to be where the young and cool congregate. Slovakia leans toward illiberalism.
I don’t know enough about Hungary to explain the developments there. So, I was referred to Tibor Dessewffy, the director of the Digital Sociology Research Center at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest and a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
I put two questions to him by email:
Can you explain why Orban so readily conceded? That is not generally in the autocrat’s approach.
Were Hungarians surprised at the success of their popular will?
Here are his answers:
Orbán’s concession has to be understood in the context of what was truly a historic and unprecedented victory for the opposition TISZA — a genuine knockout blow for Orbán. In that sense, his quick concession was less an act of magnanimity than an attempt to bring a bitter evening to a close as swiftly as possible.
I am fairly certain that had the result been a narrow, neck-and-neck defeat, the reaction would have been very different. On a micro level, however, he was probably right to shut the evening down quickly and not allow the sense of shock and pain to deepen further. If reports are accurate, he had been prepared for a different kind of outcome — losing some support on the party list while still prevailing in the individual districts.
What he did not anticipate was a landslide of this scale.
This also leads to your second question. The result was genuinely astonishing for almost everyone. Although there were one or two polling institutes measuring a significant TISZA lead, after sixteen years of illiberalism and four painful opposition defeats, very few people truly dared to believe that such a moment, winning by supermajority could actually arrive.
The eruption of joy and the extraordinary emotional release on election night was partly rooted in this disbelief as well.
With these responses in mind, I wondered what the message for Americans and our “allies and partners” around the world would be.
Yes, the situation does seem dire. In the United States, the Democrats have yet to display the leadership style and the potential nominees necessary to defeat MAGA in 2028. In Europe and Asia, illiberalism is a threat or a reality. Hungary demonstrates that if the resistance and popular will align and mobilize, even the improbable can happen.
The U.S. midterm elections will be the first real test of MAGA’s enduring power, a forecast for Trump’s remaining years and the scale of popular demands for democracy over autocracy. I hope the results will be unequivocal, as they needed to be and were in Hungary.
I really, truly resist reading bleats among the aging or elderly about their aches and pains. Toddlers, teenagers, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, everyone has issues.
But I have recently and conclusively understood the phenomenon that those of us born in the 1940s and 1950s (and now even the 1960s) are enduring: Being taken for granted — or worse, blamed.
This comes in two forms:
The Boomers Blew It and You Are So Done (Forget “Baby,” As the Oldest Are Turning Eighty This Year)
The author Marc J. Dunkelman (sorry, Marc) published a widely discussed book last year called Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — And How to Bring It Back. Because PublicAffairs, the imprint I founded thirty years ago, was the publisher, he asked me to lunch.
His opener was along the line that the vast Boomer generation, broadly speaking, is responsible for the situation he was describing, chapter and verse. I won’t do him the disrespect of summarizing his argument. For that, read the book. I bristled but I think I paid for the lunch at an Upper West Side diner.
The Boomer canard has taken hold, even among many Boomers themselves. An accomplished friend’s new book opens this way: “Well, we are now on the front stoop of old age. And good Lord, what a fuck up of a generation we’ve turned out to be. . . . A nation that used to be young and scrappy has gotten old and cranky. We’re aggrieved, tribal, stuck.” And on and on.
But ask yourself whether the rights of women, minorities, the disabled, the poor, and the disadvantaged are being ignored, as they were for so for very long. Living standards and healthy life spans in developed countries have increased markedly, and global poverty has dropped.
The process of change reached its most intense in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Boomers were in college, or in the streets.
Have the movements for civil rights, human rights, global environment solved those problems? No. Did we or our predecessor generations solve the bigotry, inequality, and injustice that are the underside of progress? No. But we did recognize the scale of these problems and have made headway, at least, in understanding them and doing what we can — yes, through regulations, affirmative action, and protests — to deal with civilization’s eternal failings.
The Boomers in power (Bill Clinton et al.), as in all political eras, coped with the political realities of the time, and with the fact that their, well, fallibilities were now exposed by a feisty media. FDR and JFK, among others, were spared the public embarrassments of infidelity.
Heroism is hard to maintain when then the main public themes are cynical and even despairing.
If you don’t want more of this, stop reading, now.
Being Taken for Granted, Superannuated, or Retired
I started to realize this in my seventies. The emails and phone calls I received from my generational cohort were about not being published, finding an agent, and feeling generally sidelined (except, it seems, in top-tier politics). The general sense among this broad circle of formers and has-beens was, depending on their personalities, a degree of ironic amusement at their predicament, chagrin, indignation, or fury.
“How dare they?” Well, they could and did.
Being taken for granted showed in different ways, from the routine to the existential. Dealing with doctors whose attention tended to be cursory until you stepped up for concierge service, the condescension of younger colleagues whom you had mentored and now were offering to support further, or a dismissive attitude from the staff at various places, especially when dealing with tech.
So how to manage this?
A seemingly trivial episode recently provided my forward strategy. While I was exercising one morning in our apartment building gym, a manager approached me, with a photographer in tow, and told me that pictures were to be taken for advertising. He asked me to wait outside while that was being done.
I paused to absorb the affront, smiled, and with brio declared, “No.” The photographer, to his credit, got the point and waited.
What was my valuable takeaway?
In dealing with the various forms of being taken for granted and blamed, instead of reacting with indignation and even (on occasion) anger, stand on your good-natured ground. Be distinguished to the extent possible, rather than demeaned.
If they are fortunate enough, everyone dispensing such an attitude and criticism will get to be older or even elderly.
But by then they will also be experienced and seasoned — and definitely not to be taken for granted.
*****
Paul Taylor’s book, quoted above, is This Is Getting Old: Two Boomers and Their Generation at Dusk. Paul and his wife, Stefanie, “have been together since childhood,” he writes. They have three children and five grandchildren. Paul had a great run at the Washington Post, where we met. He then served as executive vice president at the Pew Research Center. About herself, Stefanie writes: “Paul has written a lot of cool things about me. Take them with a grain of salt.”
Paul’s take on our mutual stage of life is different in many respects from mine as expressed above. Read his book and decide for yourself. That is our privilege.
“On his last state visit [in 1985], Charles was in the shade of Diana’s radiance. On this one, he radiated an élan of his own — a class act, shining next to the boorish Trump. At long last, Charles was in no one’s shadow. At 77, he has done what he always yearned to to do: make his mark on the world.”
— Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times, May 2, 2026
********************************
In 1982 the Outlook section of the Washington Post published an interview I conducted with then-Prince Charles. Decades later, as King Charles III, some of what he said is worth recalling. The text was approved by Charles at the time.
In answer to my first question: What can you do to cope with the serious economic problems, particularly the unemployment in Britain today?
Charles replied:
“Often you sit there and think — what the hell can I do? The problem is enormous and its like banging your head against an immense brick wall: it never seems to have any effect. But its very interesting how if you bang your head against one bit of the wall, eventually you will dislodge a bit of the brick, or you might knock one out and at that point you are achieving something. My philosophy has been that its better to begin something in a tiny small way which has the possibility of growing into something larger, than not to attempt it all.
“Or, on the other hand to attempt something large which fizzles out rather ignominiously. Which is the other severe danger: that if you try and do something in too large and loud a way, you raise everybody’s expectations and then can’t fulfill them which actually [is] more dangerous I think because it increases possible bitterness and frustration.
“But I hope to now, through . . . various organizations — one I started about eight or nine years ago [is] called ‘The Prince’s Trust.’ I wanted to try and get at the areas which I felt at that stage were the most important. [They] were those of the rather alienated young, in particular some of them in inner cities of this country who felt very much neglected. [They] I suppose felt completely alienated from society and from anything to do with the establishment, as such. I think there is a growing proportion of people like that, not just the young, but those who have families and so on, who are frightened even of doctors and teachers — they represent authority and the establishment.
“How then do we get through to these people and make them aware that there are people prepared to try and help. So this is how the Trust started. As a result, I’ve built a large number of contacts, people in all walks of life, those who deal with social work, probation and aftercare for young offenders. All these people are very keen to see ways of improving the situation. And through a trust like mine, there’s an opportunity to get things done without too much red tape.”
As published, the Post singled out two of Charles’s comments for particular attention. They were:
“You see my problem . . . is I don’t actually have a role to play. . . . I am heir to the throne, full stop. That’s all. . . . I could go and play polo all over the world, I suppose.”
“It may sound silly, but I think I did have to struggle. . . . [It gives] me a different sort of outlook perhaps than some of my predecessors might have had. Purely because I had to struggle.”
***************
King Charles III, for so long a prince in uneasy limbo, accompanied by his well and true life partner, Queen Camilla, was duly rewarded for his patience and soared in comparison to his host, the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president of these United States of America. The king, examined by arbiters of such matters in Washington, was pronounced properly seasoned, proving that dignity refined over many years wears well (as do finely tailored suits).
.
Recently, Emma Tucker, the editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal was interviewed by Press Gazette, a widely read newsletter on journalism, based in the U.K.. Tucker reported on how much the Journal has grown in subscribers since she took over at the start of 2023, moving from the editorship of The Sunday Times in London. These are two of the flagship publications controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
Overall, she said, print and digital subscriptions have increased by 20 percent to 4.68 million. While that is roughly a third of the number of the New York Times’s subscribers, it is about twice the reported number for the Washington Post.
Here is Tucker’s explanation for why that increase has happened:
The Wall Street Journal, she said on her arrival, would give readers the “new distinctive, useful, compelling, relevant journalism” they needed.
“I asked the newsroom to get behind that strategy. I also made structural changes to the newsroom to enable it to get behind that strategy. They did, and the results have been incredibly good.
“I would never rest on my laurels, and there’s still work to be done, but the strategy is working. It just goes to show you when a newsroom as, frankly, brilliant as the Wall Street Journal’s gets collectively behind a very clear strategy, you get results.”
There are two observations to be made about Tucker’s comments and her success.
I have only met her once, soon after she arrived, at a friend’s one-table dinner of probably sixteen people, most of whom were connected, one way or another, to the New York–based media. I was amazed at how critical Tucker was of the news organization she was leading. She took on Washington coverage, the foreign report, the Saturday review section (a particular favorite of mine), and the overall desultory vibe.
The editorial pages and book reviews are under the long-time aegis of Paul Gigot and adhere to a right-wing or conservative perspective that is usually less vituperative than the language and politics of Trump-era MAGA. She had no comments on that part of the Journal.
I wondered whether it was really a good idea for Tucker to trash her news organization among people who might well spread the word that could be embarrassing to her. I thought not, although I recognized that she must have been given a mandate from Murdoch to shake things up.
And that was my second thought. Stipulate that, on the whole, I think Murdoch’s impact on the media has been profound and negative. Fox News is the source, in many ways, of America’s crisis of politics and morality.
But Murdoch is driven by what he considers news values for his businesses, which is why in the almost twenty years he has owned Dow Jones and the Journal, the news organization has mostly maintained its stature at the higher end of American journalism.
One episode in particular impressed me. Murdoch had invested a reported $125 million in Elizabeth Holmes’s biotech startup Theranos, which she claimed would transform medicine. It was the Journal’s reporting that revealed her company to be a fraud and eventually sent her to prison.
As recounted in John Carreyrou’s brilliant book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Holmes came to New York to plead with Murdoch to stop the Journal’s coverage. Among other things, she said, Murdoch had all that money at risk.
He refused, specifically telling her, according to Carreyrou, who was then a Journal reporter, that he would not interfere with the news coverage.
Again, Rupert Murdoch’s approach to journalism is far from pristine, but he does understand what makes news — and what drives subscriptions and advertising to his company.
Here’s my aside: As I have written before, Jeff Bezos is an entrepreneurial genius, but he has shown, conclusively, that he does not understand that successful journalism comes from the energy and distinctive quality of its content, even in the data-driven digital world.
(That The Washington Post won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service on May 3, the same day that Bezos is hosting the Met Gala does suggest ironic destiny. )
As a daily reader of the Wall Street Journal’s online news output and, leisurely, in print on Saturday, I look forward to it (after my daily absorption of the New York Times and Financial Times) because there are news and features I find intriguing and have not already read elsewhere.
A story about the “lewd” birthday greeting that Donald Trump sent to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 led the president to sue the Journal for $10 billion, except that it turned out the greeting was in the extensive files on Epstein that were released over time. The suit was later dismissed.
Scandalous Trump revelations are frequent. But it was also the case that the most thorough coverage of Joe Biden’s aging was in the Journal and was immediately ascribed to the animus and bias of the Murdoch forces, a foray into pro-Trumpism.
In fact, the record and history shows that compelling journalism is going to be an equal opportunity offender of the powers that be, which Tucker clearly recognizes. And she and her invigorated newsroom are bringing that and more to the impressive news organization that the Wall Street Journal has become.
The link below is to a group of essays about the late Marshall Shulman, just published by the Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum at Columbia University. The authors were specialists in what a half century ago was the USSR and is now Russia, a nuclear-armed autocracy as menacing as it was then, perhaps more so. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, Russia was deemed less central to global order until Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Compared to the expertise reflected in these writings, current official U.S. policy and understanding of Russia is a dangerous mess.
https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/JervisForum-Tribute-Shulman.pdf
Here is my contribution:
Marshall Shulman entered our lives on a rainy night in Moscow in early fall of 1974. We had recently arrived. I was the Washington Post correspondent with a three-year assignment. By then, my wife Susan and I already realized that because so little was available from official Soviet sources and the very circumspect US diplomats working at the embassy, even the most esteemed American visitors wanted to be in touch with journalists representing the major US newspapers and magazines as providers of information and insight. They also welcomed the modicum of hospitality we could provide, including dollops of black-market caviar.
Our apartment was in a foreigners’ compound on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where militia at the entrance monitored the arriving guests. The clear understanding was that visitors and residents like us would have to accept the KGB reporting the American connection, perhaps for retribution. On that night, Marshall was waved through routinely by the militia. But in the process he was soaked, head to toe, in the torrential downpour. So it was that our first session with an enduring friend, whom we considered among the wisest American experts on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was conducted with him wearing a bathrobe that barely covered his knees.
US-Soviet relations in the 1970s, which in hindsight marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War that culminated in 1991 with the final implosion of the USSR, were a composite of intermittent forays at détente, navigating hardline American animus and the Kremlin’s defensive suspicions. There were many major issues: how to take advantage of the Sino-Soviet split, competition for influence around the developing world, the reality of enmity in the Indochina conflicts, and negotiations to restrain nuclear weapons, which everyone understood was essential to preserving civilization.
And what were broadly termed Human Rights. The movement in support of Jewish emigration was especially well organized. After the 1967 Arab-Israel war, a substantial portion of Jews in the Soviet republics sought the goal of a more enriching life, in every sense of the term, in Israel and the United States.
The emigration issue served purposes in both Moscow and Washington. Antisemitism had deep roots in Russia, and using exit visas to portray Jewish apostasy was cynically satisfying to the Kremlin. And, with the issue being led by Sen. Henry Jackson (D-Wash) and a fiercely anti-Soviet US political mainstream, measuring exit visas became a valuable asset in setting parameters for the relationship, particularly on trade benefits.
The Helsinki Accords in 1975 codified human rights as an area for East-West disputes and negotiation. With celebrated writers and scientists at the forefront, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, the dissident movement was an asset for demanding changes in the USSR and an excuse by the KGB to crack down on critics and criticism.
What was exceptional about Marshall, and unusual among other American scholars and officials who were monitoring the USSR, was that he understood the complexities of ideology and competition which framed the way superpowers maneuvered for dominance.
Everybody had to be placed in the categories of that time: Anti-Soviet, soft on communism, socialist leaning, liberal, conservative, leftist, rightist, hawk, dove. Marshall recognized that the autocracy of Leonid Brezhnev and his Politburo was flailing in many respects, especially economic policy and chronologically geriatric.
That the USSR was a formidable military adversary with the capacity to encourage global tensions and wage unspeakable destruction was undeniable. But Shulman had aligned himself with George Kennan’s view that exaggerating the Soviet threat tended to serve US political interests by providing the reasoning for defense expenditure and a sprawling intelligence apparatus.
In the 1980s, when the head of the USA and Canada Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that in Perestroika and Glasnost that the Soviets were “doing the worst thing we could do to you Americans, denying you an enemy,” I heard truth in his sly appraisal.
After Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976 and his appointment of Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State, the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger’s years was replaced by the split between Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, which was marked by differences in personality as well as strategy. Carter’s emphasis on human rights, combined with Brzezinski’s deep anti-Russian animus, was a contrast to Vance’s more traditionally diplomatic approach. As a senior adviser to Vance on the Soviets, Shulman was on that side of the divide.
And here is a personal explanation for why Marshall’s assessment of US-Soviet relations resonated with me as it did: I admired and wrote about the dissidents and the repressive policies of the Kremlin. But I also sensed that focusing so heavily on those issues meant underestimating equally important aspects of Soviet reality. While the West tended to call the Soviet empire “Russia,” it was in fact an uneasy composite of nationalities and their histories that made Kremlin control less complete than it seemed.
In the twenty-first century, the war with Ukraine is the most striking example of the impact of the breakup of the USSR. From the Baltics to the Caucasus and Central Asia, Russia is no longer master of its once massive domain. In dealing with the Soviet Union as an indomitable and eternal entity, an imperial power that was comparable to Rome and Britain at their pinnacles, the US missed underlying weaknesses. The USSR did not work. It had an ersatz economy, its projection of unity was essentially superficial, and its leadership was sclerotic.
Shulman believed that engaging with Soviet society, within the broader context of the much-disputed term détente, served a positive purpose for the United States. He held that the US would gain much more than it could lose in that approach to the relationship.
An aside about the Kremlin’s cockeyed sense of wpower in that era: in the early years after the Soviet collapse, Central Committee archives were open to researchers. A friend found a Top-Secret Central Committee document signed by then KGB head Yuri Andropov about a 1977 Politburo meeting where the debate was about “Korrespondent Osnos,” Joseph Presel, who was a young diplomat at the American Embassy, and Natan Sharansky, a dissident who played a role in advocacy for democracy and emigration.
I was assailed in the Soviet media as a CIA agent but not expelled; Presel had a lengthy State Department career in the former Soviet republics; and Sharansky spent nine years in the Gulag after a trial for anti-Soviet activities before being released and moving to Israel. That the Kremlin’s most senior officials would devote so much attention to three young men with no discernible power, I concluded, reflected their profound insecurity and declining confidence.
Calling attention to the Kremlin’s weakness was less welcome in official circles than warning of the Soviet Union’s encroaching power. Preeminence in Washington is associated with ambition and an affinity for the limelight. Marshall was by nature soft-spoken and, from what we observed, genial. He was content to be a lodger at Averell Harriman’s Georgetown homestead, which made him ancillary to the capital’s elite. Combined with his sophisticated assessment of Soviet power rather than the reductive commitment to the Cold War that was then in fashion, Marshall’s influence was never great.
When Shulman became the first director of Columbia’s W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, Susan and I continued to enjoy the company of Marshall and his beloved and formidable wife, Collette. We would discuss in depth what was happening in the USSR, but we were now observing this absorbing, infuriating country and no longer directly in the competitive fray for attention or impact.
Who knows what Marshall Shulman’s role might have been in managing President Vladimir Putin’s dangerously uncontrollable Russia? I am certain he would have advice and judgment that would be well worth taking seriously.
