It's kind of funny to read the work of ex-Marines and soldiers because what they said to me as a reporter was only a fraction of what they were thinking and feeling and saying to one another.

It's kind of funny to read the work of ex-Marines and soldiers because what they said to me as a reporter was only a fraction of what they were thinking and feeling and saying to one another.

Playing to resentment and using a lot of, you know, grand abstract phrases like make America great again is - it just doesn't have the answer. It's simply a way to whip up emotion and then leave people more bitter than you found them.

When you go to Washington and get off at Union Station, as I sometimes do, and see the Capitol building, I get this hopeless feeling that comes over me.

I'm reading a bunch of fiction by Afghan and Iraq War veterans for a New Yorker piece. There hasn't been that much, but it's starting to come out, and some of the fiction is really good.

American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.

I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .