I’m just some white guy in California, and nobody in Flint is going to pay any attention to what I’m saying. I don’t blame them. Nor do doctors want to publicly agree with me, because nobody wants to downplay the effects of lead poisoning. I get that too. I can already imagine the number of tweets and emails I’m going to get demanding to know why I think Flint is no big deal.

Promising a revolution that’s simply not feasible really does have the potential to create cynicism when a couple of years go by and it hasn’t happened.

You're more likely to vote Democratic if you hate Republicans than if you love Democrats, and vice versa.

So many theories. But all of them have one thing in common: They demonstrate that although Trump isn’t much of a businessman, he is rich enough to hire good tax attorneys who will hand over huge stacks of forms for him to sign blindly. That’s a helluva qualification for president, isn’t it?

I hate the idea that we might lose even a few talented future leaders because they fell for Bernie Sanders's spiel and then got discouraged when it didn't pan out.

If you don’t want your followers to give up in disgust, your inspiration needs to be in the service of goals that are at least attainable.

In other words, in the same way that mass incarceration surged because of a real thing, it's finally starting to ebb because of a real thing: the actual, concrete decline in violent crime that started in the early 90s and which appears to be permanent. America is simply a safer place than it used to be, and looks set to stay that way.