Last year I decided to fix our deck. It’s big, about 600 square feet, nine feet off the ground, and it was falling apart. Joists were rotting, and the whole thing was resting on one beam, when there should’ve been three. My foot went through the floor a couple of times.

“War made the state,” said the political scientist Charles Tilly, “and the state made war.” Tilly was talking about actual states, but the same could be said about metaphorical states: states of mind, or perhaps of the soul.

I’ve heard it said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I’ve also heard that people these days are pretty stressed out, and I have to wonder if that’s because we’re all being so damned vigilant.

Critics of the populism that put Donald Trump in the White House (again) often point to what they assume is a contradiction between the “average Joe” of populist imagination and the decidedly above-average wealth of the people’s chosen tribunes.

I’ve heard it said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I’ve also heard that people these days are pretty stressed out, and I have to wonder if that’s because we’re all being so damned vigilant.

Given her painful loss to Donald Trump, surely the most unfortunate of Kamala Harris’ verbal tics was her frequent celebration of “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”

A few years ago now, Sheryl Sandburg of Facebook wrote a book called Lean In, which I certainly did not read, since I am a respectable academic and people like me do not read best-selling self-help books by business gurus, especially when the business is social media.

Most of my students say that the main reason for the sorry state of our democracy is that people are “not well-informed.”